@munin maybe "why is your average Joe more likely to die in a car accident than in a cage-fighting deathmatch?"

I suppose this assumes your interlocutor has some modest amount of wit to think it through, and of course they have to understand they're comparing something that's survived by 99.978% of participants (US motoring, lifetime risk) to something that's survived by 50% of participants (assuming one is only dumb enough to try a 1-on-1 deathmatch once in one's life). But you get the jist.

It's tricky because the person to whom you're explaining this is the sort of person who is trying to infer meaning from a string of statistically-interrelated word-fragments generated by an algorithm, and terrifyingly (to me at least), thinks the database of statistical-interrelationships of word-fragments has an understanding of the world. So my heart goes out to you, because you've chosen a real uphill struggle here. A worthy cause! But an uphill struggle.

#statistics #math #communication #teaching #maths #odds #risk #mathematics #AI #LLM