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AP
Trad climber
Calgary
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Mar 20, 2018 - 02:44pm PT
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I don't know how we survived with mothers who smoke and drank during pregnancy, no seat belts in cars, no bike helmets, dangerous playground equipment on an asphalt surface, and 3 fall ropes.
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madbolter1
Big Wall climber
Denver, CO
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Mar 20, 2018 - 02:55pm PT
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^^^ Just lucky, I guess.
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tradmanclimbs
Ice climber
Pomfert VT
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 20, 2018 - 03:09pm PT
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rideing in the back of pick up trucks...
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Jaybro
Social climber
Wolf City, Wyoming
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Mar 21, 2018 - 05:03am PT
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But there's no avoiding the inevitable, however it gets us.
After all, If we could avoid it' it wouldn't be inevitable!😎
But how often to do we recognize,miss, or misread what is inevitable. Play to win!
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healyje
Trad climber
Portland, Oregon
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Mar 21, 2018 - 06:14am PT
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I don't know how we survived with mothers who smoke and drank during pregnancy, no seat belts in cars, no bike helmets, dangerous playground equipment on an asphalt surface, and 3 fall ropes.
And No-Pest strips in every room...
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Trump
climber
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Mar 23, 2018 - 05:36pm PT
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“Perceived risk is almost always less than actual risk.”
Or maybe you’re lucky to not have a fear based psych disorder like OCD or anxiety or something, and to only perceive risk based on the information you have, without considering the information that you don’t have, and so your experience is to underestimate the risks from the information you don’t have. Maybe there are even some facts about why you’re “lucky” to seem to not have a fear based disorder?
Perceived risk is based on our perceptions. (My apologies for the duh) A lot of our perceptions are at least partly based on the information we have - the knowledge we have. And the rest is based on how we process that information. Luck is just our way to describe the difference between reality and the information we do have.
To not have information, or to not have knowledge, and to believe that we have luck instead, is maybe not as lucky, or as factual, as we believe it is.
That we all perceive that we’re lucky if we’re not killed by the avalanche, and we don’t perceive that we’re lucky if we do get killed by the avalanche, is maybe not really lucky at all, but more a reflection of what 4 billion years of survival of the fittest has done to our perception systems.
And maybe completely trusting that we have enough of the information to make a decision that won’t get us killed, even when we (any of us) don’t have all the information, and so discounting the information that we don’t have, and therefore discounting the “risk”, is reflective of that 4 billion year old process too?
If an avalanche happens at an exact place in time and space, and there’s a newbie who didn’t know what they were doing who gets killed by it, they’re no more or less lucky than if an experienced guide, the best and the brightest, with the most current information on avalanches, had gotten swept away in that same moment. The avalanche happened for reasons that are disconnected from our perceptions of the unluck of being killed by the avalanche.
The person was there when the avalanche happened for reasons that weren’t luck either. That the guide was a guide who loved outdoor adventure and studied up on avalanches, or that the newbie was an executive with three kids with no time to spend doing enough research to know that that avalanche was going to happen at that exact place and time, weren’t due to luck either.
The reasons that someone gets killed by an avalanche are a function of the information that we don’t have. And the information that we have or don’t have isn’t a function of luck. It’s no more unlucky to get killed by an avalanche with a lot of the information about whether an avalanche might happen than it is to get killed by an avalanche with only a little bit of the information.
Maybe it would be lucky for us to know all of the exact reasons why an avalanche happens at a specific place and time, but we were lucky to be born as humans, with our human ways of perceiving “luck”, instead.
Always the reference class problem.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
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johnkelley
climber
Anchorage Alaska
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Mar 24, 2018 - 02:33am PT
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If climbing FA’s on big mountains in Alaska means it’s inevitable that I’ll get the chop and climbing in the Himalayas means it’s inevitable I’ll also get killed what about the FA’s of Himalayan peaks in the winter that I’ve been up to? Are you claiming i’ve only been successful at it because of luck?
Was I more lucky to survive new routes in Alaska during the winter or new routes in the Himalayas in the winter?
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perswig
climber
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Mar 24, 2018 - 03:05am PT
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The risk I took was calculated......but man, am I bad at math.
Dale
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tradmanclimbs
Ice climber
Pomfert VT
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 24, 2018 - 05:23am PT
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John. I respect the hell out of what you do and always enjoy your trip reports.
lot of folks get killed doing that stuff. you tell us?? what makes you different from the guys and gals that don't make it?
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johnkelley
climber
Anchorage Alaska
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Mar 24, 2018 - 05:50am PT
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Tell me about it...Maybe you should stop climbing if it bothers you?
Here’s a photo Clint Heilander took of Ryan Johnson (in red) and I getting picked up with the North Face of Main Memdenhall in the background.
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tradmanclimbs
Ice climber
Pomfert VT
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 24, 2018 - 05:57am PT
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Obviously climbing accidents can happen in all styles of climbing. You can get lowered off your rope sport climbing or have a rapelling accident trad or ice climbing but the sheer number of user days between accidents leads us to be reasonable certain that we are going to be ok doing most of the normal recreational climbing that we do. Ice climbing is certainly more dangerous than rock climbing but even then with the tens of thousands of user days we have each season here in the north east a fatality is very rare and our usual 3 or so accidents a year involve those nasty lower leg injuries that crampons cause...
K2 on the other hand, people die every season.. You simply can not go there and assume that you won't die. Death on that mountain is a constant companion.
same thing goes for Isle of Man TT.
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tradmanclimbs
Ice climber
Pomfert VT
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 24, 2018 - 06:07am PT
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It does not bother me. I Ice climb and I solo a lot. many of my friends solo. We climb waterfalls and cliffs. we rarely lose anyone. maybe we are just lucky. who knows?? but mostly our mountains are simply much more forgiveing than yours....
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johnkelley
climber
Anchorage Alaska
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Mar 24, 2018 - 06:30am PT
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I lost too many friends climbing but I’m pretty sure more were involved in accidents while cragging. More on shorter climbs then on mountain routes. Seems like more now then when I was in my 30’s and it seems like most of the lost are in their early-mid 30’s now too. Makes sense since their generation is much larger then mine. Drugs, car wrecks, and suicide have taken more then anything else...
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tradmanclimbs
Ice climber
Pomfert VT
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Topic Author's Reply - Mar 24, 2018 - 06:46am PT
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Lost my best friend in a motorcycle accident @21 yrs old and quit street raceing and rideing altogether.. Was simo soloing grade 3 ice on Mt Washington a few years later when my partner came off. He fell several hundred meters completely out of my sight. I assumed he was gone and made a vow with myself that I was not going to give up climbing. when I reached him he was conscious and survived to climb again.. lots of luck involved in that one....
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Trump
climber
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Mar 24, 2018 - 08:38am PT
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I appreciate the perceptions that we mostly all share about risk as a result of our direct experience with eg climbing. I just don’t think that our understanding of it is as accurate as we think.
When we compare the “luck” of getting killed in an avalanche in July in the Tetons to the “luck” of getting killed in an avalanche in the big mountains in Alaska, what we’re doing is putting each individual instance of an avalanche into a larger reference class, and saying that the probability of getting killed in each instance is the same as the probability of getting killed in that reference class, and saying that our “luck” is the difference between the two. Yes, that’s a heuristic, and maybe, like all the other beliefs we each individually form, the best we can do, even if our belief is not entirely true.
But each individual instance of an avalanche is a result of specific individual conditions - each individual instance of an avalanche is itself it’s own unique reference class.
The reason we perceive that the probability of each instance is the same as the probability of the reference class is because we lack the information that would allow us to compute exactly whether the avalanche was going to occur or not. We do it because we’re ignorant of those facts - we do it because it’s the best we can do when computing with incomplete information, and needing to come to a complete conclusion. Like every single other one of our beliefs.
The “probability” of the avalanche happening at the exact moment that you’re in its path in the Tetons in July is not determined, or completely explained, by the reference class of avalanches in July. It’s not a random event - the “probability” of it happening is either 0 or 1. It either happens or doesn’t happen for the specific reasons that it happens or doesn’t happen, we just don’t know what those reasons are.
What we think of as “probability” in this case is a fiction - what we really mean is plausibility - what makes sense for us to believe about whether an avalanche is going to occur during our climb.
What makes sense for each individual person to believe is, similarly, a function of the specific information that we each individually have, combined with the processing systems that we each individually have developed through genetics (4 billion years of survival of the fittest) and the effect of our environment and experiences on our processing systems, where the chopping block for all of those things is survival of the fittest.
That our perception is that (i.e. that our processing systems tell us that) we “made” our own luck, and people who aren’t as good as we are at it are just not as good at “making” their own “luck”, is also a reflection of our self-confirming survival of the fittest induced processing systems, in the same way that our believing that we’re lucky if we don’t killed by the avalanche, and we’re unlucky if we do get killed by the avalanche, is a reflection of our survival of the fittest belief processes.
But we each individually believe what we believe for the reasons that we believe it, and if in the reference class of humans, we overwhelmingly prefer to not believe that, I apologize for my third grade understanding.
Hoping we’re all lucky!
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BruceHildenbrand
Social climber
Mountain View/Boulder
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This thread is a good example of why I don't believe in the slogan "Sh*t Happens"
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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Sh#t happens because of the positions people put themselves in..."hold my beer, watch this!"
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Don Paul
Gym climber
Denver CO
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I view it as a matter of identifying risks and minimizing them. Hanging out in "the zone" isn't for me.
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larryhorton
Trad climber
NM
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Regardless of belief, regardless of presence or absence of interest in spiritual truth, human beings are guaranteed two spiritual experiences in life—birth and death. Do you really believe the divine is stupid or imperfect enough to leave those experiences to chance? The time, place, and circumstances of both are soundly in place before soul enters a human body—as well as parents, siblings, mates, children, careers, avocations, everything. It’s all a setup. And those significant others in our lives are not strangers—we’ve known and shared karma with them for a long, long time.
But we don’t believe in karma, do we? Other than to make cute jokes about it. Or to flap our lips about what the mind thinks of these things.
Given a few thousand more lifetimes, though, we may have decided there might be something there—or here. And given a few more rounds, we may be graced to overhear a conversation such as this thread, and recognize it as the mechanical mind incessantly chewing again on concepts that don’t even exist. And we’ll smile and be grateful for what’s unfolding in our own consciousness, while unimaginable truths are endlessly revealed as we make our way to realms far beyond the existence of karma, or $hit happens. All while living in a physical body.
It never ceases to amaze me that climbers, of all people, who continually set themselves up for spiritual experiences beyond the requisite two, seem to be completely disinterested in looking our self-created experience squarely in its eye. But in life—or death—at this level, there is no luck, no happenstance—it simply doesn’t exist. And when the second experience happens, only one identity will be left. It won’t be our cherished mind.
In the meantime, enjoy the ferris wheel!
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larryhorton
Trad climber
NM
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You’re absolutely right, xCon. But the vast majority of humanity can ignore or deny the suffering for an amazingly long time. Birth and translation are difficult to ignore.
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