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Nick
climber
portland, Oregon
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Dec 20, 2008 - 03:22pm PT
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I am not a physicist, nor do I play one on TV. But, it seems obvious that at some point a system becomes so complicated that predicting outcomes becomes very difficult. If I understand it correctly, I am probably just blowing hot air as usual, complexity theory basically states that when qualitative factors are added into a linear system the system become less predictable. Trad climbing has many very important qualitative components, probably the most important being the confidence and competence of both belayer and climber. So it seems to me, sport climbing with big fat bolts and a grigri is a fairly simple system and therefore safer because it is easier to manage all the components. Trad climbing with natural anchors is much more complex and it is much more difficult to predict outcomes. Trad climbing given the same climbing partners operating in the same fashion is more dangerous than sport. What the hell am I trying to say here? Danger is subjective and difficult to measure. We all make judgment calls everyday. For me, if a person’s skill is in question, I tend toward sport climbing. If I judge a person to be incompetent and no fun to climb with, well I won’t be tying in with them any time soon. If a partner has the whole package, skills, attitude and experience I will hop on almost any climb within my ability. It’s all about the people. Good attitude and good skills make a safer and more enjoyable climb.
3” of snow in Portland and the city is paralyzed.
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jstan
climber
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Dec 20, 2008 - 04:15pm PT
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Statistics is an attempt to calculate probabilities when we lack critical information. Mortality tables do this without considering whether some people are climbers or base jumpers. Our failure to construct special populations does not mean the statistics are meaningless. It only means their interpretation needs to acknowledge our ignorance.
This poll might be construed as an attempt to construct such a special population but I warn you be prepared for criticism. First the data will be biased because it is based on only on those persons who are strange enough to volunteer information and who are still alive. It also needs to break out a subgroup of those climbers having two left feet.
To my mind the more interesting question is whether technical rock climbing, previously considered to be affected mainly by objective risk, is not taking on a stronger hue of subjective risk. Alpine climbers face subjective risks over which they have no control such as when a weather front comes at them from behind the peak. Climbers now use a greater variety of pre-placed devices to assure safety. Such as bolts that can no more be assessed than can the weather, and that wondrous entity the “fixed quick draw.”
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Jay Wood
Trad climber
Fairfax, CA
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Dec 21, 2008 - 04:23pm PT
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Ok, 1/429 chance of dying sounds bad.
As I read it:
1 death per 15,000 climber days assumed.
35 climbing days per year assumed.
15,000/35= 429
This says that if you climbed 35 days per year for 429 years, you would statistically die during that time.
Now, since most of us won't be able to climb for that long- lets say 40 years. So then the odds are 1/10 as much, or 1/4,290
Or another way:
If you climbed EVERY day from age 16 to age 57 (15,000/365=41 years), you would statistically have 100% chance of dying during that time.
Other thoughts that comes up re climbing partner safety:
If you are very conservative in choice of partners, it will be vastly safer, because your partner won't be able to go (schedule, injury, wife, moved, etc.), so you won't climb. And since an unknown, and therefore unsafe, partner is so risky, then you will sit home eating fried food (1/400 mortality odds from heart disease).
Further, if, against your better judgement, you do practice 'unsafe climbing', it is likely that your partner will find you annoying, (and slow, since you are overweight) and not climb with you again! (insert odds of depression mortality here)
But if you rally, and get off the couch, you can hire Dr. Yoho to staple your stomach as part of you weight- loss plan. (1/300 mortality risk)
I do like the emphasis on taking more responsibility for one's partner safety level...
Personally, I tend to distribute and promote the use of rappel back-up loops.
Kind of like handing out condoms....
End of musings- carry on.
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murcy
climber
San Fran Cisco
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Dec 21, 2008 - 05:02pm PT
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Having climbed with you, Jay, I can vouch for your safety practices. But I have some reservations about your math.
If one climber dies for every 429 climbing-years (with 35 climbing days per climbing year), then each climber has 1/429 chance of dying every year. That doesn't mean a climber who climbs for 429 years is certain to die, any more than a fair coin is guaranteed to land tails in two tosses (the actual chance of that is .75), or a fair die to show a six in six rolls (actual chance is .66).
Where p is the probability of dying in any given year, and y is the number of years, the chance of NOT dying in y years is (1-p) raised to the power y, and the chance of dying is 1 minus that.
If there's a 1/429 chance of dying every year, then:
YEARS CHANCE
1 0.002
10 0.023
20 0.046
30 0.068
40 0.089
50 0.110
429 0.633
Like the original article said, those are some pretty high odds of buying the farm. Whether they're applicable to a given climber is a whole nother question.
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murcy
climber
San Fran Cisco
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Dec 21, 2008 - 05:10pm PT
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yes, but use bendy, rubber-tipped needles.
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Jay Wood
Trad climber
Fairfax, CA
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Dec 21, 2008 - 05:40pm PT
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Murcy-
Whoa. We were climbing sluts, and no one died!
So are you saying that in the 429 years illustration, in year 429 you have a 2/3 chance of dying, if you're not dead yet?
I'm actually most interested in the relative risks of climbing, and driving.
In discussing the difference between fear and danger, I use the example of driving i.e.
If you weren't accustomed to it, you would sh#t your pants when driving down the highway with other cars passing a few feet away at combined speeds of over 100 mph.
And in fact this is arguably more risky than climbing, where at least you have some idea of your partner's state, unlike the hundreds of potentially drunk, stoned, ill, or distracted drivers passing you daily.
Khanom-
It is 100% certain that you will die, no matter how much you climb.
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Matt
Trad climber
primordial soup
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Dec 21, 2008 - 07:19pm PT
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"...with whom..."
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Jay Wood
Trad climber
Fairfax, CA
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Dec 21, 2008 - 08:08pm PT
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Need more information.
-Would you rather die climbing, or knitting?
-If climbing, would you prefer to die on moderate, or hard route?
-Would you prefer to die by falling, personal lapse (rap off rope, etc.), or environmental conditions (rockfall, exposure)
-Do you favor biting it on cracks, slab, choss, or ? (needed to predict route)
-Should your partner be nOOb, experienced, man/woman, or should you be with secondary person such as paramedic?
-Why do want to know, and if you knew would you take steps to change the outcome?
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Porkchop_express
Trad climber
thats what she said...
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Dec 21, 2008 - 10:13pm PT
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I think the last question really hits it on the head. I wouldn't want to know. It would really take the fun out of everything before dying and the looming ever after would be that much more prominent in my mind.
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G_Gnome
Trad climber
In the mountains... somewhere...
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Dec 21, 2008 - 10:48pm PT
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And if I climb 150 days a year but I never get more than 4 feet off the ground on 100 of those days, what are my odds. The only thing I have figured out is that at some point I am going to die. It might as well be while climbing! I just hope if I go splat it is somewhere remote enough that my partner can walk away and the tools will never find me and desecrate my body.
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Wade Icey
Trad climber
www.alohashirtrescue.com
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Dec 22, 2008 - 01:41pm PT
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g-nome- your odds of a bruised heel are astronomical. consider a pad.
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Doug Hemken
climber
Madison, WI
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Dec 22, 2008 - 02:03pm PT
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Suppose an urn contains 1 white ball and 9999 red balls.
Each day you remove one ball, selected uniformly at random, then return the ball to the urn. The game ends the day you remove the white ball.
What is the probability you will play for less than 350 days?
(Hint: what is the cumulative probability/ distribution function of a geometric random variable?)
What is the expected number of days you will play?
How many days would you expect to play if the urn contained 19999 red balls and 1 white ball?
Consider the Valley as an urn. Is every ball equally likely to be selected?
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TradIsGood
Chalkless climber
the Gunks end of the country
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Dec 22, 2008 - 02:08pm PT
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It depends....
on how much a red ball is worth, and your utility function.
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looking sketchy there...
Social climber
Latitute 33
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Dec 22, 2008 - 03:45pm PT
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Of course several people have made the same point, but I'll try to be clever and say it another way.
Any pure statisitical analysis (red/white balls) or allegedly relevant stats (climbing accident rates in the Valley) are meaningless.
The Human factor is impossible to quantify, but is at the heart of risk in climbing.
While Bob's article does emphasize choosing good climbing partners, in attempting to quantify how this is done he strays off-route...
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ricardo
Gym climber
San Francisco, CA
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Dec 22, 2008 - 04:29pm PT
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seems to me that you can greatly lower your chances of being killed by your partner while climbing by soloing ..
Someone once told me that if i survived my first year of leading, that I would then be ok .. they were right .. on that first year i made the following mistakes
1 - almost rapped while having belay device attached to harness gear loop. (double check caught that)
2 - led 5.9 when i was a 5.7 leader. (that was dumb)
3 - rapped off a fixed line that was attached to a locking carabiner, which was unlocked.
4 - slipped while downclimbing a 5.easy section of rock. (luckily i was attached to a line via a prussik)
5 - epiced while leading or rappelling a few times.
.. i wonder if there are statistics of how many leaders die in their first year.
.. i think that pete once summed it up .. -- you're going to make mistakes .. and usually a single mistake won't kill you .. (climbing is very safe because we usually use redundant systems) -- just hope that you dont make 2 or 3 mistakes at the same time ..
.. most fatalities happened because you made 3 mistakes at the same time.
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dmitry
Trad climber
the evil empire
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Dec 22, 2008 - 06:10pm PT
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I would climb with anyone, but am a little choosier about the difficulty of the routes and would not really climb something under protected that I was likely to fall on when climbing with someone I don't know much about.
I prefer to do harder and scarier stuff with someone I can trust.
Seems like common sense...
Cheers,
d
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Hawkeye
climber
State of Mine
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Dec 22, 2008 - 06:29pm PT
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its not the climbing that is risky it is hitting the ground.
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TradIsGood
Chalkless climber
the Gunks end of the country
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Dec 22, 2008 - 07:00pm PT
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First year?!!
Most leaders who die do it in their last year.
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Daphne
Trad climber
San Rafael, CA
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Dec 22, 2008 - 09:35pm PT
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very funny Jay
I suppose it really increased your confidence in your safety to have been the one to teach me how to climb. Thanks for being one of the safest climbers I have climbed with-- up to now.
I can only add that this forum is filled with people who will passionately discuss what is the safest and what is the most risk tolerable although they never come into agreement about either one.
As a noob I have seen personally that experience, length of time climbing, and self-confidence don't stop mistakes from being made by those on the sharp end. But I am still around, even with mistakes being made, so maybe those qualities are enough to keep a climber alive.
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Doug Hemken
climber
Madison, WI
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Dec 23, 2008 - 12:38pm PT
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It's true that numbers only tell part of the story. But even a very simplistic probability model can be informative:
If the probability of picking a white ball out of the urn is 1/10,000, then the probability of picking a white ball within the first 350 rounds of play is 34/1,000. Does that sound horribly risky?
How many rounds would you "expect" to play in this game? The average length of play is 9999 picks of the red ball, or 10,000 rounds total. That would be over 27 years of daily play. If you only play 35 rounds per year, the average length of play would be 285 years. Does that sound horribly risky?
If the probability of picking the white ball is 1/20,000, then the average length of play doubles, and you expect to play for 54 years if you play daily. At 35 rounds per year, that stretches to 571 years of occasional play. How risky does that sound?
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