ypsm

I'm on a graduate admissions committee at a research University. It's very different. Graduate admissions decisions are made at the departmental level, and you really have to demonstrate mastery (for your level) of your chosen field. We don't care about your summer experiences or life lessons you've learned. We care about how good you are at our discipline. Because of this, we look at lot more closely at letters of recommendation than undergraduate admissions officers do.

I'm not sure, but I think you misunderstood my comment, because I'm trying to say the same thing that (I think!) you are: what matters is how much extra risk you incur with one procedure rather than the other. In contrast, whether the new risk counts as double the previous one does not matter.

For example, if procedure A has a mortality risk of 3%, and the B has a risk of 5%, what matters is that there is an additional 2% risk, not that the risk of B is 1.66x the risk of A.

Likewise, if A's risk is 0.001% and B's risk is 0.002%, what matters is that B has an additional 0.001% risk, not that B's risk is 2x A's.

Does that make sense? Sorry if I'm not explaining clearly.

... (and the doubled risk of death was humbling)

...

doubling risk

This shouldn't factor in to your decision-making. What matters is marginal risk, i.e., how much risk is increased by one decision rather than another. Whether the new risk is some large multiple of the old one is irrelevant.

Otherwise, going from 0.001% to 0.002% risk would be worse than going from 20% to 30%.

I'm not the person who said "Lol", and I have no horse in this race, but the WP's answer just seems pat and glib. It doesn't acknowledge that there's a tradeoff between being quick and being right. You can't literally sit on your story forever until it's perfect, because then you'd never publish anything.

Will In-N-Out Burger ever make a veggie burger?