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"you've got more chance of winning the lottery"
You do have to include the "or win the second prize" to be reasonably accurate, and typically people will think you're talking about one ticket per draw, two draws per week. A commuter makes 10 journeys per week. Over a 40 year career, that's 20,000 journeys.
(1-(3×10-7))20000=0.994
From an office of 1000 workers, all commuting by bike every day for 40 years, 6 will receive hospital treatment for a cycling related head injury. Even if none of them is using a helmet at the moment, and helmets actually prevent 85% of head injuries, and you could get every single one of them to start using a helmet, you could only save 5 hospital visits from those 10 million working days. -
What I particularly like about Tester's analogy is that when you're trying to get across a message to people with a poor grasp of risk statistics*, the old "you've got more chance of winning the lottery" argument at least gets them thinking along familiar lines. ;-)
Yeah, but they still try to win the lottery every time. The danger with this line of argument is that they'll then try their damnedest to get a head injury, too.
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gbj_tester
Oliver Schick
@PhilPub
What I particularly like about Tester's analogy is that when you're trying to get across a message to people with a poor grasp of risk statistics*, the old "you've got more chance of winning the lottery" argument at least gets them thinking along familiar lines. ;-)
*Not aimed at anyone here; I'm looking forward to wheeling this out the next time anyone I know sees me riding a bike without a helmet, thinking I might as well be playing Russian roulette. (I usually do wear one but sometimes CNBA depending on journey circumstances.)