To see how useful the idea of expected value is, let’s consider a morbid but important application: assessing the risk of death from different activities. Smoking, riding a motorbike, scuba diving, taking ecstasy, eating peanut butter: all these things increase your risk of death. How much should you worry about each of them? Public health experts use the concept of a ‘micromort’ to compare the risks, where one micromort equals a one-in-a-million chance of dying, equivalent to thirty minutes of expected life lost if you’re aged twenty, or fifteen minutes of expected life lost if you’re aged
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