"We’re talking about real, human-powered flight"
August 31, 2016 9:40 AM Subscribe
Why are so many BASE jumpers dying? The answer [warning, graphic description] is more complicated than "because they are jumping off cliffs".
More on wingsuit jumping, including a comparison to a flying squirrel.
Wingsuit through a ring of fire, through a cave
BASE jumping with a dog.
More on wingsuit jumping, including a comparison to a flying squirrel.
Wingsuit through a ring of fire, through a cave
BASE jumping with a dog.
Is it really much more complicated than that, though? Really?
posted by clockzero at 9:44 AM on August 31, 2016 [37 favorites]
posted by clockzero at 9:44 AM on August 31, 2016 [37 favorites]
I'm surprised it hasn't been applied to special forces insertion yet.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 9:53 AM on August 31, 2016
posted by GallonOfAlan at 9:53 AM on August 31, 2016
Can I get TL;DR, since I'm not really up for the graphic description this early?
posted by asterix at 9:54 AM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by asterix at 9:54 AM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
> The reason so many wingsuit BASE jumpers believe that accidents won’t happen to them is easy to see: that mentality is a prerequisite to taking up the sport. It’s like marriage. No one gets married thinking that it’s going to end, even though the statistics show it might.
Well, that's...one comparison you could draw to make the point, sure.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:55 AM on August 31, 2016 [13 favorites]
Well, that's...one comparison you could draw to make the point, sure.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:55 AM on August 31, 2016 [13 favorites]
The simple truth is that wingsuit BASE jumpers don’t know what they are getting into, don’t know how to practice the sport safely, and don’t even know enough to know how little they know. “
posted by My Dad at 9:55 AM on August 31, 2016 [8 favorites]
posted by My Dad at 9:55 AM on August 31, 2016 [8 favorites]
Quick note of connection: The BASE jumper in the "with a dog" story died in a jump a year after his documentary came out. He was in Yosemite attempting an illegal jump from Taft Point.
posted by supercres at 9:56 AM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by supercres at 9:56 AM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
The TL;DR is that the introduction of wingsuits and the capabilities they introduce has made the sport exponentially riskier.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:57 AM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:57 AM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
The skiing world has been hit hard in recent years, as several of the best free skiers and snowboarders have been lost to avalanches and injury while pushing the limits of their sport. Sebastien Haag, Andrea Zambaldi, JP Auclair, Andreas Fransson, Dave Rosenbarger, and Liz Daley were all considered world-class, conscientious, experienced athletes. To further complicate the issue, many died while working to create “content” in the form of films and Instagram photos for their sponsors.
The article draws a parallel between skiing and wing-jumping in this regard and also points out that many professional extreme-sports people make very little money and may not have health insurance, so there's additional pressure on them to do media-generating things, which may be one reason that it's not just inexperience people dying but skilled professionals.
That said, this particular sport seems so much less safe and to have so much less margin for error even than the more hard core kinds of skiing and cave-diving (and similar) that honestly I just don't think it should be legal. You can be rescued from a skiing mishap but it's hard to rescue someone from a botched flight.
(In re the opening description - it wasn't graphic-bloody-graphic but it was pretty upsetting if you're the kind of person who gets upset on this topic. I was expecting the article to stick to more general descriptions of the "Unlucky McProfessional died by [tragic situation]" rather than "here is my experience of watching this happen live".)
posted by Frowner at 9:58 AM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
We have artificial wave pools for surfing, artificial Alpine slopes in the desert for skiing. Can an inflatable mountainside for various flavors of jumping-off-a-mountain-like-a-crazy-person activities be far behind?
posted by Western Infidels at 10:08 AM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by Western Infidels at 10:08 AM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
It's weird, but somehow I would feel a lot better if the attitude of the jumpers was "we understand that it's likely we'll die, and that's a choice we made" and not "my positive attitude has led me to this crazy place!"
posted by selfnoise at 10:10 AM on August 31, 2016 [36 favorites]
posted by selfnoise at 10:10 AM on August 31, 2016 [36 favorites]
I honestly can't understand why its social acceptable for people with families to engage in extremely unsafe behavior when its for sport.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:12 AM on August 31, 2016 [37 favorites]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:12 AM on August 31, 2016 [37 favorites]
A wingsuit has absolutely zero tolerance or forgiveness. One wrong twitch means instant death. Even Micheal Jordan and Lebron James miss layups. NASA astronauts lose tools on missions they simulated perfectly 100times. Anything that humans do cannot be done perfectly every time.
posted by T.D. Strange at 10:14 AM on August 31, 2016 [44 favorites]
posted by T.D. Strange at 10:14 AM on August 31, 2016 [44 favorites]
The answer [warning, graphic description] is more complicated than "because they are jumping off cliffs".
But it really isn't, even according to the article. The answer seems to be that people have managed to make an incredibly dangerous sport even more dangerous.
posted by Sangermaine at 10:16 AM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
But it really isn't, even according to the article. The answer seems to be that people have managed to make an incredibly dangerous sport even more dangerous.
posted by Sangermaine at 10:16 AM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
Next up: A new craze sweeps wingsuit BASE jumpers: juggling active chainsaws during flight while on fire. Can anyone solve the mystery of why so many of them are dying?
posted by Sangermaine at 10:20 AM on August 31, 2016 [37 favorites]
posted by Sangermaine at 10:20 AM on August 31, 2016 [37 favorites]
I dunno -- not sure if the article's conclusion agrees with the poster's assertion that BASE jumpers are dying is "more complicated" than that they're jumping off cliffs:
After years of narrow misses and seeing friends die who were better and more experienced than he, McNamara concluded, “BASE jumping does not get safer with experience.”
This, after reading in the bulk of the article BASE jumpers claiming reason after reason why others die. They're inexperienced. They're complacent. They've been pushed by sponsorship. By fame.
Really, you take any group of people, kill a random percentage, and the survivors will create narratives around ethics, morals -- whatever -- to explain why the others died. They're finding patterns where none may exist. Here, it seems obvious. Wing-suiting is dangerous. If you do it, there's a good chance you'll die.
posted by touchstone033 at 10:21 AM on August 31, 2016 [47 favorites]
After years of narrow misses and seeing friends die who were better and more experienced than he, McNamara concluded, “BASE jumping does not get safer with experience.”
This, after reading in the bulk of the article BASE jumpers claiming reason after reason why others die. They're inexperienced. They're complacent. They've been pushed by sponsorship. By fame.
Really, you take any group of people, kill a random percentage, and the survivors will create narratives around ethics, morals -- whatever -- to explain why the others died. They're finding patterns where none may exist. Here, it seems obvious. Wing-suiting is dangerous. If you do it, there's a good chance you'll die.
posted by touchstone033 at 10:21 AM on August 31, 2016 [47 favorites]
Count me in as one who's immediate response to the question, Why are so many BASE jumpers dying? is the obvious one.
But then I reflected a bit on a period in the late 1970s, early 1980s when the same sort of crazy statistics started popping up for hang gliders. Interesting that they never went away and now seem to have settled into acceptable measure of danger.
The accident rate from hang glider flying has been dramatically decreased by pilot training. Early hang glider pilots learned their sport through trial and error and gliders were sometimes home-built. Training programs have been developed for today's pilot with emphasis on flight within safe limits, as well as the discipline to cease flying when weather conditions are unfavorable, for example: excess wind or risk cloud suck.
In the UK there is one death per 116,000 flights, a risk comparable to running a marathon or playing football for a year.[13]
posted by philip-random at 10:22 AM on August 31, 2016 [13 favorites]
But then I reflected a bit on a period in the late 1970s, early 1980s when the same sort of crazy statistics started popping up for hang gliders. Interesting that they never went away and now seem to have settled into acceptable measure of danger.
The accident rate from hang glider flying has been dramatically decreased by pilot training. Early hang glider pilots learned their sport through trial and error and gliders were sometimes home-built. Training programs have been developed for today's pilot with emphasis on flight within safe limits, as well as the discipline to cease flying when weather conditions are unfavorable, for example: excess wind or risk cloud suck.
In the UK there is one death per 116,000 flights, a risk comparable to running a marathon or playing football for a year.[13]
posted by philip-random at 10:22 AM on August 31, 2016 [13 favorites]
A college acquaintance of mine just died BASE jumping. I had always noticed her fb profile pictures of her jumping, huge grin, clearly full of joy. And then to hear that she's gone, it's just awful. But not shocking - I mean, to essentially court death with each jump? Seems like the outpouring of grief has been a tethered to the sentiment, "she died doing what she loved." So hard to reconcile, though.
(I don't know, I just feel some raw grief so sorry for the jumble of words.)
posted by boofidies at 10:28 AM on August 31, 2016 [11 favorites]
(I don't know, I just feel some raw grief so sorry for the jumble of words.)
posted by boofidies at 10:28 AM on August 31, 2016 [11 favorites]
"She points out the nearby ledge, or “exit point”, from which she normally jumps, in a suit cut from light paragliding material that gives the wearer the appearance of a flying squirrel.<The Announcer>"Well, you're just in time for what might be a very unhappy ending."</The Announcer>
posted by octobersurprise at 10:28 AM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
Perhaps the most confounding question, though, is why so many people seem to believe that the unthinkable won’t happen to them.
This is not confounding at all. Everyone always believes the unthinkable won't happen to them. That's why every single time there's a mass shooting, the news is full of people saying, "this kind of thing doesn't happen in places like this." Yes, it does. Bad stuff happens everywhere all the time, even to people who aren't strapping themselves into a weird suit and jumping off a cliff.
It's interesting how several of the"experts" they interview blame the victims, citing "ignorance and complacency," rather than acknowledging the entire thing is crazily, unpredictably dangerous. If you don't blame the dead people for dying, though, you can't go back out there, I guess.
posted by something something at 10:34 AM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
This is not confounding at all. Everyone always believes the unthinkable won't happen to them. That's why every single time there's a mass shooting, the news is full of people saying, "this kind of thing doesn't happen in places like this." Yes, it does. Bad stuff happens everywhere all the time, even to people who aren't strapping themselves into a weird suit and jumping off a cliff.
It's interesting how several of the"experts" they interview blame the victims, citing "ignorance and complacency," rather than acknowledging the entire thing is crazily, unpredictably dangerous. If you don't blame the dead people for dying, though, you can't go back out there, I guess.
posted by something something at 10:34 AM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
I'm not sure anyone on earth can truly call themselves experienced. The activity is too new, the time involved in a single jump too long to do *lots* of jumps.
I'd wager I've played more rounds of golf than the number of jumps made by the most experienced jumper on earth. To think that I may have more experience with something than the most experienced person on earth is scary. And I'm an idiot, I make critical errors in judgement all the time, only while golfing you don't end up dead. (unless you underestimated the number of alligators living in the pond by where your ball is.)
posted by Keith Talent at 10:36 AM on August 31, 2016 [7 favorites]
I'd wager I've played more rounds of golf than the number of jumps made by the most experienced jumper on earth. To think that I may have more experience with something than the most experienced person on earth is scary. And I'm an idiot, I make critical errors in judgement all the time, only while golfing you don't end up dead. (unless you underestimated the number of alligators living in the pond by where your ball is.)
posted by Keith Talent at 10:36 AM on August 31, 2016 [7 favorites]
FTA:
"Hollywood-style beard"
Is that something people are familiar with?
posted by josher71 at 10:42 AM on August 31, 2016 [7 favorites]
"Hollywood-style beard"
Is that something people are familiar with?
posted by josher71 at 10:42 AM on August 31, 2016 [7 favorites]
The part of the article about how beginners are killing themselves by stalling their suits seemed really familiar to me from learning to fly airplanes
Sounds like something similar would help for wingsuiters. And maybe it does, the folks who train themselves carefully in skydiving scenarios. There's no recovering from a stall 15' over the ground, no safe way to train to even learn to recognize an incipient wingsuit stall flying low.
But then the scarier part of the article is about how even experienced wingsuiters are dying. There's a concept for airplane pilots called "the killing zone", which is the idea that intermediate-experience pilots are most at risk for accidents. Students have instructors with them. Newly licensed pilots are extra careful. But after ~100 hours pilots get complacent and can get themselves in trouble, the accident rate goes up. This is the "killing zone". Eventually a pilot gets enough hours experience that their accident rate goes down again. It's not clear that this phenomenon is statistically correct, but it does match a certain intuition about people's self-assessment of expertise.
(I'm not sure there's too much analogy between airplane pilots and wingsuit pilots. They're both in the air, sure, but otherwise there's not a lot of similarity in the activities.)
posted by Nelson at 10:45 AM on August 31, 2016 [40 favorites]
By hugging air you feel as if you're creating or catching more lift than you actually are. What ends up happening is your suit can only grab so much air, and it starts to stall. When it starts to stall, it loses lift, starts to drag, and then, splat.When you learn to fly airplanes, one thing you do is stall training. You go up to a safe altitude and you stall the plane. You learn to recover from the stall. Then you learn to fly right on the edge of a stall, to recognize the signs of an impending stall, to learn the reflex reaction of what to do if you're about to stall. (You push the nose down, which feels wrong at first because you're so afraid of going down. But you need more airspeed; pulling up is only going to make it worse.) You are trained over and over again to recognize a stall and either avoid it or else recover from it.
Sounds like something similar would help for wingsuiters. And maybe it does, the folks who train themselves carefully in skydiving scenarios. There's no recovering from a stall 15' over the ground, no safe way to train to even learn to recognize an incipient wingsuit stall flying low.
But then the scarier part of the article is about how even experienced wingsuiters are dying. There's a concept for airplane pilots called "the killing zone", which is the idea that intermediate-experience pilots are most at risk for accidents. Students have instructors with them. Newly licensed pilots are extra careful. But after ~100 hours pilots get complacent and can get themselves in trouble, the accident rate goes up. This is the "killing zone". Eventually a pilot gets enough hours experience that their accident rate goes down again. It's not clear that this phenomenon is statistically correct, but it does match a certain intuition about people's self-assessment of expertise.
(I'm not sure there's too much analogy between airplane pilots and wingsuit pilots. They're both in the air, sure, but otherwise there's not a lot of similarity in the activities.)
posted by Nelson at 10:45 AM on August 31, 2016 [40 favorites]
As an IT guy, let me be the first to say it: "It's a training issue."
Or maybe try rebooting the sport and see if you run into the same problems.
posted by blue_beetle at 10:45 AM on August 31, 2016 [11 favorites]
Or maybe try rebooting the sport and see if you run into the same problems.
posted by blue_beetle at 10:45 AM on August 31, 2016 [11 favorites]
I blame GoPro.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 10:49 AM on August 31, 2016 [16 favorites]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 10:49 AM on August 31, 2016 [16 favorites]
I've lost a couple of friends to extreme sports deaths or extreme injuries. Extreme sports have definitely changed. For a long time, whether it was kayaking or climbing or BASE jumping, the equipment and knowhow were sort of a secret. There was a lot of DIY, a lot of people who only got into a sport because they knew the other people doing it. There was a progression because the communities were small and unafraid to tell someone they were an idiot and to knock it off.
But as more people got involved, particularly in the 90s, I think the population reached a tipping point at just the same time that video equipment got smaller and more accessible and digital editing became something everyone could have access to. More and more people saw really cool stuff not when they saw someone whose capabilities they already knew do it, but when they saw it on video. My own experience was with whitewater kayaking, and I can say that people just jumped into gnarly shit and hoped they washed out the other side. I still remember going on a video shoot on the Green River in NC, I was not nearly good enough to paddle the river, I was just lugging gear, and watching someone run Gorilla for the first time and do it wrong and spin around in the middle of a bad drop. It was terrifying (not unlike what's captured on this video), and just below was the rapid Sunshine where a friend we all knew had been paralyzed from the waist down a few years earlier. The almost accident on our trip was absolutely because of inexperience and the presence of a video camera.
It was just the next winter that the best paddler on that trip died running another creek, when he got stuck under a tree and drowned. One thing that struck me about Pablo's death, and that I still think about, is how much it hurt all of his friends. He was a guy everyone loved, and who loved everyone. One of the really good guys, in his early twenties, and his death just fucked us all up. One of the guys who saw him drowned ended up needing inpatient psych care, another flushed a bunch of his life down the crapper doing stupid shit. There was a real cost. I basically haven't boated since Pablo drowned.
But, ultimately, especially if you've read any mountaineering books, you've got to know that only so much is in one's control in extreme situations. In almost all cases extreme sports are extreme because of the environment (including gravity), and that environment is always beyond your control. There is no taking a break or stepping aside while the other person passes you if you are having an off day.
posted by OmieWise at 10:56 AM on August 31, 2016 [62 favorites]
But as more people got involved, particularly in the 90s, I think the population reached a tipping point at just the same time that video equipment got smaller and more accessible and digital editing became something everyone could have access to. More and more people saw really cool stuff not when they saw someone whose capabilities they already knew do it, but when they saw it on video. My own experience was with whitewater kayaking, and I can say that people just jumped into gnarly shit and hoped they washed out the other side. I still remember going on a video shoot on the Green River in NC, I was not nearly good enough to paddle the river, I was just lugging gear, and watching someone run Gorilla for the first time and do it wrong and spin around in the middle of a bad drop. It was terrifying (not unlike what's captured on this video), and just below was the rapid Sunshine where a friend we all knew had been paralyzed from the waist down a few years earlier. The almost accident on our trip was absolutely because of inexperience and the presence of a video camera.
It was just the next winter that the best paddler on that trip died running another creek, when he got stuck under a tree and drowned. One thing that struck me about Pablo's death, and that I still think about, is how much it hurt all of his friends. He was a guy everyone loved, and who loved everyone. One of the really good guys, in his early twenties, and his death just fucked us all up. One of the guys who saw him drowned ended up needing inpatient psych care, another flushed a bunch of his life down the crapper doing stupid shit. There was a real cost. I basically haven't boated since Pablo drowned.
But, ultimately, especially if you've read any mountaineering books, you've got to know that only so much is in one's control in extreme situations. In almost all cases extreme sports are extreme because of the environment (including gravity), and that environment is always beyond your control. There is no taking a break or stepping aside while the other person passes you if you are having an off day.
posted by OmieWise at 10:56 AM on August 31, 2016 [62 favorites]
Mumbledy mumble and a half decades ago I was a fairly hardcore whitewater paddler. Had an incident one weekend (in which nobody got hurt, just scared), but I pretty much hung up the kayak and switched to an open canoe (way harder to paddle, so more challenge on less dangerous water). Then I moved to California, far away from the good water, and forgot about for a decade or so.
Thought it'd be cool to go get back in touch with the people I knew back then, so started surfing the web, and found all of these people mentioned in accident reports. None of those friends had died, but plenty of them had been there when others had.
(Aside to OmieWise: like you, I never ran the Green, but most of these friends had)
So I kind of feel like this is what 20-somethings do, in our search for meaning we go off and see where our limits are. And either we find out where those limits are, or we decide that we no longer need to know. Because if I'm seeking my limits in a dangerous physical sport, finding that limit means dying.
posted by straw at 10:59 AM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
Thought it'd be cool to go get back in touch with the people I knew back then, so started surfing the web, and found all of these people mentioned in accident reports. None of those friends had died, but plenty of them had been there when others had.
(Aside to OmieWise: like you, I never ran the Green, but most of these friends had)
So I kind of feel like this is what 20-somethings do, in our search for meaning we go off and see where our limits are. And either we find out where those limits are, or we decide that we no longer need to know. Because if I'm seeking my limits in a dangerous physical sport, finding that limit means dying.
posted by straw at 10:59 AM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
The BASE jumper in the "with a dog" story died in a jump a year after his documentary came out.
yeah but is the dog ok? this is pretty much all i care about.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:00 AM on August 31, 2016 [33 favorites]
yeah but is the dog ok? this is pretty much all i care about.
posted by poffin boffin at 11:00 AM on August 31, 2016 [33 favorites]
I honestly can't understand why its social acceptable for people with families to engage in extremely unsafe behavior when its for sport.
If we can codify this and get it written down, then whenever teens complain about uncool parents, parents everywhere can point to the requirements and blame the teens. It won't make anything any better, but it'll add another silly spoke to the endlessly turning wheel of life :)
posted by anonymisc at 11:01 AM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
If we can codify this and get it written down, then whenever teens complain about uncool parents, parents everywhere can point to the requirements and blame the teens. It won't make anything any better, but it'll add another silly spoke to the endlessly turning wheel of life :)
posted by anonymisc at 11:01 AM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
One interesting bit from the article is that really experienced--to the extent there is such a thing--wingsuiters are dying on not-especially-difficult jumps. They get complacent.
posted by persona au gratin at 11:03 AM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by persona au gratin at 11:03 AM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
posted by entropicamericana at 11:04 AM on August 31, 2016 [14 favorites]
posted by entropicamericana at 11:04 AM on August 31, 2016 [14 favorites]
Just out of curiosity I checked Amazon for wingsuits. Thankfully that is one thing it doesn't carry.
posted by persona au gratin at 11:04 AM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by persona au gratin at 11:04 AM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
The sport seems like some deeply morbid version of the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. "Experienced" is the bullseye you paint around the people who hit the ground and lived. Whatever precautions they take after they decide they're going to jump off a cliff are astrology dressed up in a physics costume.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 11:05 AM on August 31, 2016 [8 favorites]
posted by lefty lucky cat at 11:05 AM on August 31, 2016 [8 favorites]
The skiing world has been hit hard in recent years, as several of the best free skiers and snowboarders have been lost to avalanches....JP Auclair [avalanche, Patagonia, September 29, 2014]
posted by Flashman at 11:06 AM on August 31, 2016
posted by Flashman at 11:06 AM on August 31, 2016
I blame humanity's innate need to seek thrills and attract mates.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:13 AM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:13 AM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
Really, you take any group of people, kill a random percentage, and the survivors will create narratives
This is so true. You can see this whenever a cyclist gets splattered by a car -- other cyclists will race to find out which magic totem the victim was missing that can be safely assigned the full blame.
He wasn't wearing a high-vis vest? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I wear a high-vis vest.
He was riding at 6:30 PM? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I never ride when the sun is within 10 degrees of the horizon.
He wasn't using side lighting? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I use side lighting.
He was signalling with the 90 degree arm thing? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I signal with straight arms.
posted by 0xFCAF at 11:17 AM on August 31, 2016 [40 favorites]
This is so true. You can see this whenever a cyclist gets splattered by a car -- other cyclists will race to find out which magic totem the victim was missing that can be safely assigned the full blame.
He wasn't wearing a high-vis vest? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I wear a high-vis vest.
He was riding at 6:30 PM? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I never ride when the sun is within 10 degrees of the horizon.
He wasn't using side lighting? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I use side lighting.
He was signalling with the 90 degree arm thing? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I signal with straight arms.
posted by 0xFCAF at 11:17 AM on August 31, 2016 [40 favorites]
People who aren't addicted to adrenaline don't repeatedly hurl themselves off of mountains.
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:18 AM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by Faint of Butt at 11:18 AM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
Wow, OmieWise. I had no idea that sort of kayaking was a thing. I'm sorry for your loss.
posted by persona au gratin at 11:19 AM on August 31, 2016
posted by persona au gratin at 11:19 AM on August 31, 2016
I honestly can't understand why its social acceptable for people with families to engage in extremely unsafe behavior when its for sport...
I agree with you. I imagine the rationale they'd give is something along the lines of that they're leading by example, instilling values of fearlessness, love of the outdoors, creativity, and the like.
Have these people never watched a nature documentary? I don't recall 'fearlessness' being among the life lessons ever imparted by a mama bear to her cubs:
"No, little ones. Don't run and hide from the strange, scary sound. Go out and explore! Be bold! Be adventurous! That's the secret to a long and prosperous life in the wilderness."
posted by Atom Eyes at 11:26 AM on August 31, 2016 [12 favorites]
I agree with you. I imagine the rationale they'd give is something along the lines of that they're leading by example, instilling values of fearlessness, love of the outdoors, creativity, and the like.
Have these people never watched a nature documentary? I don't recall 'fearlessness' being among the life lessons ever imparted by a mama bear to her cubs:
"No, little ones. Don't run and hide from the strange, scary sound. Go out and explore! Be bold! Be adventurous! That's the secret to a long and prosperous life in the wilderness."
posted by Atom Eyes at 11:26 AM on August 31, 2016 [12 favorites]
Table top + Towel = Fail.
Ladder + Bed sheet = Fail.
Roof + Umbrella = Fail.
Tall cliff + Fancy outfit = Fail.
People should be figuring this stuff out by now.
posted by buzzman at 11:27 AM on August 31, 2016 [6 favorites]
Ladder + Bed sheet = Fail.
Roof + Umbrella = Fail.
Tall cliff + Fancy outfit = Fail.
People should be figuring this stuff out by now.
posted by buzzman at 11:27 AM on August 31, 2016 [6 favorites]
I did an impromptu waterfall climb at the very end of my recent hike with my Dad in New Hampshire's Presidential range. There was this beautiful mountain waterfall woth no-one else around, I was in a particularly adventurous mindset after having successfully hiked across a dozen or so mountains, and it was just so tempting to find out what was at the top of the falls and how high up I could get before I ran into an obstacle I couldn't overcome. I also had a GoPro, so of course I strapped it onto my head before I started up.
Dad had a sore leg and just isn't into that kind of thing to the extent that I am, so he stayed down below. I was quickly out of his sight, once I got over the first level of the falls and started exploring the cascades further up. I was having a fantastic time. It was an exhilerating, breathtaking, gorgeous experience—the perfect capstone for an incredible hike. And I had the GoPro to document it, so that I could show my friends back home how beautiful it all was, and what a brave and adventurous soul I am.
Eventually, I got to the end of the road. I reached a waterfall that was higher than the rest and had no obvious route up (I've since returned and discovered a way, but that's a different story) and I could feel that I was starting to tire, so I figured I should go back down before I found myself in a situation that I couldn't get out of.
That's when I realized that if something went wrong, I was about to provide my Dad with high-definition, first-person footage of his own son falling off a waterfall to his death. I turned the GoPro off at that point, and climbed back down via an easier route.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:28 AM on August 31, 2016 [23 favorites]
Dad had a sore leg and just isn't into that kind of thing to the extent that I am, so he stayed down below. I was quickly out of his sight, once I got over the first level of the falls and started exploring the cascades further up. I was having a fantastic time. It was an exhilerating, breathtaking, gorgeous experience—the perfect capstone for an incredible hike. And I had the GoPro to document it, so that I could show my friends back home how beautiful it all was, and what a brave and adventurous soul I am.
Eventually, I got to the end of the road. I reached a waterfall that was higher than the rest and had no obvious route up (I've since returned and discovered a way, but that's a different story) and I could feel that I was starting to tire, so I figured I should go back down before I found myself in a situation that I couldn't get out of.
That's when I realized that if something went wrong, I was about to provide my Dad with high-definition, first-person footage of his own son falling off a waterfall to his death. I turned the GoPro off at that point, and climbed back down via an easier route.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 11:28 AM on August 31, 2016 [23 favorites]
This is so true. You can see this whenever a cyclist gets splattered by a car -- other cyclists will race to find out which magic totem the victim was missing that can be safely assigned the full blame.
He wasn't wearing a high-vis vest? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I wear a high-vis vest.
He was riding at 6:30 PM? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I never ride when the sun is within 10 degrees of the horizon.
He wasn't using side lighting? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I use side lighting.
He was signalling with the 90 degree arm thing? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I signal with straight arms.
At the risk of a thread digression, I think that this is a powerful misread. At least according to my experience, when a cyclist gets hit, other cyclists know that it can be them - we so rarely blame the victim because we have all had near-misses due to distracted drivers, dangerous and negligent drivers, and straight-up unsafe street design.
Things that can be controlled - though are outside of our immediate control.
I wonder if the issue with BASE/wingsuiting is a misread of what is within and without one's control. If it's part of the fundamental attribution error - you know - "what happens to me is an accident - what happens to other people is their fault."
posted by entropone at 11:33 AM on August 31, 2016 [15 favorites]
He wasn't wearing a high-vis vest? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I wear a high-vis vest.
He was riding at 6:30 PM? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I never ride when the sun is within 10 degrees of the horizon.
He wasn't using side lighting? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I use side lighting.
He was signalling with the 90 degree arm thing? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I signal with straight arms.
At the risk of a thread digression, I think that this is a powerful misread. At least according to my experience, when a cyclist gets hit, other cyclists know that it can be them - we so rarely blame the victim because we have all had near-misses due to distracted drivers, dangerous and negligent drivers, and straight-up unsafe street design.
Things that can be controlled - though are outside of our immediate control.
I wonder if the issue with BASE/wingsuiting is a misread of what is within and without one's control. If it's part of the fundamental attribution error - you know - "what happens to me is an accident - what happens to other people is their fault."
posted by entropone at 11:33 AM on August 31, 2016 [15 favorites]
"Hollywood-style beard" Is that something people are familiar with?
Uh, Nicole Kidman?
posted by octobersurprise at 11:36 AM on August 31, 2016 [87 favorites]
Uh, Nicole Kidman?
posted by octobersurprise at 11:36 AM on August 31, 2016 [87 favorites]
Just out of curiosity I checked Amazon for wingsuits. Thankfully that is one thing it doesn't carry.
Nah for something like that you gotta look in the ACME catalog.
posted by atoxyl at 12:15 PM on August 31, 2016 [22 favorites]
Nah for something like that you gotta look in the ACME catalog.
posted by atoxyl at 12:15 PM on August 31, 2016 [22 favorites]
The article mentions research by Ian McCammon on six "heuristic traps" that might lead people (even and sometimes especially experienced people) into danger, but unfortunately it doesn't explain them at all. Here's a super-interesting explanation that applies the concept to avalanche accidents -- Heuristic Traps: A Conceptual Framework. The research indicates that "...rules of thumb become 'heuristic traps' when they are applied unconsciously to situations for which they are inappropriate. " I feel like these are worth reading for anyone who ever has to make decisions about risk, and they may well cast some light onto the questions in the article (especially the question of why experts, not just newbies, have been dying). The six traps are as follows:
Familiarity: "...prior experience can lead us to take chances we might not take in unfamiliar territory." This has more of an effect on people with lots of experience.
Consistency: "...there was a significant increase in the level of risk taken by parties who, for one reason or another, were committed to a particular course of action." Larger groups are apparently more susceptible.
Acceptance: "The desire to be noticed and accepted has a powerful influence on human behaviour." The gender composition of the group may influence this factor, and less experienced groups are more prone to taking risks because of it.
Expert Halo: "...groups without a leader exposed themselves to less risk than those with clear leadership." Larger groups are more likely to take risks when there is a perceived leader.
Social Facilitation: the urge to either show off or hide your lack of experience in front of others. Experienced folks may take bigger risks when they have an audience, while inexperienced folks may avoid risk in the same situation.
Scarcity: "...parties who saw another group headed for the same place took significantly higher risks than if the slope had already been skied."
posted by ourobouros at 12:17 PM on August 31, 2016 [39 favorites]
Familiarity: "...prior experience can lead us to take chances we might not take in unfamiliar territory." This has more of an effect on people with lots of experience.
Consistency: "...there was a significant increase in the level of risk taken by parties who, for one reason or another, were committed to a particular course of action." Larger groups are apparently more susceptible.
Acceptance: "The desire to be noticed and accepted has a powerful influence on human behaviour." The gender composition of the group may influence this factor, and less experienced groups are more prone to taking risks because of it.
Expert Halo: "...groups without a leader exposed themselves to less risk than those with clear leadership." Larger groups are more likely to take risks when there is a perceived leader.
Social Facilitation: the urge to either show off or hide your lack of experience in front of others. Experienced folks may take bigger risks when they have an audience, while inexperienced folks may avoid risk in the same situation.
Scarcity: "...parties who saw another group headed for the same place took significantly higher risks than if the slope had already been skied."
posted by ourobouros at 12:17 PM on August 31, 2016 [39 favorites]
Seriously? It's amazing a lot more _don't_ die. Sorry, folks, but jumping from very high places and assuming you won't come to a bad end is a fool's folly.
posted by dbiedny at 12:17 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by dbiedny at 12:17 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
The answer is pretty clear:
If you really want to risk death and not be selfish prick, there's plenty of war torn, poverty stricken places where relief organizations could use an extra set of hands. No, it's not really thrilling and you can't go around with a GofuckingPro attached to your head while high-fivin' your bros, but on the minor plus side, you actually help other human beings.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:20 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
“The simplest answer is wingsuits,” says Webb. “Right now, wingsuit BASE jumping is, globally, the hottest thing going for the impressionable, 18- to 35-year-old single-male demographic.”So basically if you're well to do dude looking to court death for thrills, then it's recommended that you think three times before choosing wingsuit BASE jumping. Because the stats aren't good bruh.
If you really want to risk death and not be selfish prick, there's plenty of war torn, poverty stricken places where relief organizations could use an extra set of hands. No, it's not really thrilling and you can't go around with a GofuckingPro attached to your head while high-fivin' your bros, but on the minor plus side, you actually help other human beings.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 12:20 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
This thread has a fair number of people who've experienced personal loss and have laudably shared their experiences and maybe slamdunk jokes and finger-wagging are not so nice.
posted by selfnoise at 12:25 PM on August 31, 2016 [27 favorites]
posted by selfnoise at 12:25 PM on August 31, 2016 [27 favorites]
Seriously? It's amazing a lot more _don't_ die. Sorry, folks, but jumping from very high places and assuming you won't come to a bad end is a fool's folly.
Well I was also going to say - wasn't it always considered a very dangerous activity? But then I read the article and the point is that there's been a recent spike in deaths above that baseline, which appears to be connected to the rising popularity of wingsuits. Though in my skimming of the article I saw mostly count stats, not rate stats, so there could also be an increase in popularity in general connected to its visibility through online videos (I am aware that the article makes a point of focusing on recent deaths of longtime participants.)
posted by atoxyl at 12:25 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
Well I was also going to say - wasn't it always considered a very dangerous activity? But then I read the article and the point is that there's been a recent spike in deaths above that baseline, which appears to be connected to the rising popularity of wingsuits. Though in my skimming of the article I saw mostly count stats, not rate stats, so there could also be an increase in popularity in general connected to its visibility through online videos (I am aware that the article makes a point of focusing on recent deaths of longtime participants.)
posted by atoxyl at 12:25 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
You can jump from high places and assume you won't come to a bad end, I think. That's an engineering problem. When you want to jump from high places, do visually-impressive stunts along the way, and then have the whole thing be manually controlled? That's when you have to assume this is going to go badly. If they were just jumping out of planes over flat areas in good weather, that wouldn't be a problem--skydiving is pretty safe. Even BASE jumping without wingsuits isn't this dangerous. This is just a bridge too far. They're introducing more variables than the human brain and body are actually designed to deal with, and if they discover that something can be done safely, then the next time they cut it closer. The reason this is killing people seems to be, very simply, because the versions that don't kill people aren't exciting enough for the people who keep getting killed.
It seems like the more significant question to me is: If we have a large number of people who are effectively attempting suicide on a regular basis, and they claim not to be suicidal, are they lying? Do they really just believe that wingsuits are safer than they are--or is there more to it than that?
Lemmings don't literally follow each other off cliffs, but it seems like some segment of the human population actually does, and that seems somewhat worrisome to me. I don't think they're just idiots. I lost a friend to an opiate overdose this year, and I don't think he was an idiot, either, but he was doing a dangerous thing in the attempt to deal with a brain and a life that had never quite functioned as intended. I can't help but see some parallels.
posted by Sequence at 12:40 PM on August 31, 2016 [16 favorites]
It seems like the more significant question to me is: If we have a large number of people who are effectively attempting suicide on a regular basis, and they claim not to be suicidal, are they lying? Do they really just believe that wingsuits are safer than they are--or is there more to it than that?
Lemmings don't literally follow each other off cliffs, but it seems like some segment of the human population actually does, and that seems somewhat worrisome to me. I don't think they're just idiots. I lost a friend to an opiate overdose this year, and I don't think he was an idiot, either, but he was doing a dangerous thing in the attempt to deal with a brain and a life that had never quite functioned as intended. I can't help but see some parallels.
posted by Sequence at 12:40 PM on August 31, 2016 [16 favorites]
300 deaths since they started tracking the sport, 260 of which were in the last 16 years, just doesn't seem terribly extreme. Sure, every death is a tragedy, but the best statistics I can find indicate we're looking at one wingsuit death for every 500-1000 wingsuit jumps, which while higher than most other activities, leads me to believe we're seeing what allowing people the freedom to do whatever they want with their lives. So long as they're aware of the risks -- and I can't see how anyone who's seen even a single wingsuit jump video wouldn't be aware this is a risky activity -- I'm not sure what the problem is here. Now, if they want to make this some sort of sanctioned, regulated activity sure, go for it, sounds like some folk need to be reigned in before they get killed, but ultimately life itself is fatal, with a 100% chance of death.
posted by Blackanvil at 12:46 PM on August 31, 2016 [10 favorites]
posted by Blackanvil at 12:46 PM on August 31, 2016 [10 favorites]
Blackanvil has a good point. Are people misjudging the risk, or are they judging it accurately but doing it anyway because flying in a wingsuit looks totally awesome? I mean, I would definitely try this sport and it definitely looks hella risky. When you watch the videos, it looks like it would be very easy to get yourself killed by making even the tiniest mistake, but I would absolutely give it a shot because it looks fucking incredible! I mean, flying like a bird under one's own power has been a dream of humanity since forever and this is the closest thing yet.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 12:59 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 12:59 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
I'm not sure anyone on earth can truly call themselves experienced. The activity is too new, the time involved in a single jump too long to do *lots* of jumps.
And wingsuits in particular have only been around for... ~15 years? Well-known for the last 5-10? Between that and this
The accident rate from hang glider flying has been dramatically decreased by pilot training. Early hang glider pilots learned their sport through trial and error and gliders were sometimes home-built. Training programs have been developed for today's pilot with emphasis on flight within safe limits, as well as the discipline to cease flying when weather conditions are unfavorable, for example: excess wind or risk cloud suck.
I'm not sure it's established whether it's really something nobody can ever know how to do (relatively) "safely" versus something nobody yet actually can.
posted by atoxyl at 1:03 PM on August 31, 2016
And wingsuits in particular have only been around for... ~15 years? Well-known for the last 5-10? Between that and this
The accident rate from hang glider flying has been dramatically decreased by pilot training. Early hang glider pilots learned their sport through trial and error and gliders were sometimes home-built. Training programs have been developed for today's pilot with emphasis on flight within safe limits, as well as the discipline to cease flying when weather conditions are unfavorable, for example: excess wind or risk cloud suck.
I'm not sure it's established whether it's really something nobody can ever know how to do (relatively) "safely" versus something nobody yet actually can.
posted by atoxyl at 1:03 PM on August 31, 2016
I would do it too. I would also probably pee myself.
posted by AFABulous at 1:03 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by AFABulous at 1:03 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
300 deaths since they started tracking the sport, 260 of which were in the last 16 years, just doesn't seem terribly extreme.
It's not the number, it's the rate. Per wikipedia:
BASE jumping as of 2006 has an overall fatality rate estimated at about one fatality per sixty participants.[43] A study of 20,850 BASE jumps from the same site (the Kjerag Massif in Norway) reported 9 fatalities over the 11-year period from 1995 to 2005, or 1 in every 2,317 jumps.[44][45] However, at that site, 1 in every 254 jumps over that period resulted in a nonfatal accident.[44] BASE jumping is one of the most dangerous recreational activities in the world, with a fatality and injury rate 43 times as high as parachuting from a plane.[44][45]
posted by entropone at 1:10 PM on August 31, 2016 [8 favorites]
It's not the number, it's the rate. Per wikipedia:
BASE jumping as of 2006 has an overall fatality rate estimated at about one fatality per sixty participants.[43] A study of 20,850 BASE jumps from the same site (the Kjerag Massif in Norway) reported 9 fatalities over the 11-year period from 1995 to 2005, or 1 in every 2,317 jumps.[44][45] However, at that site, 1 in every 254 jumps over that period resulted in a nonfatal accident.[44] BASE jumping is one of the most dangerous recreational activities in the world, with a fatality and injury rate 43 times as high as parachuting from a plane.[44][45]
posted by entropone at 1:10 PM on August 31, 2016 [8 favorites]
When you watch the videos, it looks like it would be very easy to get yourself killed by making even the tiniest mistake, but I would absolutely give it a shot because it looks fucking incredible.
One commonality between metafilter and the Trump campaign: both have, this year, introduced me to people whose subjectivities are so completely different from mine that one of us might as well be an alien dwelling on the frozen-methane slopes of a planet in another galaxy.
When I imagine doing something so amazingly risky, I can't even focus on any fun aspect, because I immediately flash on how horribly traumatizing it was to accidentally watch one of those death videos, how it must feel to know someone whose death you watch, how scary the last flails would be before the crash, the clear indication in the first article that the guy who crashed took a while to die, times when I have fucked my body up doing activities I'm actually competent at....my brain immediately goes to "how would that even work", there's no delay for "if it worked it would be really fun". I fully believe that people are capable of thinking about this without going through those thoughts first, but it is an utterly foreign way of experiencing the world.
I tend to feel that unless we're going full luxury anarchism, it's legit to forbid activities even if people understand the risk, or think they understand the risk - with a large part of the risk being the harm that is done to other people who didn't want anyone to go wingsuit jumping. There's an argument against forbidding even risky behaviors if they are addictive, strongly economically or socially incentivized, etc, or if the ban would cause more harm via law enforcement/prison than the activity, but I don't think that extends to the idea that the state has zero responsibility to protect us from our impulses.
If there really is an effective way to train/regulate and lower the death count, sure, that sounds persuasive. But one is talking about banning a fringe activity with little historical or cultural significance and a high death rate, so it seems like the harm/benefit ratio is, to me, reasonable if one supports banning anything.
posted by Frowner at 1:11 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
One commonality between metafilter and the Trump campaign: both have, this year, introduced me to people whose subjectivities are so completely different from mine that one of us might as well be an alien dwelling on the frozen-methane slopes of a planet in another galaxy.
When I imagine doing something so amazingly risky, I can't even focus on any fun aspect, because I immediately flash on how horribly traumatizing it was to accidentally watch one of those death videos, how it must feel to know someone whose death you watch, how scary the last flails would be before the crash, the clear indication in the first article that the guy who crashed took a while to die, times when I have fucked my body up doing activities I'm actually competent at....my brain immediately goes to "how would that even work", there's no delay for "if it worked it would be really fun". I fully believe that people are capable of thinking about this without going through those thoughts first, but it is an utterly foreign way of experiencing the world.
I tend to feel that unless we're going full luxury anarchism, it's legit to forbid activities even if people understand the risk, or think they understand the risk - with a large part of the risk being the harm that is done to other people who didn't want anyone to go wingsuit jumping. There's an argument against forbidding even risky behaviors if they are addictive, strongly economically or socially incentivized, etc, or if the ban would cause more harm via law enforcement/prison than the activity, but I don't think that extends to the idea that the state has zero responsibility to protect us from our impulses.
If there really is an effective way to train/regulate and lower the death count, sure, that sounds persuasive. But one is talking about banning a fringe activity with little historical or cultural significance and a high death rate, so it seems like the harm/benefit ratio is, to me, reasonable if one supports banning anything.
posted by Frowner at 1:11 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
More cowbell :(
posted by Ogre Lawless at 1:13 PM on August 31, 2016
posted by Ogre Lawless at 1:13 PM on August 31, 2016
I think the point is wingsuits are something that can be used relatively safely if jumping out of a plane, but not combined with the already insanely risky activity of BASE jumping.
It's not even regular BASE jumping, there's a escalating competition to get as close to immovable obstacles as possible for the YouTube views. Inherent risk of skydiving + low starting point of a BASE jump + trying to get as close to a tree/building/rockwall/ground without hitting it, at some point the risks pile up to the point where death is just a matter of time.
posted by T.D. Strange at 1:14 PM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
It's not even regular BASE jumping, there's a escalating competition to get as close to immovable obstacles as possible for the YouTube views. Inherent risk of skydiving + low starting point of a BASE jump + trying to get as close to a tree/building/rockwall/ground without hitting it, at some point the risks pile up to the point where death is just a matter of time.
posted by T.D. Strange at 1:14 PM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
A fatality rate of 1 in 1000 is absolutely unthinkable in just about any other activity. Driving fatalities are around 1.3 per 100 million miles with an average trip length of about six miles; so that's about one fatality for every 12.8 million trips. Airplane accidents are about 3 per million departures (fatalities significantly less than that, wiki thinks it's about 117 per billion journeys).
posted by backseatpilot at 1:15 PM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by backseatpilot at 1:15 PM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
If there really is an effective way to train/regulate and lower the death count, sure, that sounds persuasive. But one is talking about banning a fringe activity with little historical or cultural significance and a high death rate, so it seems like the harm/benefit ratio is, to me, reasonable if one supports banning anything.
Ban how? Jumping off (or climbing up to jump off) the... things BASE jumpers jump off is already frequently illegal as far as I know- for reasonably reasonable reasons - but people do it anyway. If anything that's part of the thrill for the hardcore. Ban selling wingsuits? Not so easy in this day and age. It seems like the better approach is to regulate the safer variants - out of a plane, controlled environment - and publicize the risks of the crazy variants, so normal people can get their thrill and go home. Meanwhile the craziest jumpers will probably keep sneaking onto high places and jumping off until they decide to hang it up or they die.
posted by atoxyl at 1:22 PM on August 31, 2016
Ban how? Jumping off (or climbing up to jump off) the... things BASE jumpers jump off is already frequently illegal as far as I know- for reasonably reasonable reasons - but people do it anyway. If anything that's part of the thrill for the hardcore. Ban selling wingsuits? Not so easy in this day and age. It seems like the better approach is to regulate the safer variants - out of a plane, controlled environment - and publicize the risks of the crazy variants, so normal people can get their thrill and go home. Meanwhile the craziest jumpers will probably keep sneaking onto high places and jumping off until they decide to hang it up or they die.
posted by atoxyl at 1:22 PM on August 31, 2016
>>This is so true. You can see this whenever a cyclist gets splattered by a car -- other cyclists will race to find out which magic totem the victim was missing that can be safely assigned the full blame.
>>He wasn't wearing a high-vis vest? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I wear a high-vis vest.
>>He was riding at 6:30 PM? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I never ride when the sun is within 10 degrees of the horizon.
>>He wasn't using side lighting? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I use side lighting.
>>He was signalling with the 90 degree arm thing? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I signal with straight arms.
At the risk of a thread digression, I think that this is a powerful misread.
It is not. This is a bog-standard reaction of almost every adventure-community to almost every accident.
I was in a bad accident, wrote an excruciatingly detailed report wherein I talked a bunch about the fallibility of the human brain, as that was the cause of my accident (not complacency -- just inattention). We're human: we make mistakes, our attention is imperfect, we forget to check the rearview that 8,489th time. Deaths every day, for utterly stupid reasons.
And the comments poured in, "it was about to rain, so they must have been rushing (won't happen to me)". "Do the following standard safety thing! (won't happen to me)."
Denying the possibility that this horrible thing really can happen to you, even if you buckle your seatbelt, is a universal part of life. And death.
posted by Dashy at 1:23 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
>>He wasn't wearing a high-vis vest? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I wear a high-vis vest.
>>He was riding at 6:30 PM? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I never ride when the sun is within 10 degrees of the horizon.
>>He wasn't using side lighting? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I use side lighting.
>>He was signalling with the 90 degree arm thing? Oh, wouldn't have happened to me, I signal with straight arms.
At the risk of a thread digression, I think that this is a powerful misread.
It is not. This is a bog-standard reaction of almost every adventure-community to almost every accident.
I was in a bad accident, wrote an excruciatingly detailed report wherein I talked a bunch about the fallibility of the human brain, as that was the cause of my accident (not complacency -- just inattention). We're human: we make mistakes, our attention is imperfect, we forget to check the rearview that 8,489th time. Deaths every day, for utterly stupid reasons.
And the comments poured in, "it was about to rain, so they must have been rushing (won't happen to me)". "Do the following standard safety thing! (won't happen to me)."
Denying the possibility that this horrible thing really can happen to you, even if you buckle your seatbelt, is a universal part of life. And death.
posted by Dashy at 1:23 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
Are people misjudging the risk, or are they judging it accurately but doing it anyway because flying in a wingsuit looks totally awesome?
That's my thought. I totally get how someone would be willing to risk splattification in order to be able to do the next best thing to flying, which is one of the more popular superpowers. And I've got acrophobia.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:27 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
That's my thought. I totally get how someone would be willing to risk splattification in order to be able to do the next best thing to flying, which is one of the more popular superpowers. And I've got acrophobia.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:27 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
According to TFA, wingsuiting from a plane in the way one normally skydives isn't particularly dangerous. But you're not whizzing close to the ground that way.
posted by persona au gratin at 1:27 PM on August 31, 2016
posted by persona au gratin at 1:27 PM on August 31, 2016
When you learn to fly airplanes, one thing you do is stall training. You go up to a safe altitude
Kinda the essence of the issue, there is just not enough altitude when jumping off anything, to recover from a stall "you go faster" and splat.
posted by sammyo at 1:29 PM on August 31, 2016
Kinda the essence of the issue, there is just not enough altitude when jumping off anything, to recover from a stall "you go faster" and splat.
posted by sammyo at 1:29 PM on August 31, 2016
You can see this whenever a cyclist gets [hit] by a car -- other cyclists will race to find out which magic totem the victim was missing that can be safely assigned the full blame
Like BASE jumping, cycling can be made much safer by choosing only to do it in The Netherlands.
posted by ambrosen at 1:32 PM on August 31, 2016 [14 favorites]
Like BASE jumping, cycling can be made much safer by choosing only to do it in The Netherlands.
posted by ambrosen at 1:32 PM on August 31, 2016 [14 favorites]
Ban how? Jumping off (or climbing up to jump off) the... things BASE jumpers jump off is already frequently illegal as far as I know- for reasonably reasonable reasons - but people do it anyway.
I mean in most wilderness parks in the U.S. (all national parks I think) it's already banned outright. On private property it's trespassing. It's the sort of thing where you'll get fined a couple grand, I believe, probably not go to jail, but I'm pretty sure that anything but the briefest incarceration would be doing as much harm as good so - not sure what law enforcement is going to solve here.
(Except I suppose you could increase ranger patrols while keeping penalties low - make sure there's somebody actually there to say "sorry, you're not allowed to do that and if you don't get out of here I'm confiscating your equipment." That's not necessarily unfair but the resources are probably not there and it's a marginal issue to society anyway.)
posted by atoxyl at 1:37 PM on August 31, 2016
I mean in most wilderness parks in the U.S. (all national parks I think) it's already banned outright. On private property it's trespassing. It's the sort of thing where you'll get fined a couple grand, I believe, probably not go to jail, but I'm pretty sure that anything but the briefest incarceration would be doing as much harm as good so - not sure what law enforcement is going to solve here.
(Except I suppose you could increase ranger patrols while keeping penalties low - make sure there's somebody actually there to say "sorry, you're not allowed to do that and if you don't get out of here I'm confiscating your equipment." That's not necessarily unfair but the resources are probably not there and it's a marginal issue to society anyway.)
posted by atoxyl at 1:37 PM on August 31, 2016
I really enjoy watching wing suit videos, they're beautiful and amazing. But out of subconscious self-preservation or something I never looked more deeply into the sport than occasionally watching some YouTube videos. I had myself convinced that these folks are experts, no-one actually ever dies doing this etc. etc.
But this post has made it very clear that's not the case and I now I don't think I'll be able to watch anymore.
posted by Jimbob at 1:38 PM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
But this post has made it very clear that's not the case and I now I don't think I'll be able to watch anymore.
posted by Jimbob at 1:38 PM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
I remember the first wingsuit BASE video I saw. Reaction: that looks like a really fun way to die, I'll pass. And I've only watched a handful since, because they are all a single twitch away from becoming a snuff video and that completely negates my enjoyment.
posted by BungaDunga at 1:41 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by BungaDunga at 1:41 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
That's my thought. I totally get how someone would be willing to risk splattification in order to be able to do the next best thing to flying
I think people are still underestimating the risk. I don't think that people who do this are suicidal, I think they mostly feel like they are in control of something they are not in control of. Sure, they realize it's dangerous, but they think they can handle it and that they aren't really risking death. Not really.
posted by OmieWise at 1:45 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
I think people are still underestimating the risk. I don't think that people who do this are suicidal, I think they mostly feel like they are in control of something they are not in control of. Sure, they realize it's dangerous, but they think they can handle it and that they aren't really risking death. Not really.
posted by OmieWise at 1:45 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
If you read "The Right Stuff" you will find a passage about how test pilots and military pilots dealt with the frequent fatalities within their cohort during their peace time careers in the 50's and 60's. Basically it was the pilots fault, regardless of whether or not it really was. When I discovered climbing in the late 70's it didn't take too long before I realized that the same cultural survival mechanism attended there as well. I will assert that it is human nature to explain away statistical danger and to cling to explanations that soothe doubt and enhance feelings of control.
The reality, as far as I am concerned, is that it is completely not "worth" the risk to engage in dangerous sports but we are humans and just terrible at evaluating risk/reward. In climbing the notion that "he died doing what he loved" always seemed like total BS to me. If I had been seriously messed up or killed I would never have called it a fair trade, it is only by living in ignorance or denial that it seems like it is. And yet, and yet...when I was climbing it was the only thing that made any sense at all in whole entire world.
To answer the "why are so many dying?" question it seems pretty obvious that it is a very dangerous activity that is increasingly popular and easy to take up. Sort of like opiates.
posted by Pembquist at 1:57 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
The reality, as far as I am concerned, is that it is completely not "worth" the risk to engage in dangerous sports but we are humans and just terrible at evaluating risk/reward. In climbing the notion that "he died doing what he loved" always seemed like total BS to me. If I had been seriously messed up or killed I would never have called it a fair trade, it is only by living in ignorance or denial that it seems like it is. And yet, and yet...when I was climbing it was the only thing that made any sense at all in whole entire world.
To answer the "why are so many dying?" question it seems pretty obvious that it is a very dangerous activity that is increasingly popular and easy to take up. Sort of like opiates.
posted by Pembquist at 1:57 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
Of course the more experienced jumpers are dying too. More experience doesn't necessarily mean they're any better; it just means they've gambled with their lives more often and haven't lost it yet. Every winning streak comes to an end eventually; the more jumps, the more chances for the house to make its money back. (Cue the Kenny Rogers.)
posted by Sys Rq at 1:58 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Sys Rq at 1:58 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
What I'm wondering: what revenue streams are there associated with wingsuit jumping? At least some of the US wingsuit makers seem to be assuming that people will BASE jump with them, at least some of the people who talk about coaching seem to use language that suggests that they will coach wingsuit jumpers, etc. If I wanted to ban something, I'd work on the revenue streams more than anything else - no training people to base jump, make people sign a waiver saying that they will not use their wingsuit to jump, no revenue associated with wingsuit jumping. I assume that one has to be licensed in some way to teach people to jump out of planes, so making licensure hinge on everyone involved keeping a clear distance from wingsuit jumping would be a start.
I'd also look into how wingsuit jumping videos are posted/shared - if there's already enough process within Facebook, etc, to prevent posting videos of significantly and blatantly illegal stuff, could that be used to decrease the amount of wingsuit jumping videos that were shared?
If this were a cheap and widespread activity, you'd worry about banning it making it seem even cooler, but it seems like there's more regulatory heft when dealing with complicated, expensive, relatively rare hobbies, especially hobbies that probably have a lot of social and economic overlap with fairly safe and regulated hobbies like jumping out of planes.
Probably throwing the book at some of these people who after all post videos of themselves illegally jumping off things would help - again, this is an expensive, niche hobby and legal inconvenience would probably dissuade a lot of people.
I'd say that this is precisely not like opiates, because it's pretty easy to start with the opiates and you hit the "this isn't as fun as I thought" threshold pretty quickly. Also, while I'm sure semi-suicidality drives a few people to dangerous sports, everyone I've ever known who has been serious with the opiates has had physical and/or emotional and/or mental issues that made daily life very difficult for them. On the one hand, this means that opiates are a much, much bigger problem - but it also suggests to me that getting people not to wingsuit jump is probably fairly easily achieved through regulatory measures, unlike getting people off, say, heroin.
Admittedly, there are much bigger social problems than people streaming their own painful, tragic, traumatizing and completely, immediately preventable deaths live on the internet so their family and friends can watch and their orphaned children can read up on it later when they're older. It would be really difficult to justify devoting a lot of resources to any kind of ban or enforcement in society as it presently exists, but if we lived in a properly organized society I think it would be worth attempting some regulatory measures to see what happens.
posted by Frowner at 2:05 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
I'd also look into how wingsuit jumping videos are posted/shared - if there's already enough process within Facebook, etc, to prevent posting videos of significantly and blatantly illegal stuff, could that be used to decrease the amount of wingsuit jumping videos that were shared?
If this were a cheap and widespread activity, you'd worry about banning it making it seem even cooler, but it seems like there's more regulatory heft when dealing with complicated, expensive, relatively rare hobbies, especially hobbies that probably have a lot of social and economic overlap with fairly safe and regulated hobbies like jumping out of planes.
Probably throwing the book at some of these people who after all post videos of themselves illegally jumping off things would help - again, this is an expensive, niche hobby and legal inconvenience would probably dissuade a lot of people.
I'd say that this is precisely not like opiates, because it's pretty easy to start with the opiates and you hit the "this isn't as fun as I thought" threshold pretty quickly. Also, while I'm sure semi-suicidality drives a few people to dangerous sports, everyone I've ever known who has been serious with the opiates has had physical and/or emotional and/or mental issues that made daily life very difficult for them. On the one hand, this means that opiates are a much, much bigger problem - but it also suggests to me that getting people not to wingsuit jump is probably fairly easily achieved through regulatory measures, unlike getting people off, say, heroin.
Admittedly, there are much bigger social problems than people streaming their own painful, tragic, traumatizing and completely, immediately preventable deaths live on the internet so their family and friends can watch and their orphaned children can read up on it later when they're older. It would be really difficult to justify devoting a lot of resources to any kind of ban or enforcement in society as it presently exists, but if we lived in a properly organized society I think it would be worth attempting some regulatory measures to see what happens.
posted by Frowner at 2:05 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
Blaming victims for accidental deaths is not unique to extreme sports; it's just called for more often in those situations. A friend-of-a-friend was killed when his car was struck by a train a few years ago. We all drive over those tracks fairly frequently. After it happened, I watched one of my friends, in obvious emotional distress and cognitive dissonance, grill a friend of the deceased until they finally admitted that there was a possibility the deceased had been drinking. That resolved the cognitive dissonance, and my friend was immediately cheered up, and could go on with his life, safe in the knowledge that he and those he loved would never be killed in that way, because they are good people who don't drink and drive.
posted by agentofselection at 2:06 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by agentofselection at 2:06 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
There's an argument against forbidding even risky behaviors if they are addictive, strongly economically or socially incentivized, etc, or if the ban would cause more harm via law enforcement/prison than the activity, but I don't think that extends to the idea that the state has zero responsibility to protect us from our impulses.
The notion that "the state [is responsible for protecting] us from our impulses" doesn't seem categorically different to me from affective labor, which we complain about here all the time, as an instance of an institution wrongly colonizing our interior lives. This seems very different from e.g. a large soda ban, in that the power of the state in that case is being mobilized to prevent a similarly-powerful entity from exploiting our impulses. Granting the state the conceptual power to rule on which of our impulses are worthy of being satisfied, on the other hand, seems like an terrifying amount to cede for the sake of reducing the harm caused by what's already a fringe activity.
posted by invitapriore at 2:22 PM on August 31, 2016 [7 favorites]
The notion that "the state [is responsible for protecting] us from our impulses" doesn't seem categorically different to me from affective labor, which we complain about here all the time, as an instance of an institution wrongly colonizing our interior lives. This seems very different from e.g. a large soda ban, in that the power of the state in that case is being mobilized to prevent a similarly-powerful entity from exploiting our impulses. Granting the state the conceptual power to rule on which of our impulses are worthy of being satisfied, on the other hand, seems like an terrifying amount to cede for the sake of reducing the harm caused by what's already a fringe activity.
posted by invitapriore at 2:22 PM on August 31, 2016 [7 favorites]
All dangerous human activities seem go through an initial phase of extreme danger until people start designing danger mitigation strategies and refine them again and again so that the activity becomes acceptably "safe". Motorsports are dangerous, but racing car drivers can now walk away from accidents like this. Wingsuit BASE jumping is in its "extreme danger" phase, so the question is, how can it be made safer? Is it even possible?
posted by elgilito at 2:24 PM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by elgilito at 2:24 PM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
Banning is not necessary. Set up a catenary zipline swooshing and swooping down a rocky mountainside. Charge pasty, non-physically-fit middle-class tourists $35 to dress up in a wing-suit and tear down the mountain in a harness. Wingsuiting ceases to be cool.
posted by Western Infidels at 2:25 PM on August 31, 2016 [7 favorites]
posted by Western Infidels at 2:25 PM on August 31, 2016 [7 favorites]
until people start designing danger mitigation strategies and refine them again and again
adamantium-plated skeletal structure and retractable claws
posted by My Dad at 2:30 PM on August 31, 2016 [6 favorites]
adamantium-plated skeletal structure and retractable claws
posted by My Dad at 2:30 PM on August 31, 2016 [6 favorites]
The notion that "the state [is responsible for protecting] us from our impulses" doesn't seem categorically different to me from affective labor, which we complain about here all the time, as an instance of an institution wrongly colonizing our interior lives.
I just asked, and the institution says it'll promise not to colonize your interior life with affective labor if you promise not to colonize the side of a mountain with your splattered remains. Or at least put down a deposit to cover the cost of hosing it off.
posted by Sys Rq at 2:32 PM on August 31, 2016 [7 favorites]
I just asked, and the institution says it'll promise not to colonize your interior life with affective labor if you promise not to colonize the side of a mountain with your splattered remains. Or at least put down a deposit to cover the cost of hosing it off.
posted by Sys Rq at 2:32 PM on August 31, 2016 [7 favorites]
Set up a catenary zipline swooshing and swooping down a rocky mountainside.
Ski resorts already have the mountainsides and have paid for the chair-lift, and the activity can completely co-exist with other users of the slopes, as well as continue to bring in money when there isn't enough snow. Sounds like a plan!
Me? I'll wait a few years for the virtual reality :)
A fatality rate of 1 in 1000 is absolutely unthinkable in just about any other activity.
Yup. Back at the extreme end, cave-diving with a rebreather had a terrifying 1-in-11-participant fatality-rate for a while. No thanks.
posted by anonymisc at 2:34 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
Ski resorts already have the mountainsides and have paid for the chair-lift, and the activity can completely co-exist with other users of the slopes, as well as continue to bring in money when there isn't enough snow. Sounds like a plan!
Me? I'll wait a few years for the virtual reality :)
A fatality rate of 1 in 1000 is absolutely unthinkable in just about any other activity.
Yup. Back at the extreme end, cave-diving with a rebreather had a terrifying 1-in-11-participant fatality-rate for a while. No thanks.
posted by anonymisc at 2:34 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
I think people are still underestimating the risk. I don't think that people who do this are suicidal, I think they mostly feel like they are in control of something they are not in control of. Sure, they realize it's dangerous, but they think they can handle it and that they aren't really risking death. Not really.
Something I've observed in some people close to me is that it seems like exposure to risk can increase your tolerance to it no matter what the underlying activity is or how risky it actually is. You get comfortable with a .0001% risk of death, so nothing under .001% actually seems risky, then that seems OK and pretty soon you're dealing with things that are well outside of what the rest of us would say is an acceptable risk profile, but I'm sure if you asked them they'd say it's not actually that risky because their tolerance for it is so much higher than the rest of us . Obviously this is totally anecdotal, but I'd swear that's what happened to my sister after she started working as a firefighter. There wasn't a clean break, and it wasn't how she'd always felt about risk, but after a couple years of it, her tolerance was completely outside of what mine has ever been.
posted by Copronymus at 2:38 PM on August 31, 2016 [6 favorites]
Something I've observed in some people close to me is that it seems like exposure to risk can increase your tolerance to it no matter what the underlying activity is or how risky it actually is. You get comfortable with a .0001% risk of death, so nothing under .001% actually seems risky, then that seems OK and pretty soon you're dealing with things that are well outside of what the rest of us would say is an acceptable risk profile, but I'm sure if you asked them they'd say it's not actually that risky because their tolerance for it is so much higher than the rest of us . Obviously this is totally anecdotal, but I'd swear that's what happened to my sister after she started working as a firefighter. There wasn't a clean break, and it wasn't how she'd always felt about risk, but after a couple years of it, her tolerance was completely outside of what mine has ever been.
posted by Copronymus at 2:38 PM on August 31, 2016 [6 favorites]
I just asked, and the institution says it'll promise not to colonize your interior life with affective labor if you promise not to colonize the side of a mountain with your splattered remains. Or at least put down a deposit to cover the cost of hosing it off.
Done! This works out well for me, since I don't have any plans to jump off a mountain in a wingsuit myself.
posted by invitapriore at 2:41 PM on August 31, 2016
Done! This works out well for me, since I don't have any plans to jump off a mountain in a wingsuit myself.
posted by invitapriore at 2:41 PM on August 31, 2016
A guy I went to high school with does the extreme jumps with the Red Bull team. I'm fairly certain that one of these days I'm going to see a post on Facebook with 1000 reactions, all saying, "he died doing what he loved."
In fact they might not even have health insurance,”
I was told that back when New England fishermen worked out of sailboats, they usually never bothered to learn to swim since if they fell overboard in the Atlantic Ocean, it would take the boat longer to tack around than they would survive. I kind of seen a correlation between this and some of these people not being as concerned about health insurance.
I definitely undestand thrill-seeking - I spent this weekend tearing around narrow twisty streets on a motorcycle and I have a non-zero feeling that "I'll never be in an accident," but the idea of jumping off a cliff in a wing suit terrifies me.
posted by bendy at 2:42 PM on August 31, 2016
In fact they might not even have health insurance,”
I was told that back when New England fishermen worked out of sailboats, they usually never bothered to learn to swim since if they fell overboard in the Atlantic Ocean, it would take the boat longer to tack around than they would survive. I kind of seen a correlation between this and some of these people not being as concerned about health insurance.
I definitely undestand thrill-seeking - I spent this weekend tearing around narrow twisty streets on a motorcycle and I have a non-zero feeling that "I'll never be in an accident," but the idea of jumping off a cliff in a wing suit terrifies me.
posted by bendy at 2:42 PM on August 31, 2016
The notion that "the state [is responsible for protecting] us from our impulses" doesn't seem categorically different to me from affective labor, which we complain about here all the time, as an instance of an institution wrongly colonizing our interior lives.
I don't know. I think one has to define impulses very closely to have the conversation at all. For this purpose, let's leave out anti-suicide measures - we'll say that the impulse to commit suicide is such a grave thing that it's something different altogether.
Consider the wire fences that tend to be at the top of the slope leading down to expressways when those cut through residential areas. Why do we have those? They're not strong enough to prevent cars from breaking through, they don't block sound or light, they don't do a thing for pollution, they don't even keep a really determined person from going down to the highway. And because they're at the top of a steep slope, they don't have anything to do with keeping cars on the highway itself. It seems like they exist to keep us from the impulse to go stand right by the highway.
Or consider the barriers at various scenic overlooks. There's a pretty ready acknowledgement in a lot of our physical infrastructure that humans get tempted to do wildly unsafe stuff for no particular reason.
Obviously if we impulsively get drunk and wander down onto i-94, there's going to be expense and inconvenience associated with the clean-up. But it's the same with wingsuits.
I think if we were saying "the state has no limit on what it can designate a bad impulse, and has the responsibility to protect us from all of them", we'd be in tricky territory. But that's not really what's in play - we're talking about a category of things where there's a high risk of something widely held to be an irretrievably bad outcome.
I think this is a policy problem more than a moral problem. Approaching it from the stance of "by preventing us from taking impulsive physical risks, the state is colonizing our interior lives and we should never let the state colonize our interior lives" seems to get us to a really weird model of human subjectivity where a totally uncolonized interior life is possible or else to an argument for no state intervention for safety at all unless injury costs other people money.
posted by Frowner at 2:42 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
I think there are three reasons to explore the safety aspects of BASE jumping:
At some point the question becomes one of whether you know what you're going to die from, and since I'm watching one of the other alternatives happen right now, I can tell ya that smearing myself across the landscape seems way more attractive than choking from esophageal cancer. I hope I've got a couple more good decades in me, but dying at 90 is only worth it if I'm living 'til then, too.
posted by straw at 2:47 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
- The emotional and economic impact it has on the poor folks who go recover the bodies and wash the blood off the rocks.
- Understand the decision-making processes of over-testosteroned 20-somethings (like I was).
- Looking to what we can learn about wingsuit technology and what it might become.
At some point the question becomes one of whether you know what you're going to die from, and since I'm watching one of the other alternatives happen right now, I can tell ya that smearing myself across the landscape seems way more attractive than choking from esophageal cancer. I hope I've got a couple more good decades in me, but dying at 90 is only worth it if I'm living 'til then, too.
posted by straw at 2:47 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
I'm not sure I would want to do this only from an airplane. I mean, I would probably want to learn it by doing it from an airplane a few times, but I feel like the experience would be not too different from just regular skydiving. There'd be less of a sensation of travel, of speed, of flight. The attraction of this activity, as far as I can see, is that it feels a lot like being Superman. You wouldn't get that without being close enough to the ground that you can see the scenery whizzing by. If you're going to jump out of a plane, why not do it the normal way?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:48 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:48 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
(Also, seriously, a lot of progressive financial instruments are basically guards against human impulse. I'm actually in favor of defined benefit social programs, not defined pay-in programs, but we know pretty well that if we are going with the pay-in programs people do better with mandatory retirement savings and limited choice. Faced with lots of choice, people tend to go all "augh, I can't decide amongst a million things, better to do nothing or spend it on shoes". We assume that the human impulse is to take the short-term easier path, that this is predictable and a bad idea, and that it's possible to basically coerce people into doing something that provides a better outcome.
The more I think about it, the more it seems like actually quite a lot of the better parts of society are structured around the idea that humans have dumb impulses, and that things work out better when we are discouraged by physical design or by policy from the dumb thing.
I'm comfortable with the argument that the state should not colonize our interior lives, but I think that demands quite a lot of risk for everyone on all vectors. I think the anarchist idea is that there's a lot of compensations for that risk. What I end up objecting to is a society of laws and regulations that colonizes people's interior life in about a million ways but refuses to do any useful colonization.
posted by Frowner at 2:52 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
The more I think about it, the more it seems like actually quite a lot of the better parts of society are structured around the idea that humans have dumb impulses, and that things work out better when we are discouraged by physical design or by policy from the dumb thing.
I'm comfortable with the argument that the state should not colonize our interior lives, but I think that demands quite a lot of risk for everyone on all vectors. I think the anarchist idea is that there's a lot of compensations for that risk. What I end up objecting to is a society of laws and regulations that colonizes people's interior life in about a million ways but refuses to do any useful colonization.
posted by Frowner at 2:52 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
Also, to be honest, I feel like if this is somehow made safe people will just move on to the next thing. The danger is part of the thrill, and part of what makes it exclusive, and both of those factors are big attractors for the people who like to do this stuff. Climbing on an indoor rock wall is pretty safe, but people still generally prefer to do their climbing out of doors in a less controlled environment—and there are those who prefer to do it with no safety equipment, too. It's part of what people like about this stuff.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:54 PM on August 31, 2016
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 2:54 PM on August 31, 2016
The more I think about it, the more it seems like actually quite a lot of the better parts of society are structured around the idea that humans have dumb impulses, and that things work out better when we are discouraged by physical design or by policy from the dumb thing.
I agree with this, but I think there's a certain philosophical difference between shaping incentives and banning, even if the outcome in both cases is just coercing the more beneficial behavior. I think the latter should be wielded with much more care, and I guess in this case my sense is that people are already pretty heavily disincentivized from BASE jumping given that it's scary, plainly dangerous, and I assume pretty expensive. I think a lot more people would be doing it if there weren't major disincentives already, so why bring in the state?
posted by invitapriore at 3:04 PM on August 31, 2016
I agree with this, but I think there's a certain philosophical difference between shaping incentives and banning, even if the outcome in both cases is just coercing the more beneficial behavior. I think the latter should be wielded with much more care, and I guess in this case my sense is that people are already pretty heavily disincentivized from BASE jumping given that it's scary, plainly dangerous, and I assume pretty expensive. I think a lot more people would be doing it if there weren't major disincentives already, so why bring in the state?
posted by invitapriore at 3:04 PM on August 31, 2016
a fringe activity with little historical or cultural significance
I don't really agree with this. I think base jumping has cultural significance vastly greater than the tiny size of the community might suggest (which is why the popularity exploded). The youtube videos have millions of viewers. We're all in this thread right now discussing it. It's the sort of thing that frequently appears in the popular "Humans are Awesome" videos that make people feel good about people. So many millions live vicariously through that tiny fringe group that big corporations spend real money to try to associate their billion-dollar brands with the activity. I think they've clearly passed the threshold of cultural significance.
(That said, I acknowledge that if it was eliminated overnight, there are still plenty of other amazing things to live vicariously through and many people would not miss the absence of one. Though perhaps the same risk-vs-reward argument could be similarly applied to systematically eliminate the remaining activities too.)
posted by anonymisc at 3:11 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
I don't really agree with this. I think base jumping has cultural significance vastly greater than the tiny size of the community might suggest (which is why the popularity exploded). The youtube videos have millions of viewers. We're all in this thread right now discussing it. It's the sort of thing that frequently appears in the popular "Humans are Awesome" videos that make people feel good about people. So many millions live vicariously through that tiny fringe group that big corporations spend real money to try to associate their billion-dollar brands with the activity. I think they've clearly passed the threshold of cultural significance.
(That said, I acknowledge that if it was eliminated overnight, there are still plenty of other amazing things to live vicariously through and many people would not miss the absence of one. Though perhaps the same risk-vs-reward argument could be similarly applied to systematically eliminate the remaining activities too.)
posted by anonymisc at 3:11 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
(That said, I acknowledge that if it was eliminated overnight, there are still plenty of other amazing things to live vicariously through and many people would not miss the absence of one. Though perhaps the same risk-vs-reward argument could be similarly applied to systematically eliminate the remaining activities too.)
See, the interchangeability of "humans are awesome" activities is precisely what seems to render this one without cultural significance. Although I admit that I was thinking more of "cultural significance" in the sense of "being significant to people of a particular culture" - like, it's not a traditional indigenous practice, it doesn't have any specific religious significance, it's not woven tightly into queer history, that kind of thing.
People are all "fuck yeah" about so many things on the internet, too. I mean, people are fuck yeah about tiny kittens and about tofu in humorous shapes. "Many humans feel strongly about this" is too broad, if you ask me.
I think a lot more people would be doing it if there weren't major disincentives already, so why bring in the state?
Because I was truly upset by the description of the guy dying in the first article!!! Surely that is sufficient.
Or no, actually, I think "minimizing police/legal involvement" is probably a pretty good argument against banning this particular fringe hobby.
I don't really buy the interiority argument because I think human interiority is so responsive to human exteriority, but I have to admit that I am generally of the "low police involvement" persuasion so probably shouldn't be on the "high police involvement" side here.
posted by Frowner at 3:21 PM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
See, the interchangeability of "humans are awesome" activities is precisely what seems to render this one without cultural significance. Although I admit that I was thinking more of "cultural significance" in the sense of "being significant to people of a particular culture" - like, it's not a traditional indigenous practice, it doesn't have any specific religious significance, it's not woven tightly into queer history, that kind of thing.
People are all "fuck yeah" about so many things on the internet, too. I mean, people are fuck yeah about tiny kittens and about tofu in humorous shapes. "Many humans feel strongly about this" is too broad, if you ask me.
I think a lot more people would be doing it if there weren't major disincentives already, so why bring in the state?
Because I was truly upset by the description of the guy dying in the first article!!! Surely that is sufficient.
Or no, actually, I think "minimizing police/legal involvement" is probably a pretty good argument against banning this particular fringe hobby.
I don't really buy the interiority argument because I think human interiority is so responsive to human exteriority, but I have to admit that I am generally of the "low police involvement" persuasion so probably shouldn't be on the "high police involvement" side here.
posted by Frowner at 3:21 PM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
See, the interchangeability of "humans are awesome" activities is precisely what seems to render this one without cultural significance.
I don't think that really works though - if an activity is without significance because of its interchangeability with other awesome activities, then all of the "Humans are Awesome" activities are without significance, yet clearly there is great significance there.
posted by anonymisc at 3:26 PM on August 31, 2016
I don't think that really works though - if an activity is without significance because of its interchangeability with other awesome activities, then all of the "Humans are Awesome" activities are without significance, yet clearly there is great significance there.
posted by anonymisc at 3:26 PM on August 31, 2016
"he died doing what he loved."
I don't want any of my friends or loved ones (or, really, anyone else in the world) to die while they are still happy and healthy enough to enjoy their lives. I would lose a lot of respect for someone if I knew that they were the breadwinner for the family, and participated in extreme events and didn't have a significant life and/or AD&D insurance policies in place.
But beyond that, I don't really have a problem with the general idea of dying doing what one loves (so long as one goes into the act with eyes open -- I love eating sushi, I'd probably decline a dish of fugu, if someone served me fugu surreptitiously and I lived I'd be pissed and if I died I would haunt them forever).
I'm all for more education about the dangers of BASE jumping. I welcome the idea of more research and learning making the sport safer (but hopefully still as fun for the folks who do it). I just can't get super upset about the idea of people dying while choosing to do a thing that is likely to kill them for the thrill of it, especially not to the point of banning it (to the extent that it's generally legal -- no trespassing, putting others in danger, etc.)
Then again, I also feel very strongly that people should have the right to die in a manner and at the time of their own choosing. It's hard for me to reconcile the idea that we need to protect the right to die, with the idea that we should stop fully-informed adults from doing things that might cause them to die.
posted by sparklemotion at 3:28 PM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
I don't want any of my friends or loved ones (or, really, anyone else in the world) to die while they are still happy and healthy enough to enjoy their lives. I would lose a lot of respect for someone if I knew that they were the breadwinner for the family, and participated in extreme events and didn't have a significant life and/or AD&D insurance policies in place.
But beyond that, I don't really have a problem with the general idea of dying doing what one loves (so long as one goes into the act with eyes open -- I love eating sushi, I'd probably decline a dish of fugu, if someone served me fugu surreptitiously and I lived I'd be pissed and if I died I would haunt them forever).
I'm all for more education about the dangers of BASE jumping. I welcome the idea of more research and learning making the sport safer (but hopefully still as fun for the folks who do it). I just can't get super upset about the idea of people dying while choosing to do a thing that is likely to kill them for the thrill of it, especially not to the point of banning it (to the extent that it's generally legal -- no trespassing, putting others in danger, etc.)
Then again, I also feel very strongly that people should have the right to die in a manner and at the time of their own choosing. It's hard for me to reconcile the idea that we need to protect the right to die, with the idea that we should stop fully-informed adults from doing things that might cause them to die.
posted by sparklemotion at 3:28 PM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
The reason I wouldn't want this banned is that it is the nearest thing we have to being able to fly like a bird. If wanting to fly like a bird doesn't have deep-rooted cultural significance, then I don't know what does.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:29 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:29 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
My eyes are going to hell and I keep reading it as "Wingnut BASE jumping," which seems not so far from the truth.
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 3:33 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
posted by Emperor SnooKloze at 3:33 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
It seems like they exist to keep us from the impulse to go stand right by the highway.
I'd think more than anything to keep children, pets etc. from doing so?
Anyway it's just... this is a situation when the barriers are already there such that you have to be pretty determined to do it, and the incentives are already there sufficient to dissuade most people from trying so
unless it were somehow to become really popular and I can't think of much that risky that's really popular except tobacco, alcohol, opioids to a lesser extent - which are obviously quite different situations
posted by atoxyl at 3:38 PM on August 31, 2016
I'd think more than anything to keep children, pets etc. from doing so?
Anyway it's just... this is a situation when the barriers are already there such that you have to be pretty determined to do it, and the incentives are already there sufficient to dissuade most people from trying so
unless it were somehow to become really popular and I can't think of much that risky that's really popular except tobacco, alcohol, opioids to a lesser extent - which are obviously quite different situations
posted by atoxyl at 3:38 PM on August 31, 2016
but then I also think you do ultimately have the right to simply kill yourself at any time, even though I believe in policies intended to dissuade people from doing so
posted by atoxyl at 3:44 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by atoxyl at 3:44 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
Also, I would be really leery of using "lack of cultural significance" as a criterion for determining what can be banned and what can't, especially if we're not going to bring members of the community in question to the table for the conversation. I can see that being horribly abused, and in fact people try to abuse it all the time. When people want to ban a subversive book, or a musical genre enjoyed primarily by marginalized people, or the works of a filmmaker who is seen as having anti-Statist sympathies, "lack of cultural significance" is one of the most commonly-used covers that people try to apply to justify it. Who are we to evaluate the significance of any given activity?
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:47 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 3:47 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
the nearest thing we have to being able to fly like a bird
It's really more falling like a squirrel. Only with a steeper glide ratio.
posted by Nelson at 3:54 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
It's really more falling like a squirrel. Only with a steeper glide ratio.
posted by Nelson at 3:54 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
So they open a parachute eventually, assuming they don't slam into the side of a cliff first, right? It seems like they're way too low to open a parachute. Do they actually try to land like a bird? That seems unlikely. How is this supposed to work in the supposedly safer don't-fly-close-to-stuff scenario?
I'm not sure I would want to do this only from an airplane. I mean, I would probably want to learn it by doing it from an airplane a few times, but I feel like the experience would be not too different from just regular skydiving.
The article seems to suggest that "a few times" isn't enough. One base jumper criticizes another for base jumping with a wingsuit after only having done it from a plane a hundred times or so. Presumably then you'd want to do it out of a plane a few hundred times before you headed for a cliff.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 3:56 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'm not sure I would want to do this only from an airplane. I mean, I would probably want to learn it by doing it from an airplane a few times, but I feel like the experience would be not too different from just regular skydiving.
The article seems to suggest that "a few times" isn't enough. One base jumper criticizes another for base jumping with a wingsuit after only having done it from a plane a hundred times or so. Presumably then you'd want to do it out of a plane a few hundred times before you headed for a cliff.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 3:56 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
Well, I'm not here to debate the details of wingsuit BASE-jumping protocol. Near as I can tell, nobody here has ever done it so I doubt if we're qualified to have that discussion. If I were seriously considering learning to do it, I imagine that would be the time to start doing some research into things like how much high-altitude experience one should have before trying it at ground level.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:05 PM on August 31, 2016
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 4:05 PM on August 31, 2016
See, "it's not culturally significant, let's ban it" is not what is being said - the reverse, in fact. What's being said is that if there's a strong material case for banning something [like an activity with a really high death rate], you might argue against banning it by saying that it has particular historical or cultural significance. So for instance, many people who feel that drugs should be illegal make an exception for peyote used by native people for spiritual purposes.
We routinely accept the argument that cultural significance exists and matters. What cultural significance means and who gets to decide - that's contested. But...well, let's take a fairly low-key example. You have a street full of old houses. You want to build a new library complex. Which houses are deemed old enough and significant enough not to knock down, and why? Most people would say "we can have a debate at which we bring in evidence about which ones are significant, and while we may later realize that we neglected one house or overvalued another, it's a debate where we can in good faith try to come to an agreement. The solution is not to preserve all the old houses forever (partly because saying we'll preserve all of them really means they'll all crumble equally because this is a policy issue more than a moral one) or to say that the interesting example of vernacular architecture is as significant as the bog-standard middle class Belle Epoque dwelling with the mass produced woodwork. The solution is to make your argument and take your choice.
Because something is contested, is the subject for power, does not mean that we must step away from the argument. The ordering of things is how we understand them. It's how knowledge comes into being. That's hugely exciting and variable and contested and difficult and scary, yeah.
I add that all these questions of cultural significance are modulated by power, and it's the matter of power where the changes ought to be made. The Stasi can't ban BASE jumping, right, unless the Stasi have disproportionate power?
But jeez, mefites, if you actually do this fool wingsuit thing, uh, try not to die?
posted by Frowner at 4:14 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
We routinely accept the argument that cultural significance exists and matters. What cultural significance means and who gets to decide - that's contested. But...well, let's take a fairly low-key example. You have a street full of old houses. You want to build a new library complex. Which houses are deemed old enough and significant enough not to knock down, and why? Most people would say "we can have a debate at which we bring in evidence about which ones are significant, and while we may later realize that we neglected one house or overvalued another, it's a debate where we can in good faith try to come to an agreement. The solution is not to preserve all the old houses forever (partly because saying we'll preserve all of them really means they'll all crumble equally because this is a policy issue more than a moral one) or to say that the interesting example of vernacular architecture is as significant as the bog-standard middle class Belle Epoque dwelling with the mass produced woodwork. The solution is to make your argument and take your choice.
Because something is contested, is the subject for power, does not mean that we must step away from the argument. The ordering of things is how we understand them. It's how knowledge comes into being. That's hugely exciting and variable and contested and difficult and scary, yeah.
I add that all these questions of cultural significance are modulated by power, and it's the matter of power where the changes ought to be made. The Stasi can't ban BASE jumping, right, unless the Stasi have disproportionate power?
But jeez, mefites, if you actually do this fool wingsuit thing, uh, try not to die?
posted by Frowner at 4:14 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
The reason I wouldn't want this banned is that it is the nearest thing we have to being able to fly like a bird. If wanting to fly like a bird doesn't have deep-rooted cultural significance, then I don't know what does.
Came here to say exactly that. You can blame adrenaline or youth or YouTube or young men, but this won't ever stop because it is the closest to experiencing human powered flight. Even if it is more like a flying squirrel.
I hope it becomes safer. Maybe some read adrenaline junkies will move on, but increased safety is almost guaranteed to also bring in more enthusiasts.
I wonder if any of the instantly inflatable cushioning could help? Like the Avalanche vest. Could a body suit like this possibly help survive a crash?
Either way, the deaths are horrible and sad, but man wants to fly. So let's make it safer.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 4:14 PM on August 31, 2016
Came here to say exactly that. You can blame adrenaline or youth or YouTube or young men, but this won't ever stop because it is the closest to experiencing human powered flight. Even if it is more like a flying squirrel.
I hope it becomes safer. Maybe some read adrenaline junkies will move on, but increased safety is almost guaranteed to also bring in more enthusiasts.
I wonder if any of the instantly inflatable cushioning could help? Like the Avalanche vest. Could a body suit like this possibly help survive a crash?
Either way, the deaths are horrible and sad, but man wants to fly. So let's make it safer.
posted by [insert clever name here] at 4:14 PM on August 31, 2016
I live in a mountain town renown for its mountain film festival where wingsuits have been a staple feature for years now. Red Bull never makes movies about people dying while being "extreme" and as a consequence you've literally got people jumping off one side of our mountain (at least two wingsuit deaths this summer) while sold out crowds cheer on radical and extreme sports from the other side of the same peak. I do wonder if some measure is required, perhaps similar to what Guiness Book of Records did I n no longer glorifying "don't try this at home" stunts.
posted by furtive at 4:31 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by furtive at 4:31 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
Sorry to post again but I don't think a wingsuit is like being a bird flying. I've never flown a wingsuit so I can't speak from experience but I have a pilots license and I went skydiving a couple times and I couldn't see the point. To me flying is about the ability to soar, to stay aloft for a long long time, to swoop up and down like a bird. The wingsuit thing looks more speed centric, less lofty. Hanglider, sailplane, that Yves Rossi rocket ride thing....those seem like flying, wingsuit? totally gutsball but not flying.
posted by Pembquist at 4:34 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by Pembquist at 4:34 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
Came here to say exactly that. You can blame adrenaline or youth or YouTube or young men, but this won't ever stop because it is the closest to experiencing human powered flight. Even if it is more like a flying squirrel.
This idea keeps coming up, and oh my god is this ever fucking wrong. Human powered flight has been accomplished, and it doesn't look anything like driving a truck up a mountain and then jumping off.
posted by Chuckles at 4:51 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
This idea keeps coming up, and oh my god is this ever fucking wrong. Human powered flight has been accomplished, and it doesn't look anything like driving a truck up a mountain and then jumping off.
posted by Chuckles at 4:51 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
For some hard numbers on "falling like a squirrel", see glide ratio examples. Wingsuits are 2.5:1. Small airplanes are roughly 10:1, a hang glider is 15:1 and a sailplane is like 40:1.
Flying squirrels are 2:1.
posted by Nelson at 4:57 PM on August 31, 2016 [6 favorites]
Flying squirrels are 2:1.
posted by Nelson at 4:57 PM on August 31, 2016 [6 favorites]
Human powered flight is only part of it. The other part is that you are lying in a prone position, steering with your body, and using your arms as wings. You know, like a bird. Those pedal-powered planes are cool, no question, but I have yet to see a bird ride a bicycle.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:07 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 5:07 PM on August 31, 2016 [3 favorites]
Wingsuits are 2.5:1
These proximity-flying videos do give the impression that the jumper is flying but they must be selecting jump sites that have a slope below of pretty much exactly 1:2.5
posted by Flashman at 5:45 PM on August 31, 2016
These proximity-flying videos do give the impression that the jumper is flying but they must be selecting jump sites that have a slope below of pretty much exactly 1:2.5
posted by Flashman at 5:45 PM on August 31, 2016
All we want is to fly, and all the birds want is for someone to build them a bicycle or teach them to skateboard.
Hang gliding as as 'human-powered flight" as this. Sure you don't use your arms as wings, but since arms aren't designed to fly, I think of this as a plus. I feel like if this is really about flying rather than the risk itself, then hang gliding should scratch this itch. I guess I'm not entitled to say what should scratch someone else's itch, but this really does make it seem like the risk itself is the attraction.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 5:49 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
Hang gliding as as 'human-powered flight" as this. Sure you don't use your arms as wings, but since arms aren't designed to fly, I think of this as a plus. I feel like if this is really about flying rather than the risk itself, then hang gliding should scratch this itch. I guess I'm not entitled to say what should scratch someone else's itch, but this really does make it seem like the risk itself is the attraction.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 5:49 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
This was bothering me, so I looked it up:
Dog went on Potter's last excursion but apparently didn't make the jump.
I can accept a person without dependents choosing to do something this risky but the thought that he dragged the dog along sometimes made me furious.
posted by praemunire at 5:55 PM on August 31, 2016 [10 favorites]
Dog went on Potter's last excursion but apparently didn't make the jump.
I can accept a person without dependents choosing to do something this risky but the thought that he dragged the dog along sometimes made me furious.
posted by praemunire at 5:55 PM on August 31, 2016 [10 favorites]
If someone figures out how to make a wingsuit with a much better glide ratio, I would jump at the chance to try a slower, more contemplative version of the extreme flying videos. I have no interest in rocketing down a mountain slope, but to soar without all the paraphernalia of a paraglider would be amazing.
I also don't understand people with families and responsibilities taking such huge risks, but just like with mountaineering some people just can't stop no matter what, and hopefully they make plans accordingly.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:15 PM on August 31, 2016
I also don't understand people with families and responsibilities taking such huge risks, but just like with mountaineering some people just can't stop no matter what, and hopefully they make plans accordingly.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:15 PM on August 31, 2016
Until wingsuits, hang gliding was the one extreme sport I most ached to try, based on its similarity to what I imagine flying must feel like to a bird. As soon as wingsuits came on the scene, I instinctively knew they were more like what I privately think of as "real" flying than hang gliding is. I don't know why, but somehow I just know this in my bones. "Arms for wings" is a critical step closer than "thing that hangs out over my head for wings." I feel that very strongly. It is, at its core, emotional.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:57 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 6:57 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
Not just the 18-30 male with too much disposable income demographic: Kiwi!
posted by sammyo at 7:03 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
posted by sammyo at 7:03 PM on August 31, 2016 [4 favorites]
A fatality rate of 1 in 1000 is absolutely unthinkable in just about any other activity.
Yup. Back at the extreme end, cave-diving with a rebreather had a terrifying 1-in-11-participant fatality-rate for a while. No thanks.
At the time of Into Thin Air (twenty years ago), Jon Krakauer estimated that 10% of the climbers who left Everest Base Camp didn't come back. I don't know that the numbers have improved significantly since then.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:39 PM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
Yup. Back at the extreme end, cave-diving with a rebreather had a terrifying 1-in-11-participant fatality-rate for a while. No thanks.
At the time of Into Thin Air (twenty years ago), Jon Krakauer estimated that 10% of the climbers who left Everest Base Camp didn't come back. I don't know that the numbers have improved significantly since then.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:39 PM on August 31, 2016 [2 favorites]
The BASE jumper in the "with a dog" story died in a jump a year after his documentary came out.
If you're a mature adult with no (obvious) mental problems needing treatment, and you have a DNR on file, I don't care what you climb, kayak, ski, or jump off, with or without equipment. Just damn well don't take a minor, a hesitant adult, and ANY animal with you. If you do, you should see major jail time.
If you're married, I suppose that's between you and your spouse. But if you have kids, you're a selfish SOB, and you should grow up already.
posted by BlueHorse at 8:43 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
If you're a mature adult with no (obvious) mental problems needing treatment, and you have a DNR on file, I don't care what you climb, kayak, ski, or jump off, with or without equipment. Just damn well don't take a minor, a hesitant adult, and ANY animal with you. If you do, you should see major jail time.
If you're married, I suppose that's between you and your spouse. But if you have kids, you're a selfish SOB, and you should grow up already.
posted by BlueHorse at 8:43 PM on August 31, 2016 [5 favorites]
I guess I don't understand how base jumping is a "sport". It's the pursuit of pure pleasure regardless of the risks. Which to me, is the opposite of sport. It seems the sport veneer is there because it provides a template for extracting profit.
Not that I think it should be banned. Most things actually worth doing entail a fair amount of risk. I do a pretty 'extreme' form of endurance cycling and most of the people close to me tell me I'm 'crazy'. I know what the risks are, & I can think of one death in my club that definitely haunts me. Knowing the risks isn't always the same as being able to control for them, even if what I do is like swimming in the kiddie pool compared to base jumping. But maybe that's just how I rationalize it to myself.
Funny thing, in my sport there's no money involved and sponsors are explicitly not allowed. Unlike every single other cycling discipline. It ensures that no one does it for any reason other than knowledge of themselves.
If base jumpers are doing illegal jumps with sponsors how is the sponsor not liable? At what death rate per jumps would an insurance company consider this an acceptable activity to underwrite? If base jumping evolves into an actual sport, that will be it's moment of mainstream acceptance.
I can definitely understand wanting to do something extreme as a fuck you to this shitty world, and jumping off the side of a mountain is certainly a nihilistic way of pursuing that. Not really my thing but who am I to talk? I personally believe more people should have actual adventure in their lives, which necessarily entails pain and hardship and maybe even death. Lots of things worth doing for their own sake require a certain amount of risk. Doing those things expands the realm of the possible. I don't want to live in a world where someone else gets to decide where that line is.
posted by bradbane at 9:35 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
Not that I think it should be banned. Most things actually worth doing entail a fair amount of risk. I do a pretty 'extreme' form of endurance cycling and most of the people close to me tell me I'm 'crazy'. I know what the risks are, & I can think of one death in my club that definitely haunts me. Knowing the risks isn't always the same as being able to control for them, even if what I do is like swimming in the kiddie pool compared to base jumping. But maybe that's just how I rationalize it to myself.
Funny thing, in my sport there's no money involved and sponsors are explicitly not allowed. Unlike every single other cycling discipline. It ensures that no one does it for any reason other than knowledge of themselves.
If base jumpers are doing illegal jumps with sponsors how is the sponsor not liable? At what death rate per jumps would an insurance company consider this an acceptable activity to underwrite? If base jumping evolves into an actual sport, that will be it's moment of mainstream acceptance.
I can definitely understand wanting to do something extreme as a fuck you to this shitty world, and jumping off the side of a mountain is certainly a nihilistic way of pursuing that. Not really my thing but who am I to talk? I personally believe more people should have actual adventure in their lives, which necessarily entails pain and hardship and maybe even death. Lots of things worth doing for their own sake require a certain amount of risk. Doing those things expands the realm of the possible. I don't want to live in a world where someone else gets to decide where that line is.
posted by bradbane at 9:35 PM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]
Just Cause 3 has wingsuiting built in.
It's quite exhilarating, because crashes usually kill the player character. When you're going 160km/hr and you're only five metres off the ground, the slightest miscalculation or attention lapse leads to a direct hit on a rock or tree. You often don't realize you made a mistake until your character is already dead.
There's no penalty for dying in that game, but every time you crash (and even experienced players crash), you realize how dangerous it must be to do it for real.
posted by jnnnnn at 10:33 PM on August 31, 2016
It's quite exhilarating, because crashes usually kill the player character. When you're going 160km/hr and you're only five metres off the ground, the slightest miscalculation or attention lapse leads to a direct hit on a rock or tree. You often don't realize you made a mistake until your character is already dead.
There's no penalty for dying in that game, but every time you crash (and even experienced players crash), you realize how dangerous it must be to do it for real.
posted by jnnnnn at 10:33 PM on August 31, 2016
Not just the 18-30 male with too much disposable income demographic: Kiwi!
That's disturbingly apropos, right down to the implied ending.
posted by Anonymous at 11:48 PM on August 31, 2016
That's disturbingly apropos, right down to the implied ending.
posted by Anonymous at 11:48 PM on August 31, 2016
I honestly can't understand why its social acceptable for people with families to engage in extremely unsafe behavior when its for sport.
Each time base jumping comes up again, it reminds me of the AskMe post from a couple parents wondering if it was selfish to keep doing their dangerous sports activities. After a bit of clarification, it came out that the dangerous sports were running and maybe cycling? And we were all "Ohhhhh, we thought you meant something like basejumping! Run to your heart's content."
posted by ktkt at 12:26 AM on September 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
Each time base jumping comes up again, it reminds me of the AskMe post from a couple parents wondering if it was selfish to keep doing their dangerous sports activities. After a bit of clarification, it came out that the dangerous sports were running and maybe cycling? And we were all "Ohhhhh, we thought you meant something like basejumping! Run to your heart's content."
posted by ktkt at 12:26 AM on September 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
I'm surprised it hasn't been applied to special forces insertion yet.
That we know of ...
posted by milnews.ca at 6:32 AM on September 1, 2016
That we know of ...
posted by milnews.ca at 6:32 AM on September 1, 2016
sparklemotion: "I love eating sushi, I'd probably decline a dish of fugu"
10,000 tons (9,071,847kg) of fugu are consumed in Japan each year. That number seems far too high, so I'm going to assume that means total fish weight, including bones, etc., and not the actual amount of flesh eaten. Let's be super conservative and assume that only 5% of any fish is consumed, and the rest is all thrown away. That means 453,592kg of fugu flesh is consumed in Japan each year. Fugu is not eaten in giant steak form, but very thin slices. I'd guess that the absolute maximum amount of fugu that would be consumed in a meal would be 300g (realistically, I'd say 100g max, but I'm being conservative). That means 1,511,973 servings are consumed each year. Between 1996 and 2006 a maximum of 64 fugu eaters were hospitalized nationwide. Between 1993 and 2006 there were 23 incidents in Tokyo, 22 of which were from people who caught and prepared their own fugu; only one was at a restaurant. But since that period doesn't exactly overlap with the 1996 to 2006 figure, we'll be conservative, again, and discount it, assuming that all 64 fugu hospitalizations from 96 to 06 were from restaurant fugu. Over that 10 year period, 15,119,730 servings would have been consumed, 64 of which resulted in hospitalization. That's a rate of one incident per 236,245 servings. If we take the 93-06 restaurant-to-home-caught ratio into consideration and, again being conservative, assume that 90% of the incidents were not at restaurants, then the fugu hospitalization risk would be 1/2.3 million. I'm having a hard time finding injury statistics for automobile driving (fatality stats are easy to come by, but injury stats aren't), but if the fatality rate is 1/12.8 million, then I'm guessing the combined injury-and-fatality rate is like 1/5 million or so (I'd guess that there are two car crash injuries for every car crash death). So assuming a round trip drive to the restaurant, you're probably as likely to get hurt getting to or from the restaurant as you are to get hurt eating the fugu, provided you're eating at a restaurant in Japan. Eating fugu outside Japan, or inside Japan prepared by a fisherman or a friend, would just be stupidity, of course.
(And that's using a lot of conservative guesses. If 10% of the flesh is eaten, then you're twice as likely to get hurt driving to or from the restaurant, if the average portion size is 150g then you're four times as likely to get hurt driving, etc.)
(Also, I just realized I'm being hypocritical, because if a requirement is "eating in Japan" then the odds of driving to or from the restaurant are super low, because you'd take a train. So let's say "if you were to drive to the airport, take a plane to Japan, eat fugu at a restaurant, fly back, and drive back home, the safe part would have been the flight, the neutral part would have been the fugu, and the dangerous part would have been the drive")
(Also note that fugu is super bland, so you'd still do best to decline it, because what's the point of taking even a 1/10 million or 1/100 million or 1/1 billion risk if the reward is just "you get to eat some super bland food")
posted by Bugbread at 7:21 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
10,000 tons (9,071,847kg) of fugu are consumed in Japan each year. That number seems far too high, so I'm going to assume that means total fish weight, including bones, etc., and not the actual amount of flesh eaten. Let's be super conservative and assume that only 5% of any fish is consumed, and the rest is all thrown away. That means 453,592kg of fugu flesh is consumed in Japan each year. Fugu is not eaten in giant steak form, but very thin slices. I'd guess that the absolute maximum amount of fugu that would be consumed in a meal would be 300g (realistically, I'd say 100g max, but I'm being conservative). That means 1,511,973 servings are consumed each year. Between 1996 and 2006 a maximum of 64 fugu eaters were hospitalized nationwide. Between 1993 and 2006 there were 23 incidents in Tokyo, 22 of which were from people who caught and prepared their own fugu; only one was at a restaurant. But since that period doesn't exactly overlap with the 1996 to 2006 figure, we'll be conservative, again, and discount it, assuming that all 64 fugu hospitalizations from 96 to 06 were from restaurant fugu. Over that 10 year period, 15,119,730 servings would have been consumed, 64 of which resulted in hospitalization. That's a rate of one incident per 236,245 servings. If we take the 93-06 restaurant-to-home-caught ratio into consideration and, again being conservative, assume that 90% of the incidents were not at restaurants, then the fugu hospitalization risk would be 1/2.3 million. I'm having a hard time finding injury statistics for automobile driving (fatality stats are easy to come by, but injury stats aren't), but if the fatality rate is 1/12.8 million, then I'm guessing the combined injury-and-fatality rate is like 1/5 million or so (I'd guess that there are two car crash injuries for every car crash death). So assuming a round trip drive to the restaurant, you're probably as likely to get hurt getting to or from the restaurant as you are to get hurt eating the fugu, provided you're eating at a restaurant in Japan. Eating fugu outside Japan, or inside Japan prepared by a fisherman or a friend, would just be stupidity, of course.
(And that's using a lot of conservative guesses. If 10% of the flesh is eaten, then you're twice as likely to get hurt driving to or from the restaurant, if the average portion size is 150g then you're four times as likely to get hurt driving, etc.)
(Also, I just realized I'm being hypocritical, because if a requirement is "eating in Japan" then the odds of driving to or from the restaurant are super low, because you'd take a train. So let's say "if you were to drive to the airport, take a plane to Japan, eat fugu at a restaurant, fly back, and drive back home, the safe part would have been the flight, the neutral part would have been the fugu, and the dangerous part would have been the drive")
(Also note that fugu is super bland, so you'd still do best to decline it, because what's the point of taking even a 1/10 million or 1/100 million or 1/1 billion risk if the reward is just "you get to eat some super bland food")
posted by Bugbread at 7:21 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
64 fugu eaters were hospitalized nationwide.
Did the hospitalized eaters die?
posted by OmieWise at 7:53 AM on September 1, 2016
Did the hospitalized eaters die?
posted by OmieWise at 7:53 AM on September 1, 2016
I don't know - I lay awake thinking about that guy dying slowly in the field with the cows last night. It was seriously hard to sleep, and when I did drift off, I woke up and started thinking about it again. I kept having to tell myself that he was dead and not suffering any more.
Obviously, since I would never, ever wingsuit jump unless someone pointed a gun at me (and then I'd probably just let them shoot me), I would never have worried about this dude's suffering or his family without the media. But isn't that true of any issue that does not affect you immediately?
When I think about people suffering horribly for stupid reasons, I want to fix that. People are a land of contrasts, so I'm sure many of my unconscious motives are selfish, and I think one can plausibly argue that there's only so many hours in the day so we're just going to have to let wingsuit jumping go, but "you would be better off if you avoided news of human suffering because it's all manipulative" doesn't seem like a good approach either.
posted by Frowner at 9:04 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
Obviously, since I would never, ever wingsuit jump unless someone pointed a gun at me (and then I'd probably just let them shoot me), I would never have worried about this dude's suffering or his family without the media. But isn't that true of any issue that does not affect you immediately?
When I think about people suffering horribly for stupid reasons, I want to fix that. People are a land of contrasts, so I'm sure many of my unconscious motives are selfish, and I think one can plausibly argue that there's only so many hours in the day so we're just going to have to let wingsuit jumping go, but "you would be better off if you avoided news of human suffering because it's all manipulative" doesn't seem like a good approach either.
posted by Frowner at 9:04 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'm from a small town in Northern Italy that over the past thirty years has become an international destination for rock climbing and, later, BASE jumping.
17 of the 24 BASE jumping deaths in Italy have happened a couple miles from my house and 16 of those from Monte Brento.
It's a spectacularly stark and beautiful mountain. They bus base jumpers up to the peak these days, most jumpers do multiple jumps a day. The numbers game seems to suggest it's pretty safe but I have to say that the first responders I know are tired of scraping kids off the rocks.
A very small part of me understands the appeal, there is something bigger than the jump that calls to them. I get that. The rest of me wonders if they ever thought their loved ones would listen to their breath as they lay dying in a pasture.
posted by lydhre at 11:32 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
17 of the 24 BASE jumping deaths in Italy have happened a couple miles from my house and 16 of those from Monte Brento.
It's a spectacularly stark and beautiful mountain. They bus base jumpers up to the peak these days, most jumpers do multiple jumps a day. The numbers game seems to suggest it's pretty safe but I have to say that the first responders I know are tired of scraping kids off the rocks.
A very small part of me understands the appeal, there is something bigger than the jump that calls to them. I get that. The rest of me wonders if they ever thought their loved ones would listen to their breath as they lay dying in a pasture.
posted by lydhre at 11:32 AM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
I'm sometimes amazed that there are any men older than 25.
posted by anshuman at 12:20 PM on September 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
posted by anshuman at 12:20 PM on September 1, 2016 [2 favorites]
So what? Why does your wanting to "fix" this justify making a serious intrusion on someone else's decision about what to do with their body and their time?
Wait, let's hold up and not get all internetty here - waaaaay upthread, I said that if I ran the world I'd probably ban this, except that there were probably other more important issues. Then other people argued about this and I was all, yeah, actually, I tend not to support police intrusion into people's lives, so I guess no ban, even when I am Imperator.
But I want to push back a little on "who gets to decide what reasons are stupid". We make decisions about stuff like that all the time as a society. I may want a car without seatbelts but I can't get one, even if I'm the only person who will ever drive the car. I may want my own heavy artillery, or off-the-shelf syringes, or the freedom to poke around in superfund sites on my day off, but we've decided that those things are, to sum up, stupid.
Sometimes we make decisions that are wrong, or we make decisions that are biased. But it's not some kind of weird unprecendented thing that societies evolve mechanisms for valuing different practices.
It seems so strange to me that we live in such a profoundly ordered, controlled, rigid society and yet everyone is stanning for a really dangerous sport on the grounds that banning it is too much interference with our freedom. We're really cool with....oh, name any of the incredibly intrusive things that most of us go through just to get home from work, but even to suggest that dying young, painfully, unexpectedly and totally needlessly might be an objectively bad outcome gets everyone in a tizzy.
posted by Frowner at 12:21 PM on September 1, 2016 [5 favorites]
OmieWise: "Did the hospitalized eaters die?"
Average fatality rate of 6.8%.
But, more important than that...I fucked up on my math, or, rather, I fucked up my reading of the numbers on Wikipedia, which fucked up my numbers. Total reading failure on my end. It wasn't 64 hospitalizations between 1996 and 2006, it was "between 34 and 64 hospitalizations each year between 1996 and 2006". So my numbers are off by a factor of between 7 and 10 (depending on whether the average number was closer to 64 or closer to 34).
So fugu: not as dangerous as generally imagined, but definitely more dangerous than driving a car. That said, not nearly as dangerous as riding a motorcycle.
Greg Nog: "inside japan, it's too dark to read"
Okay, maybe that sentence wasn't so clear. By "Eating fugu outside Japan, or inside Japan prepared by a fisherman or a friend" I meant "(eating fugu outside Japan, period) or (eating fugu inside Japan prepared by a fisherman or friend)".
posted by Bugbread at 2:09 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
Average fatality rate of 6.8%.
But, more important than that...I fucked up on my math, or, rather, I fucked up my reading of the numbers on Wikipedia, which fucked up my numbers. Total reading failure on my end. It wasn't 64 hospitalizations between 1996 and 2006, it was "between 34 and 64 hospitalizations each year between 1996 and 2006". So my numbers are off by a factor of between 7 and 10 (depending on whether the average number was closer to 64 or closer to 34).
So fugu: not as dangerous as generally imagined, but definitely more dangerous than driving a car. That said, not nearly as dangerous as riding a motorcycle.
Greg Nog: "inside japan, it's too dark to read"
Okay, maybe that sentence wasn't so clear. By "Eating fugu outside Japan, or inside Japan prepared by a fisherman or a friend" I meant "(eating fugu outside Japan, period) or (eating fugu inside Japan prepared by a fisherman or friend)".
posted by Bugbread at 2:09 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
So fugu: not as dangerous as generally imagined, but definitely more dangerous than driving a car. That said, not nearly as dangerous as riding a motorcycle.
My original point wasn't about relative risk, it's about knowing that you are taking the risk. Driving is risky, pretty much everyone knows this (though, they may not understand how much riskier it is than, say, flying). Yet many people still choose to drive.
Fugu may not actually be all that risky, but (at least in my mind) it's still riskier than other tasty alternatives. So, if I were to eat fugu, I'd want to know that I was taking the risk.
Basically -- I don't want to make the blanket statement that "if someone does extreme activity X it's their own fault if things go wrong" because there are plenty of values for "X" that include shady operators who will downplay the risks in order to bring in business.
The impression that I get is that in the wingsuit BASE jumping community, the risks are known and understood, and people choose to do the thing anyways, because they love it. And if people know the risks going in, and die doing something they love, that seems like a good death* to me.
*to the extent that any death can be "good." Working to reduce the risk of death is obviously not a bad thing.
posted by sparklemotion at 2:14 PM on September 1, 2016
My original point wasn't about relative risk, it's about knowing that you are taking the risk. Driving is risky, pretty much everyone knows this (though, they may not understand how much riskier it is than, say, flying). Yet many people still choose to drive.
Fugu may not actually be all that risky, but (at least in my mind) it's still riskier than other tasty alternatives. So, if I were to eat fugu, I'd want to know that I was taking the risk.
Basically -- I don't want to make the blanket statement that "if someone does extreme activity X it's their own fault if things go wrong" because there are plenty of values for "X" that include shady operators who will downplay the risks in order to bring in business.
The impression that I get is that in the wingsuit BASE jumping community, the risks are known and understood, and people choose to do the thing anyways, because they love it. And if people know the risks going in, and die doing something they love, that seems like a good death* to me.
*to the extent that any death can be "good." Working to reduce the risk of death is obviously not a bad thing.
posted by sparklemotion at 2:14 PM on September 1, 2016
sparklemotion: "My original point wasn't about relative risk, it's about knowing that you are taking the risk."
Oh, sorry, I got your point, and I wasn't disagreeing. It was just an aside about how fugu's reputation far exceeds its reality.
posted by Bugbread at 3:50 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
Oh, sorry, I got your point, and I wasn't disagreeing. It was just an aside about how fugu's reputation far exceeds its reality.
posted by Bugbread at 3:50 PM on September 1, 2016 [1 favorite]
The problem is that you are arguing that the upset-ness of willing third-party observers is a normatively acceptable basis for banning an activity.
Perhaps there was a misreading of my comment - were you reading
Because I was truly upset by the description of the guy dying in the first article!!! Surely that is sufficient?
Because, if so, I had hoped that "surely this is sufficient" was enough to signal "I am being sarcastic about my own views because you have pointed out an inconsistency". But maybe that didn't come through? Obviously "I find this upsetting, it shouldn't happen" is stupid reasoning. "Lots of people find this very very upsetting and are horribly traumatized in ways we can quantify" would be a legit argument, but that's not what I'm saying.
Then I disagreed with you about the whole "the only reason people care about things is because they know about them, turn off the TV" bit, because I think that's a rather hazardous line of thinking. There are lots of things we only care about because we know about them from the news, obviously.
posted by Frowner at 5:51 PM on September 1, 2016
Perhaps there was a misreading of my comment - were you reading
Because I was truly upset by the description of the guy dying in the first article!!! Surely that is sufficient?
Because, if so, I had hoped that "surely this is sufficient" was enough to signal "I am being sarcastic about my own views because you have pointed out an inconsistency". But maybe that didn't come through? Obviously "I find this upsetting, it shouldn't happen" is stupid reasoning. "Lots of people find this very very upsetting and are horribly traumatized in ways we can quantify" would be a legit argument, but that's not what I'm saying.
Then I disagreed with you about the whole "the only reason people care about things is because they know about them, turn off the TV" bit, because I think that's a rather hazardous line of thinking. There are lots of things we only care about because we know about them from the news, obviously.
posted by Frowner at 5:51 PM on September 1, 2016
agggh that kiwi video should have a trigger warning for sappiness!
*sniff* you have wings on your heart, little fella! *sob*
seriously folks do not watch that video while enjoying a glass or two of wine
this has nothing to do with wingsuits or fugu; carry on
posted by AV at 7:31 PM on September 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
*sniff* you have wings on your heart, little fella! *sob*
seriously folks do not watch that video while enjoying a glass or two of wine
this has nothing to do with wingsuits or fugu; carry on
posted by AV at 7:31 PM on September 2, 2016 [1 favorite]
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posted by Frowner at 9:43 AM on August 31, 2016 [1 favorite]