Your Kid Isn’t Worth Saving

This is a very good and interesting video about flood, weather, data collection, and probability. Thanks to Gina S. for bird-dogging it.

Civil engineer Grady Hillhouse notes that, as a general rule, as severity of a disaster increases, the likelihood of it decreases.

I remarked about this predictability conundrum back in 1978.

I called the far end of it a ZIP Function -- a near-ZERO chance of "it" happening, but INFINITE POTENTIAL harm if it did. 

At the time, I was 18 or 19 years old and writing about the Rasmussen Report on the relative risk imposed by nuclear reactors and nuclear proliferation in general.

ZIP Functions are impossible to solve by definition -- the raw bleeding edge of risk assessment.

In the world of cost-benefit analysis how would you plug in value for a "near Zero" chance and a value for an "ininfinite potential" harm in order to generate the ILLUSION of some objective and rational number that could be used to justify (post hoc, of course), your tragic decision?

What mathematical calculation PROVES your child was not worth saving?