Russian Roulette

[George Rice]

[ QUOTE ]
There's no value in risking death. Life has value, death does not.

[/ QUOTE ]

Death is inevitable. A decent quality of life is not. It's a matter of personal choice where someone draws the line of risk/reward.

[fraac]

There is a better way to phrase this question. It's a well known test of statistics students' idiocy, apparently. Read it recently on this blog, I think: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/mlm/

Something like: how much cash would make you accept a 1/20000 chance of immediate death?

My correct answer ('my answer' because we have to be intolerably conceited in this forum, I understand) is "the smallest amount of cash that means something to me... about 60 quid, which I can buy sex with."

Apparently many students would decline any amount of cash!

[jimmytrick]

I think life insurance policys have a term beyond which a suicide's benificiaries will collect, so you can get into situations where the proceeds would exceed the projected income and thus be plus EV to the estate.

[shaniac]

go ahead and put a dollar value on your life, then, sure, there's potential EV in High Stakes Russian Roulette