"Micromort," Ronald Howard (1989) [idea clutch]

a unit of measurement for the riskiness of various day-to-day activities

The term “micromort” was coined in 1989 by Stanford Professor, Ronald Howard, in his paper, “Microrisks for Medical Decision Analysis.” In his words in the abstract, “we propose that a convenient unit in which to measure most medical risks is the microprobability, a probability of 1 in 1 million. When the risk consequence is death, we can define a micromort as one microprobability of death.”

In layman’s terms, if you do something with one micromort of risk, you have a one-in-a-million chance of dying doing it. The riskier the activity, the more micromorts it has. It’s a fun term!

And, here’s a fun visualization by Visual Capitalist on “How Likely You Are To Die from Different Activities and Behaviors.” According to this chart, we have a higher chance of dying getting out of bed at age 45 than we do rock climbing.