(September 5, 2014 at 9:29 pm)Losty Wrote:(September 5, 2014 at 9:16 pm)Chuck Wrote: Yes, but what percentage of encounters with spiders results in a fatality, vs what percentage of encounters with the great white result in fatality?
If each person in the world encounters on average 10 spiders a year, even if each encounter has only a 1 in a million chance of resulting in a fatality, 70000 people a year world wide would still die from spider encounters. But if the chance of an average person encountering great white in a given year is 1 in a million, then even if every last encounter results in a fatality, you still only get 7000 people, one tenth as many, dying from shark bite.
But, in this scenario, if you run into a shark, you are dead for sure. If you run into a spider, you have 0.999999 chance of escaping unscathed.
So in which encounter should you soil your pants?
Irrelevant considering that you're probably a million times more likely to run into a spider on any given day.
If you react with as much fear each time you run into a spider as you would when you run into a shark, the chance of you dying for cumulative fright will be a million times higher than dying of actual spider.
On the other hand if you reach with typical amount of fear during the once out of a thousand life times when you run into a shark, you chance of surviving the shark probably increases.
