Originally Posted by
MoAlpha
Exactly and many of us are alive today because people know how to capture the behavior of complex systems with probabilistic models.
There's also mortality tables/actuaries that attempt to predict a person's demise by extrapolating how you will probably die by how people like you died in the past.
Pick up a life insurance questionaire; the questions are quite interesting. Bicycling presumably lowers your risk of heart disease while increasing the chances of a collision. That's why you always see life insurance companies offer differing payouts with the accidental death separated from illness death.
You'll also see weird questions like, "how often do you go to the dentist to get your teeth cleaned?" Surprisingly, just doing that adds 2-5 years to your life, because not having clean teeth results in a low-level whole body infection that damages your cardiovascular system.