On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 7:18 PM, RonaTD <teddur...@gmail.com> wrote: Individuals don't get to benefit from the law of large > numbers to even out the severity distribution, especially because it > only takes one incident to put the individual in the right-censored > part of the distribution.
This sounds like a misanalysis to me. Are we supposed to throw up our hands and say, we can't estimate the probability of an adverse event, so we'd better take precautions in case it happens if the precautions aren't particularly onerous? So I should wear my bike helmet when I cross the street? Should I bring mountain-lion repellent when I go for a bike ride? (I actually saw a mountain lion cub when I was riding a couple of weeks ago. Very cool. But I digress.) We don't take precautions against extremely low probability events, even if the precautions would be not very onerous. A helmet isn't hugely onerous (and as I said, I always wear one) but it's not totally without drawbacks. It messes up my hair, it costs money, it's not totally perfect. If I knew about the probability of accidents *where a helmet would protect me from injury* and that probability was really really small, I'd stop wearing one. -- -- Anne Paulson My hovercraft is full of eels -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch?hl=en.
