More Dangerous Than You Think
One thing I think about a lot is which activities are actually much more dangerous than most people realize, and which (potentially) they wouldn't do as much if they realized the costs. I have five nominations: agility sports, airplanes/airports, skiing and snowboarding, cycling in cities, and international travel.
One reason I suspect people don't take these dangers seriously is that their own experiences seem too anecdotal. And I think there's potential mistakes on both sides here, i.e. you can trust your anecdotal experiences too much and too little. If you have one friend who got swallowed whole by a zoo-lion, that's probably not evidence that zoos are more dangerous than we think they are, that's just incredibly bad luck. But if it's happened to 3 different people in your network then it's probably time to notice and ask questions, even if the statistics say zoos are very safe overall.
The thing is, some of the dangers in your own personal life really wouldn't show up in national statistics. For example, the statistical probability that an American will be struck by lightening in their lifetime is 1-in-10k, but that risk is not evenly distributed. I live in a big city and I'm pretty sure that if lightning struck here it would hit a skyscraper long before it got to me. But if you live up a mountain and love hiking and have multiple friends who have gotten in near misses with Zeus' arrows, your personal risk is probably much higher and you should probably take that seriously.
One way I think about this is that I have a limited number of friends and relations, and if any specific injury or tragedy has happened to 3 or more people I know then it's probably a meaningful danger for People Like Me. Again, there's a lot of ways to overestimate your risks and I really don't want to encourage that – you're more likely to hear about your friend's cousin who spontaneously combusted than your other-friends' other-cousins who live quiet, desperate but uneventful lives. But I think some people over-index on statistical data to the point where they're ignoring the patterns in their own immediate experience.
Without further ado, here are my nominations: if you have more, please do leave them in the comments.
Agility Sports
I have long believed that any sport which requires quick changes of direction is far more dangerous than most of my friends acknowledge. I don't know a normal name for these so I'm going to call them Agility Sports, though maybe it should be Reflex Sports, or Plyometrics or something.
I think the main danger in these sports is that you'll twist, sprain or tear some part of your foot or leg and be unable to walk for a month or two: this is obviously not the worst thing in the world, but it's very inconvenient, and to me makes those sports not-worth-it overall. For example, bros-of-the-blog (gender-neutral) C and S recently invited me to play squash, and I greatly like the idea of playing squash with them, but I also like being able to walk, so I declined.
Most team sports have this property (e.g. soccer, basketball), but so do some individual sports that include sudden and uncontrolled movement. By contrast, weightlifting doesn't have any of this, and I suspect it's safer than people realize. But I'm not at all confident about how human bodies work, and I wouldn't be surprised to discover that some kinds of strength training ultimately cause asymmetric development which ultimately leads to sprains/twists/tears.
Of course, not-exercising at all is dangerous in a different way, so I don't want to cause anyone to stop exercising completely. Experīmentum perīculōsum, iūdicium difficile.
Skiing and Snowboarding
I'm not sure I have to justify this one: I think everyone kinda-knows they're super dangerous, but people keep doing them anyway. I feel like they must be unbelievably fun for the amount of risk that people take on for them, it's got all the leg-tearingness of agility sports plus some additional risk of paralyzation or death.
Airplanes or Airports
No I don't mean for mortality, I know that air travel is safer than driving etc.
But almost-every time I travel by plane lately I catch a cold or something, and I've given up on pretending this is a coincidence. I remember being told that airplanes filter all the air continuously, so they're safer than not-airplanes for respiratory infections, so maybe I'm actually catching something in the airport rather than the airplane. Or maybe air travel just tires me out a lot, and weakens my immune system, and then I catch something afterwards as a result. I don't know, I just think something is going on here that is not being captured in any kind of statistics: generally, I sense that any kind of negative health outcome that does not lead to hospitalization doesn't get recorded, but cumulatively can be meaningful for your own personal decisions (e.g. train vs plane travel, or how much elective travel to do).
Cycling in Cities
One of my favourite people got hit by a car while cycling in a city and had their life changed forever, and frankly that was enough by itself to put me off city-cycling. After it happened I realised that I've had multiple friends who have had to go to hospital duty to city-biking accidents, though thankfully most of them were ok in the long run.
This one is tricky because all of the methods of transport in big cities have dangers, either inherent (like car accidents) or contingent (like safety concerns with walking or riding transit).
I'm specifically saying "city cycling" here because I think it has a different risk profile than cycling in the suburbs or countryside, I just don't know enough about the latter to say anything.
By the way: as I understand it, bike helmets have foam inside and once that foam has been impacted even once it will be condensed and no longer function if you're hit again, even if the helmet has no visible damage on the outside. So e.g. if you drop your bike helmet on the ground, it's no longer going to protect you correctly if heaven forbid you got in an accident.
International Travel
The book Plague Time claims that many chronic illnesses – heart disease, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, many forms of cancer – are not actually idiopathic but rather are caused by germs.
If this turned out to be true, I think one of the implications would be that travelling to exotic places is way more dangerous than we think it is. Basically, anywhere that you could pick up new and interesting germs, different from the ones you're already exposed to, would put you unknowingly at risk of a lifetime of chronic disease. Depending on the percentages, I think that might singlehandedly tip the balance on making certain kinds of elective foreign travel not-worth-it.