Microlife: The unit of life


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A microlife is thirty minutes of your life expectancy. You can use it up by chilling for 30 minutes, or you could start to speed through them by smoking a few cigarettes or having a few drinks.
A simple way to bring difficult-to-grasp long-term, slow-burn risks into a unit that can motivate you and a handy way to compare risks.
Even better, you gain a microlife with 2-3 cups of coffee. Win!
Related Ideas to Microlife
- Micromort, the unit of death
- Core components of risk
- Human Risk
- A Framework for Hope
- Detecting Prostate Cancer
- BASE Jumping
- Optimism Bias
- The Bus Factor
- The Dilution Effect
Learn More
- Microlives and more fascinating aspects of uncertainty in The Art of Uncertainty by David Spiegelhalter (book)
- BBC article: Microlives: A lesson in risk taking, by Cambridge University Professor of risk David Spiegelhalter .
- Or his 15-minute TED talk: Motorbikes, Terrorism, Heart Attacks, Sausages: Professor David Spiegelhalter at TEDxOxbridge , or the full paper (pdf).
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