Sunday, May 13, 2007
Never say "die". I'm once again aboard the SJC and glad to be here.
I' ve been wrestling of late. The parent in me has been espousing the safe and conservative argument with number one son, when it comes to climbing. I was reading on msn.com about relative risks. Taking an aspirin a day, for example, carries the same risk as driving a car - though each, per 100,000 people, amounts to a decimal fraction. But, out of 100,000 climbers, 13000 will die in accidents. That seems high, doesn't it. But, even if the number is off by a degree, it is still a wildly more risky thing to do than most others. Like everyone on the SJC, I have heard most of the arguments for climbing. Trucks and splinters might just as easily take you out, but at the end of the day, it seems that there still remains a quite healthy dose of denial, which the climber employs in order to stay on the rock face. With my son, I've resorted to mathematical projections of risk - your gear, knowledge and skill times the gear, knowledge and skill of a climbing partner times the gear, knowledge and skill of additional partners times varying geography times weather times what I had for breakfast, etc. leaves one with a rather huge bag of uncertainty.
The question becomes - how does one honestly resolve such uncertainties without simply throwing them off a cliff? Hence, the denial position.
Your thoughts...?
I' ve been wrestling of late. The parent in me has been espousing the safe and conservative argument with number one son, when it comes to climbing. I was reading on msn.com about relative risks. Taking an aspirin a day, for example, carries the same risk as driving a car - though each, per 100,000 people, amounts to a decimal fraction. But, out of 100,000 climbers, 13000 will die in accidents. That seems high, doesn't it. But, even if the number is off by a degree, it is still a wildly more risky thing to do than most others. Like everyone on the SJC, I have heard most of the arguments for climbing. Trucks and splinters might just as easily take you out, but at the end of the day, it seems that there still remains a quite healthy dose of denial, which the climber employs in order to stay on the rock face. With my son, I've resorted to mathematical projections of risk - your gear, knowledge and skill times the gear, knowledge and skill of a climbing partner times the gear, knowledge and skill of additional partners times varying geography times weather times what I had for breakfast, etc. leaves one with a rather huge bag of uncertainty.
The question becomes - how does one honestly resolve such uncertainties without simply throwing them off a cliff? Hence, the denial position.
Your thoughts...?
