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Do you have statistics to back up the relative safety of those activities? Lots of people get in trouble with car accidents because lots of people drive cars. But I would think that if you both drive and skydive, the latter is far more likely to hurt you.


As with many complicated analyses, we can introduce hypothetical artifacts or simplifications to serve almost any hypothesis!

For example, most skydiving is done in a guided and controlled way, with participants paying a professional instructor to help them through the process on a flight where everyone involved knows that people will be jumping out of this plane, in areas chosen by said flights for this to be done in. The risk of injury or death would be much higher if you were to, say, bowl over a flight attendant on a commercial plane flying over, say, the Rocky Mountains, steal a backpack from a supply area that you assume is a parachute, shove open the emergency exit, and jump out. However, that risk might be significantly lower if you happened to have prior training as a military paratrooper

Lifetime risk of death in a car accident might come down to frequency. But it could also be affected by such factors as road conditions, weather, your own physical and mental health, the condition of your car, and whether you're being pursued by a military helicopter

Broad statistics tend to be a poor substitute for understanding one's own situation in assessing the risks one is willing to take. They are used in science because science tends to aim to draw broad conclusions over large aggregates. Your own individual risk assessment may take such aggregate measures into account, but it's unlikely that this is adequate to make such assessments wisely, and either way only informs your assessment of risk rather than your tolerance for it




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