Two-thirds of University of Virginia male students preferred a shock to doing nothing, whereas only one-quarter of the women did. This finding by psychologist Tim Wilson, which I read about in the Wall Street Journal,* does not surprise me in the least—young fellows always seek excitement that causes immediate pain or potential catastrophe for their life and limb. The more micromorts, equal to a one-in-a-million chance of death, the better, at least so far as men are concerned.
According to WSJ’s 7/18/14 article “Risk Is Never a Numbers Game,” micromorts (MM) were devised in the 1970’s by Stanford’s Ronald A. Howard to quantify the chances of death for any particular activity. Each day on average the typical American faces a 1.3 MM probability of a sudden end from external causes, that is, not a natural demise. The authors, Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter, bring up all sorts of morbid statistics. What interested me was not the murders and other deathly events brought on through little or no fault of the individual, but rather the discretionary doings such as horseback riding (~1 MM) and mountain climbing (12,000 MMs!). If you like heights but the latter sport exceeds your tolerance for risk, consider parachuting at a far safer level of 7 MMs or be really conservative by simply going on a roller coaster at 0.0015 MMs.
Whenever I see statistics like this, I wonder if one shouldn’t just strap on a helmet, grab a mattress, blanket and pillow, go down into the basement with the supplies left over from the millennium Armageddon and curl into the fetal position over in the southwest corner where tornadoes do the least damage. That being very boring, I’d first set up a battery with leads for giving myself a shock now and then.