You’ll Have your Eye Out

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing freak accidents.

Speaker B: 00:00:23

Nick, kick us off. Well this was inspired by the tragic news that Love Island's Theo Campbell, who appeared on Love Island. He's my favourite. Whatever Love Island is, I think it's a thing which influencers, kind of influencer type people go there don't they? Instagram type people. Yeah.

Speaker A: 00:00:42

And they have sex with each other or something? Yeah and they're all like, all the men are really

Speaker B: 00:00:45

muscly. They're all really good looking aren't they? All the women are really numeric. I mean everyone's really good looking these days aren't they? Yeah because we're all one big Instagram fan. And we're old so. Anyway, poor old Theo Campbell, he lost his sight in one eye because of a rogue champagne cork while in Ibiza. I'm not interested enough in the incident to find out exactly who was opening the champagne and whose fault it was. I mean to be honest being able to open a champagne bottle correctly is to my mind a very basic skill but someone obviously hadn't

Speaker A: 00:01:18

been trained. What's important is that his girlfriend who I think he met on Love Island

Speaker B: 00:01:22

is sticking by him. Yeah I mean you know well he's now he gets to wear a piratey eye patch and in some ways you know probably had his coolness enhanced. Yeah he's certainly more famous as a result. Yeah so good for him. Yeah and the question is should we worry about that kind of thing? Like you know do we worry too much or not enough about these freak accidents? You know and if so what should if not what should we be worrying about? Are we worrying too much in general you know? Yeah that's what we're talking about. Okay go. Peter. So yeah so I

Speaker C: 00:02:01

think we should consider what the anatomy of a freak accident is. What makes something a freak accident? So the obvious definition is that it's something that happens with a low probability. It's a low probability thing of happening. It's unlikely in some way that you know champagne cork in the eye fairly unlikely. You know less likely than maybe getting something in your eye which causes you to go blind. A piece of tree or a stick or something. But also there's I think there's a dimension to it which is less mathematically quantifiable which that freak accidents in common parlance often refer to things which are in some way particularly dramatic. Yeah. Or tragic or funny or just sort of something other than their being less likely. Well so for a

Speaker A: 00:02:52

moment should we substitute the word freak for random because and are you saying that they look they people say they're random but they're not they're actually just those other things that

Speaker C: 00:02:59

he infection okay that was in: 1884

Speaker A: 00:04:21

yeah of so much revelation was he a particular case at the moment at that time do we know or

Speaker C: 00:04:26

he was just walking down the street i think i don't know there was no yeah nothing nothing to do with his work which is just a freak occurrence okay uh yeah let's have a let's any more accidents there's millions of them so um yeah so there's a guy called Hans Stalininger who was a bureaucrat and sort of town master of brown now in what is now Austria he died by breaking his neck by tripping over his own beard which apparently was about four and a half feet long at the time yeah you can imagine that

Speaker A: 00:05:08

happening actually breaking your neck must have been pretty short was it going up maybe he was

Speaker C: 00:05:12

walking upstairs in: 1601

Speaker B: 00:05:37

my favorite uh go on then yeah so um well you'll all be familiar with uh with Sigurd uh uh i of course yeah who was the earl of orkney in the eight in the eight eight and ninth century remember him yeah i remember him he's famous because he died he was the i think he's the only known person to be killed by the severed head of his enemy uh who he killed male brichter okay his uh you remember that guy he was like yeah uh anyway apparently he killed him and severed his head and put the head on his saddle the saddle of his horse right and then as he was riding the teeth from the skull gave him an infected wound which he then died of so he was effectively bitten to death yeah exactly i guess on his leg or something if it's an infection

Speaker A: 00:06:23

doesn't really matter does it so i remember about three to four years ago having a conversation with you nick in this very room um and i was talking about a random um a freak occurrence

Speaker B: 00:06:35

random accident died oh the poor chap who was killed by the hay bale no yeah um was it was that guy who was in the band the one who was killed when a hay bale rolled in front of his car and he got he was in a he was in like the who or something this is not familiar to me okay go on

Speaker A: 00:06:50

well what it was it was it was i just read about it in the newspaper a couple of days before i think it was a couple of teenagers were were driving um back to university or something along a along a dual carriageway in Hertfordshire i think it was um and then out of blue a deer jumped out of a nearby forest um straight into their windscreen um killed them both um car crash killed them both um and it was you know it's a horrible story and and if you think of the um the things that had to happen for that to happen okay um and i i think i would say i was i think i was asking you oh this is a an awful random thing that happened there's nothing we can do about these things and i think you were saying actually no there is stuff that you can do about this and it's not as random as you think or it's not as out of now i take issue with the idea of

Speaker B: 00:07:41

accidents who up until about: 2003

Speaker C: 00:12:11

oh unless the worry is what's driving down the figures so you're worried about your kids so many parents would go and pick them up so the the chance of them getting run over on the road would go down and the chance of being killed in the car crash might go up so but overall the

Speaker B: 00:12:28

rate of death goes down that's the the problem with these things is you don't know what the baseline baseline behavior is all you can say is okay if i'm kind of average and i am kind of average i mean you know i know you're not you're extraordinary it's thanks peter uh it's very common i mean i think everyone at that school walks home uh you know in different directions quite a lot of kids i mean quite a lot of kids walked home in the previous school he was at so i don't think i'm unusual now if he walked home across a mountain ridge for 20 miles then that's going to be different it's a different calculus that's it so you would be child abuse yeah you also well no because in mongolia that's just normal um so you know you've got you've got to take into account the differences for your particular circumstances if you're a professional champagne opener yeah you're you're going to be in more line to get blinded by champagne cork um but basically the the i think the best the best thing to look at is micro morts i think we've discussed them before it's just a good way of standardizing death risks from things i think when we talked about that australian who got uh the australians who got into a crocodile fighting with the crocodiles yeah um and making the point that you know your risk of death is pretty much zero if you stay in downtown melbourne you know but if you go into a crocodile infested river your chance of death goes up yeah but if we what you can do is look at different activities and say well how many million one in a million chances of death do i get from doing this so for example running a marathon is seven micro balls if you're on a marathon on average you've got a seven and seven and a million chance of dying and the by far the most dangerous thing

Speaker A: 00:14:08

on this list is climbing everest do you want to make a guess i remember it's similar to smoking the risk i remember that possibly lifetime risk yeah yeah um but what is it like uh i have a

Speaker B: 00:14:18

guess uh so you've got seven seven micro morts is running a marathon i guess how many marathons of danger is is climbing everest uh i would say it's like running a hundred marathons yeah it's it's um it's considerably more it's more like about it's something more like 500 marathons 40 000 micro morts scuba diving that's pretty dangerous have you done scuba diving oh yeah i

Speaker A: 00:14:45

was a dive master right um yeah um it's going to be less dangerous i think it's less dangerous

Speaker B: 00:14:52

than climbing everest oh for sure per dive yeah go on about the same as a marathon okay

Speaker A: 00:14:58

okay but but people would dive more regularly than they would um run a marathon so it's more

Speaker B: 00:15:05

dangerous therefore uh and i i also looked at you know people always say oh if you worried about that you'd stay indoors you'd never go out and i thought well actually how safe would you be if you just stayed indoors 50 percent of people die at home yeah 50 percent of people who die from from external causes die at home so at the very most you are going to reduce your mortality by 50 percent and given that as i said earlier your chance my chance of dying from external causes is minuscule it's of the order of one in you know uh 10 000 um i'm i'm not shaving very much off by

Speaker A: 00:15:40

staying at home yeah yeah um i mean look i don't know if there's much to discuss here because i think the reason why is people worry about this stuff is because although the chances are very small of death by these whatever manner um our chance of death overall is one in one right um and so people are kind of aware of that um and then two is either we know someone or or more likely we read about this stuff and that makes it seem uh all we see on tv radio whatever and so therefore it becomes more present um and three i think is just the amount of value that we attach to our own lives which is pretty high um and so those three things together it makes us worry about

Speaker B: 00:16:24

this stuff i mean it only really matters when there's a trade-off like if you can do something which makes you safe i would say putting your seatbelt on for example is almost never not a good idea yeah or wearing a bicycle helmet yeah i mean it's it's almost free to do yeah and and it reduces your risk so the thing is that risk people like me i guess are very caught up with the idea that people out there are kind of idiots and worry about the wrong things and um you know i think everyone thinks oh we're not very good at handling low probability risks and we we worry about being murdered so it's not true people don't worry about being murdered they don't they what people worry about for themselves right the things that people worry about happening are all about relationships and work and money and and their long-term health so i'm not even sure it's true that people do worry about you know becoming the victim of a freak accident yeah yeah

Speaker C: 00:17:14

peter uh i'd like to go back to like the idea of the cause of death being less or more likely if you if you are if you philosophically speaking if you argue from a from a determinism point of view then you could say that every death no matter how weird is equally as likely because they are all the product of a unique set of circumstances to to arrive at that particular situation so there's no there's no any given situation is no more or less likely than any

Speaker B: 00:17:51

it's our classification the fact that we choose to classify cancers as the same type of thing yeah whereas if we gave each cancer its own name classified as a separate disease it would seem

Speaker C: 00:18:01

like a yes which is really the cancer that would kill me would be my specific pedicure killed but that would that cancer being there is a product of everything to do with my life everything to do with my genetics everything to do with the my entire family tree and everything every decision and cigarette i smoked and beer i had throughout my entire life yeah all of those had their small

Speaker B: 00:18:23

contribution to that ultimate cancer yeah i mean but the interest and this is why i'm always sort of you know saying that it's not helpful to talk about luck and randomness as though that's a feature of the universe it's a feature of our ignorance and i think one of the when we when we are going to see some big advances in in health outcomes it's going to be because we get much better it's not about treating or preventing it's going to be much much better at detecting you know the cigarette that gives you cancer because there is one there's going to be one cigarette now we talk about it as though it's a kind of cumulative thing but you really it's that cancer is going to be caused by some by a molecular change which happens at one point and uh if we can detect it really really early like you imagine you could just go into test goes and be screened for cancer instantly um then then you you know you'd have a hundred percent um survival rate on on removing those cancers so yeah i think i think those you know really there's a lot of uh advances a lot of low-hanging fruit in the in just the sort of detection yeah

Speaker C: 00:19:22

area and and you know difficult example to actually make real because that so we're talking about a particular molecular change at a at the level of dna yeah being able to identify that one cancer cell ultimately spreads and eliminating it immediately yeah uh okay look we're pretty

Speaker A: 00:19:42

much there in terms of finishing off um i've got a question um and actually is one of the rule of thumb uh um measures that you like to use which is you know of how likely someone of something has to happen is do you know someone that this has happened to so um although we've got lots of wonderful examples of freak accidents which i would like to hear more about but um maybe you can choose a favorite one have that have that in your in your drawer ready to finish this off peter but um do you know someone who's had a freak accident and they don't have to have died um but i know of one which is actually quite sad especially since you know it's kind of someone i sort of know um i don't know what relation this person is to me perhaps you'd be able to tell me so my sister-in-law in brazil her husband has a sister and that sister's husband this happened to christ so what that person is to me i don't know but anyway he was a very keen um uh bonsai uh person you know you mean the trees the trees trees yeah and one day he was uh pruning one of them and he was pruning a particularly difficult bit and was pulling at it something like that and as he pulled it the the specialist um scissors whatever they are went back and he stabbed himself in the eyeball oh god with this and um and blinded himself okay um horrible i mean i really feel for the poor bloke you know um so i feel a bit bad saying well this is one of my favorite freak accidents but anyway that's one that i'm aware of and yeah i know i guess i

Speaker B: 00:21:14

i mean the thing is if we are talking about um things of the order of one in ten thousand then we should know someone who knows someone who you know has had a free freak accident um or it's the sort of thing that would happen to one of your friends at some point during your life you know uh the only thing i can contribute and i didn't know the person i i can't even tell you their name but a my uh a friend of mine mine's wife is norwegian and uh she knew someone who was eaten by a polar bear which is pretty extraordinary it's not the kind why are you laughing it's it's not the kind of thing that you would want uh to happen to you no if you're going to be eaten by any animal that's quite a noble one to to be eaten by yeah yeah but uh i mean polar bears are scary enough as it is the idea of one eating you yeah not nice nice yeah being eaten alive by polar

Speaker C: 00:22:05

bear oh no uh peter have you got one not any personal or family or friend uh examples but

Speaker A: 00:22:12

okay let's say okay so here we go this is yeah i'll give two because these are both this is going to

Speaker C: 00:22:17

us off so these yeah so so in: 1660

Speaker B: 00:22:33

it is a good one that is yeah i'll tell you what the phrase is killing himself

Speaker C: 00:22:36

yeah okay calm down fraser you don't want another one um uh uh i think that there's uh various stats on weird causes of death uh it for uh on the internet and so autoerotic asphyxiation right um in the us per year around a thousand people that die from that wow you could you can make

Speaker B: 00:23:00

things safer for you by not doing it yeah well it was that tory mp wasn't there get your kicks in another sadly who's who will never be known for anything other than having died through auto erotic asphyxiation didn't he have an orange in his mouth and he was wearing stockings i think yeah extraordinary stuff okay each to their own uh each so yeah it's quite a

Speaker C: 00:23:20

it's it's a relatively sort of uh dangerous activity unsurprisingly but i i think i think

Speaker B: 00:23:25

our response to it is basically quite rational in that i think we are we we like them we like these stories but i don't think we're unduly is anyone here unduly scared that that's going to

Speaker C: 00:23:35

happen to them i mean i'm not but if you are going to put a plastic bag over your head make

Speaker A: 00:23:38

sure you've done a risk assessment first yeah okay all right let's stop there um thank you as always for listening to the cognitive engineering podcast um i'm fraser mcgrew been here with nick hare and peter coghill be careful out there until next time