Micromort - A Unit Of Measure Of Risk

One problem we have is that risk is usually both relative and cumulative in nature. Vaccines work because they reduce the overall risk of death dramatically, but in almost every case, some risk remains. So you’re not eliminating a threat, you’re just lowering the odds that it will impact you. And you can reduce the risk further by adding additional measures, like masking or social distancing. So to understand the total risk that you face in a given situation, you have to understand the base rate of danger that you’re confronting, and then the relative impact of the interventions you’re considering, whether it’s wearing a seat belt or putting on a mask.

Another problem with risk is that it often revolves around very small probabilities, which can lead to all sorts of base-rate confusion. You’ll read an article about a new study that finds eating bacon doubles the risk of pancreatic cancer and it’ll sound terrifying. (I am making these numbers up, so do not adjust your diet based on them.) But what if your initial odds of getting pancreatic cancer are 1 in 100,000? Then you can just as accurately say that eating bacon will change your odds of getting pancreatic cancer from from .00001 to .00002. That doesn’t sound nearly as worrisome.

A few decades ago the Stanford professor Ronald Howard proposed a unit of measure for mortality risk. He called it the “micromort.” One micromort equaled a one-in-one-million chance of dying. Howard was an expert in decision theory, and he had recognized that many of life’s most complicated decisions—particularly medical ones—involved complicated assessments of risk probability. Howard imagined the micromort as a common framework that, for example, a doctor could use with a patient to describe the risks of undergoing a specific procedure—and the risks of not undergoing the procedure.

The standard never really took off, but it has seen something of a revival in the COVID age.

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And in the event that you feel untroubled by COVID’s current micromort levels and are planning a sporty vacation somewhere this spring, I present to you, courtesy of Wikipedia, a list of potential recreational activities ranked by micromort levels:

• Skiing: .7 micromorts per day
• Scuba diving: 5 micromorts per dive
• Running a marathon: 7 micromorts per run
• Skydiving: 8 micromorts per jump
• Climbing Mt. Everest: 37,932 micromorts per ascent

Plan accordingly.

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One of the reasons I adore Taleb is because for the first time in history, there is this one person who spent his entire life on meditating, acting and finally succeeding in educating the masses on the concept of risk. Thank you for that Taleb!! 

History will immortalize him but yet sapiens refuse to comprehend risk. I think, risk should be part of our emotional repertoire on par with happiness, grief, disgust, and anger. Maybe risk is already part our emotions - every living creature evolved with innate risk dial but we might have subsided it by sheer lack of our unawareness.