Most of this seems like bad advice. Fire alarms basically don’t help with fire deaths at all. Fire blankets don’t really do much and basically never come in handy. You have a phone, you don’t need a separate torch. Modern extension chords extremely rarely end up overheating. Fire is not a leading cause of death in any western country. If you have enough money to comfortably self-insure, don’t buy insurance.
I agree that you should invest your money into index funds, and to watch your basic health.
Fire alarms basically don’t help with fire deaths at all
Is that true? I don’t think there’s amazing evidence, but my sense is that it’s sufficient to expect fire alarms help. I think the study designs look like:
Difference in fire deaths when there are working fire alarms. To help with confounders, they try and do within neighbourhood comparison. Obviously that won’t be sufficient, but still
Do a campaign in a neighbourhood to get people to install fire alarms, and see the before and after of fire deaths. Unfortunately, I think most campaigns also include education, and at least increase the saliency of fire, so that makes it harder to tell
Tending to see things like earlier evacuation with fire alarms, and an association between evacuation time and mortality
While skepticism on utility is wise, I strongly disagree with most of your comment. Fire accidents at home is by far the leading majority of fire related deaths in many countries, and fire accidents is a major cause of accidental civil deaths.
If we look at US as a whole (not where I live but you do), fire accidents are few versus drug overdose and gun violence. If I post: Don’t do drugs, is this useful advice? Tell me the low-hanging fruit there. Fires you CAN protect yourself against but many don’t.
Falls and poisoning are other common accidents worldwide. But, “don’t fall” is not very helpful, is it? And I don’t know how to proactively prevent posinoning for adults apart from not overdoing drugs. Those are context dependent. And traffic accidents are its own topic, everyone know about it.
Your claims on fire alarms lack backing. And using fire blankets for extinguishing small fires is a sound strategy although you may be right its not super effective. Point is, prevented home accidents do not show up in stats, it is akin to survivor bias.
As for using your phone and its limited capacity to work as a torch, this is just dumb. I mean, where do I start? Having a designated, powerful battery powered flashlight in an emergency cannot compare to the flashlight capacity of a smartphone, that may or may not be charged. And your phone is otherwise needed for other things during a longer blackout.
Come on, if you want to argue the fire death point at least give some kind of statistic or do a micromort estimate.
prevented home accidents do not show up in stats, it is akin to survivor bias.
Most people do not own fire blankets, as such there is little survivorship bias going on here. You can just estimate using base rates.
The expected annual property damage from fire is around $60/year per homeowner per this random ChatGPT analysis (in other words not worrying about). A fire blanket would need to result in a 50% reduction of all fire risk to start being worth the cost and attention.
Honestly, this whole conversation just feels like I am on Reddit with people giving random anecdotes without statistical literacy. You can disagree with me, but you speak with weird authority on issues that you seem to not have actually thought that clearly about.
Thinking about this much harder, I would rewrite the post to clearly phrase it as damage prevention you can do fast and cheap from your home.
I notice I forgot to mention a first aid kit. First thing to correct.
Secondly, when thinking hard on what of your feedback might actually be useful, I realized that statistically speaking you may do more good by buying slip mats for wet floors, and potentially investing in premium ladders. Since fall accidents dominate injury statistics. Not something I thought about intuitively but makes sense.
For general awareness, accidents are 3d leading cause of death in US, fire is top 3 common accidents in the home, and quick google confirms cast majority of fire deaths happen in the home. Which I knew from safety trainings too.
Oliver. You just suggested “just use a smartphone” as a flashlight in an emergency as an argument not to get a flashlight. And you say I don’t think things through? You make claims that fire alarms are useless. Data? If you hadn’t revived LW I would think you are a troll. And your odd reasoning using GPT seems mostly off topic.
I don’t think there is any negative utility here, perhaps low on investing in a fire blanket.
Also, I have lived through scenarios where I needed a flashlight, and I have used fire blankets. Like, I have used these in my own life. I have been in the wild too, and the military ( I am from Finland.) Pretty standard safety advice here, tbh. Not sure what your problem is. If you think post is useless, and we should just trust the system, fine, but don’t make such low quality critique?
Most of this seems like bad advice. Fire alarms basically don’t help with fire deaths at all. Fire blankets don’t really do much and basically never come in handy. You have a phone, you don’t need a separate torch. Modern extension chords extremely rarely end up overheating. Fire is not a leading cause of death in any western country. If you have enough money to comfortably self-insure, don’t buy insurance.
I agree that you should invest your money into index funds, and to watch your basic health.
Is that true? I don’t think there’s amazing evidence, but my sense is that it’s sufficient to expect fire alarms help. I think the study designs look like:
Difference in fire deaths when there are working fire alarms. To help with confounders, they try and do within neighbourhood comparison. Obviously that won’t be sufficient, but still
Do a campaign in a neighbourhood to get people to install fire alarms, and see the before and after of fire deaths. Unfortunately, I think most campaigns also include education, and at least increase the saliency of fire, so that makes it harder to tell
Tending to see things like earlier evacuation with fire alarms, and an association between evacuation time and mortality
While skepticism on utility is wise, I strongly disagree with most of your comment. Fire accidents at home is by far the leading majority of fire related deaths in many countries, and fire accidents is a major cause of accidental civil deaths.
If we look at US as a whole (not where I live but you do), fire accidents are few versus drug overdose and gun violence. If I post: Don’t do drugs, is this useful advice? Tell me the low-hanging fruit there. Fires you CAN protect yourself against but many don’t.
Falls and poisoning are other common accidents worldwide. But, “don’t fall” is not very helpful, is it? And I don’t know how to proactively prevent posinoning for adults apart from not overdoing drugs. Those are context dependent. And traffic accidents are its own topic, everyone know about it.
Your claims on fire alarms lack backing. And using fire blankets for extinguishing small fires is a sound strategy although you may be right its not super effective. Point is, prevented home accidents do not show up in stats, it is akin to survivor bias.
As for using your phone and its limited capacity to work as a torch, this is just dumb. I mean, where do I start? Having a designated, powerful battery powered flashlight in an emergency cannot compare to the flashlight capacity of a smartphone, that may or may not be charged. And your phone is otherwise needed for other things during a longer blackout.
Come on, if you want to argue the fire death point at least give some kind of statistic or do a micromort estimate.
Most people do not own fire blankets, as such there is little survivorship bias going on here. You can just estimate using base rates.
The expected annual property damage from fire is around $60/year per homeowner per this random ChatGPT analysis (in other words not worrying about). A fire blanket would need to result in a 50% reduction of all fire risk to start being worth the cost and attention.
Honestly, this whole conversation just feels like I am on Reddit with people giving random anecdotes without statistical literacy. You can disagree with me, but you speak with weird authority on issues that you seem to not have actually thought that clearly about.
Thinking about this much harder, I would rewrite the post to clearly phrase it as damage prevention you can do fast and cheap from your home.
I notice I forgot to mention a first aid kit. First thing to correct.
Secondly, when thinking hard on what of your feedback might actually be useful, I realized that statistically speaking you may do more good by buying slip mats for wet floors, and potentially investing in premium ladders. Since fall accidents dominate injury statistics. Not something I thought about intuitively but makes sense.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/fire-related-fatalities-and-injuries/
https://rehis.com/news/preventable-accidents-in-the-uk-are-rising-and-deaths-reach-an-all-time-high-warns-new-report/
For general awareness, accidents are 3d leading cause of death in US, fire is top 3 common accidents in the home, and quick google confirms cast majority of fire deaths happen in the home. Which I knew from safety trainings too.
Oliver. You just suggested “just use a smartphone” as a flashlight in an emergency as an argument not to get a flashlight. And you say I don’t think things through? You make claims that fire alarms are useless. Data? If you hadn’t revived LW I would think you are a troll. And your odd reasoning using GPT seems mostly off topic.
I don’t think there is any negative utility here, perhaps low on investing in a fire blanket.
Also, I have lived through scenarios where I needed a flashlight, and I have used fire blankets. Like, I have used these in my own life. I have been in the wild too, and the military ( I am from Finland.) Pretty standard safety advice here, tbh. Not sure what your problem is. If you think post is useless, and we should just trust the system, fine, but don’t make such low quality critique?