When I was in Cambodia I riding along on a motorcycle and I saw a truck that had driven off the side of the road and flipped over. The violence of it made me assume the driver had probably died, although it's possible he hadn't. There were people milling about and moving the cargo from the overturned truck to a number of other smaller vehicles.
I tend to think about the likelihood of various things happening when I'm overseas. I tried to work out the likelihood of being kidnapped in Colombia. I tried to work out the likelihood of my truck falling into the river on that hairy mountain trip from Peru to Bolivia. Or the likelihood of my five hours on a motorcycle containing a fatal accident. These things are hard to figure out. You can't really extrapolate from one event. I could look at the one month in Cambodia before the crash as a sample size of one. In that sample there was one bad car crash. Maybe that is a lot, but maybe it isn't. In one sense, it is definitely a lot, but it doesn't really tell you anything definitive about Cambodia. I have been in Australia my whole life, and have never seen a truck on it's back on the side of the road. How do I compare one crash in one month, to zero crashes in 24 years? You could multiply that one crash by the right proportion to have a guess at how many crashes there would be in 24 years. But you're not really supposed to.
Most people would look at that crash and get a bit worried. Statisticians would look at it and dismiss it because the sample size is too small. People are probably right to be worried, even though they don't have maths on their side. Although the only reason I think they're right to be worried is because I have a whole lot of other associations in my head about car crashes and third world countries.
If I try to ignore all the other associations there probably aren't any useful conclusions I could have made about that one bad crash. So when I saw another bad crash a couple of days later I felt a bit more confident. Two deadly crashes in four days had to mean something. Surely my fears were concretely justified. But they still aren't. Two crashes, even in one day, doesn't really count for anything. Statistically speaking, I reckon I'd have to spend many months on the backs of motorcycles scouting around for truck crashes before I could be confident about anything.
It all does make me wonder how much more likely statisticians are to die in violent crashes. Someone should do a paper on that. I'm obviously not very good at statistics, so I'd probably stuff it up.
i spend a considerable amount of time calculating the likelihood of apocalypse/nuclear holocaust are, and wondering if swimming the Atlantic would be a reasonable option for getting to see my family again. :) (i jest, but imagining never ever seeing my Amie friends and family again because international air travel is at a standstill. it’s a strange and disturbing thought.)
click / 8:09pm / 10 December 2007
It would be even more tricky to work out the likelihood of an apocalypse, because we have had so few of them in the past. In fact the whole idea of probabilities wouldn’t really apply to nuclear apocalypses.
Ryan / 7:13pm / 11 December 2007
The riskiest thing I did in my holiday was cycling back from the Angkor temples. I was careful to get a bicycle with at least a dynamo light. Then the sun went down and I could not turn the light on. I had to cycle for half an hour on unlit roads.
Then I talked to Nicolas, the manager of an almost-vegan restaurant in town. He told me after we finished talking about food for a podcast that the rates of road accident were scarily high.
5-minute podcast about finding vegan food in Cambodia:
http://verdantreports.org/2009/07/23/vegan-vegetarian-food-cambodia/
Bill / 8:11pm / 28 July 2009
I did a lot of cycling around Siep Riep without much light. It was fairly hairy, although oddly less scary than riding in Sydney. Thanks for the tips. Within 2 minutes of visiting your site I was ordering three vegan passports, which I’d never heard of before but always wanted.
Ryan / 6:50pm / 29 July 2009