Heuristics that almost always work

Re:Heuristics that almost always work by gilgad13 on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @06:35PM (#30266425)

While this is true, in the context of alpine climbing where I first heard this statement, the bold alpinists who die young are very much not beginner-intermediates. I've interpreted this differently than just the "Bathtub Curve"[1] applied to dangerous pursuits.

Rather, there is a certain amount of objective risk in alpine environments, and the more time you put yourself in that environment, especially in locations you aren't familiar with, the greater the chance that something will eventually go wrong.

I'm always surprised by the number of famous alpinists who weren't killed on their progressive, headline-capturing attempts but rather on training attempts and lesser objectives.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve

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Re:Heuristics that almost always work by PaulHoule on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @07:11PM (#30266714)

My wife teaches people to ride horses for a living so we talk about the safety of that.

You hear a lot about people who get seriously injured riding who are often professionals or people who ride competitively at a high level. They are doing dangerous things and doing a lot of them.

We don't think it is that dangerous for people who ride at the level we do, out of maybe 15 years we've had one broken bone.

The other day I noticed that we had acquired a used horse blanket from another barn in the area which is a running joke at our barn because of their bad safety culture. They are a "better" barn than ours in that they are attached to the show circuit at a higher level than the bottom, but we are always hearing about crazy accidents that happen there. When I was learning to ride there they had a confusing situation almost like

https://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=19810217-...

with too many lessons going on at once where I wound up going over a jump by accident after a "near miss" in which I almost did. (I never thought I could go over a jump and survive, as it was I had about two seconds to figure out that I had to trust the horse and hang on and I did alright...)

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Re:Heuristics that almost always work by hailwren on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @08:22PM (#30267383)

Another good allegory is that, in the US Air Force, the flight crews considered most dangerous are those with the highest collective rank. Sure, the young crews are learning but the old ones still think they know it all and have often forgotten critical details.

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Re:Heuristics that almost always work by Aeolun on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @10:45PM (#30268519)

(Example) When you go climbing somewhere, you have like a 40% of getting killed that you can mitigate completely by skill, and an additional 0.1% chance that something goes wrong by some fluke, that you can’t mitigate at all.

Pretty good if you go climbing 10 times a year. Pretty bad if you go 1000 times.

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Re:Heuristics that almost always work by samastur on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @10:49AM (#30274052)

Isn't this somewhat expected?

They wouldn't be famous if they didn't succeed on headline-capturing attempts and there are only so many you can realistically do in life. They are dead however as doing dangerous things often enough will kill a substantial number of practitioners.

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Re:Heuristics that almost always work by bujak300 on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @12:27AM (#30269214)

Need to consider that headline capturing objectives ar a few in a lifetime and training goes on all the time.

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