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Topic: Job Hazards (Read 2941 times) |
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playful
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Re: Job Hazards
« Reply #25 on: Apr 28th, 2016, 1:58pm » |
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Quote:| the job they signed up for was "astronaut". |
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Do you know this for a fact?
I do get your point and was sensitive to it when choosing that example, as it seemed like a chance for one-of-a-kind job titles. My point is that there was probably one guy on that crew who had a job title that was used only once.
The fatality rate for the guy who had that job title is 100%.
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towr
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Re: Job Hazards
« Reply #26 on: Apr 28th, 2016, 10:58pm » |
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Do I know it for a fact? No. Is it a lot more likely than the alternative? Yes.
And in any case, if you approach the danger of a job in that way, then a job that has only been filled once has an infinite variance associated with it, so you can't rightly say anything about how dangerous it is.
It's a pretty poor way to try to evaluate the danger of a job anyway. If two job titles entail doing exactly the same thing, but one had 100% fatality and the other 0, then they're still equally dangerous, because they're the exact same job even though the title is different. (Unless you can explain how the title suddenly makes it dangerous; but then, it's still the title, and not really the job, that's dangerous.)
I'd also be surprised if there are many jobs that can really be consider to be so narrow as to cover no more than what a given person on the job actually does (vs could do). If a "job" is playing Russian roulette once (assuming a standard 6-chamber revolver), then it's fatality rate is 1 in 6, regardless of whether the job has only ever been filled by one person that had the poor luck of blowing his brains out. The alternative ways the job could have played out, even though they weren't realized, do influence the statistics of the job. (I wouldn't take the job if he hadn't blown his brains out, because 100% survival rate says nothing with N=1.)
Applying this to the Challenger disaster, we have to consider the likelihood of that accident happening, not just that historically it did happen. Only in very large samples of events can you safely assume that rare events are fairly represented in the statistics.
So, yeah. In summary, I, personally, won't consider any job as an answer anymore that doesn't have either a sufficient number of samples or appropriate proxy statistics for what characterizes that job.
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| « Last Edit: Apr 28th, 2016, 11:15pm by towr » |
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alien2
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Re: Job Hazards
« Reply #27 on: Apr 29th, 2016, 3:49am » |
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on Apr 28th, 2016, 10:58pm, towr wrote:| In summary, I, personally, won't consider any job as an answer anymore that doesn't have either a sufficient number of samples or appropriate proxy statistics for what characterizes that job. |
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Ergo there is no such thing as the most hazardous job in the United States. Unless of course I was right.
on Apr 28th, 2016, 7:34am, Grimbal wrote:
Japanese kamikaze pilots are still attacking US warships?
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towr
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Re: Job Hazards
« Reply #28 on: Apr 29th, 2016, 1:04pm » |
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on Apr 29th, 2016, 3:49am, alien2 wrote:| Ergo there is no such thing as the most hazardous job in the United States. Unless of course I was right. |
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As long as there are jobs in the US, one or several should be the most hazardous. "Hazardousness" is just a way to rank items, and something has to be on top of a (non-empty) ranking
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anglia
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Re: Job Hazards
« Reply #29 on: Apr 29th, 2016, 10:52pm » |
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It must be Police Officer.
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alien2
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Re: Job Hazards
« Reply #30 on: Apr 30th, 2016, 1:02am » |
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on Apr 29th, 2016, 10:52pm, anglia wrote:| It must be Police Officer. |
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Not necessarily. When I see a parking ticket I am out of my gourd.
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