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It's a great example. This is the very reason I have scaled back the amount of time I rock climb as I've gotten older -- not because any individual outing is da

It's a great example. This is the very reason I have scaled back the amount of time I rock climb as I've gotten older -- not because any individual outing is dangerous, but there's an element of Russian roulette wherein the mere act of doing it more often dramatically changes the risk.

HWR_14 5y ago
> the mere act of doing it more often dramatically changes the risk. Kind of. However, you already know that the first N outings didn't have a disaster. So those should be discarded from your analysis. Doing it N times more has a lot of risk, doing it the N+1th time has barely any.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  The "slippery slope" principle applies here though: N+1 enables N+2, which enables N+3 and so on.
  - mkolodny 5y ago
    Slippery slope is a fallacy, not a principle. Just because you took N steps, that doesn't necessarily mean you will take N+1 steps. It's a convincing fallacy because sometimes you do take N+1 steps. But just like in the article, heuristics aren't always right.
    - vojvod 5y ago
      Slippery slope arguments aren't inherently fallacious. If you can justify one more climb on the grounds that probability of injury or death is very low then you will be able to justify every subsequent climb on the same basis.
      - mkolodny 5y ago
        Slippery slope arguments are inherently fallacies. They don't prove that something will happen. Just because you can justify the next climb on the same basis, that doesn't mean you will. You could decide that you've already tested the odds one too many times.
        vojvod 5y ago
        "You could decide that you've already tested the odds one too many times" was the original point. Someone responded that the N previous times don't matter and N + 1 has barely any risk. Another poster countered that that argument as stated applies not just for N + 1 but for (N + 1) + 1 etc and therefore the slippery slope principle applies. Of course if you add in "you could decide that you've already tested the odds one too many times" then it's a fallacy to invoke slippery slope because an off-ramp is explicitly specified. In this case slippery slope was mentioned only because N was dismissed as irrelevant.
        bhuber 5y ago
        Don't get on that greased sliding board that ends at the top of a cliff. Once you start sliding, it will be hard to stop because of the grease, and then once you slide off then end you will fall and die. Do you really think this slippery slope argument is a fallacy? FWIW, wikipedia acknowledges slippery slope can be a legit argument when the slope, and it's chain of consequences, are actually real. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope . Indeed, this is the very basis of mathematical induction.
        mkolodny 5y ago
        From your linked article: > The fallacious sense of "slippery slope" is often used synonymously with continuum fallacy, in that it ignores the possibility of middle ground and assumes a discrete transition from category A to category B. In this sense, it constitutes an informal fallacy. "If you take N steps, you will take N+1 steps" is a fallacy whenever it's possible that you won't take N+1 steps.
        5y ago
      - bear8642 5y ago
        >If you can justify one more … Reminds me of Terry Pratchett quote "No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.” Full quote is fifth here: <https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/819104-thud https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/819104-thud>
    - HPsquared 5y ago
      When accounting for human psychology it does have validity: doing an enjoyable activity "one more time" has a risk of a habit forming, which has a non-zero probability. It is indeed possible. The argument can certainly be used in a fallacious manner (e.g. by greatly exaggerating the probability of the further steps, saying they are inevitable if the first step is taken, etc.). It's logically valid to say that the first step enables subsequent steps to be taken. Edit: I'd say that the slippery slope is perfectly valid rule of thumb in a lot of 'adversarial' situations. Once one side makes an error or fails somehow, the balance between the two sides can be disrupted leading to one 'side' gaining momentum. Just as between people, a similar 'adversarial' process can occur within the minds of individuals: between two ideas or patterns of thought/behaviour, one idea can gain momentum after a decision has been reached. Precedence is a strong force.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
      Like all fallacies, it's only a fallacy when it's fallacious. Otherwise, it's just a regular d argument.
      - HPsquared 5y ago
        Maybe fallacies could be renamed "logical hazards" or something like that. Arguments that are at high risk of being false and require extra care, but not automatically false.
    - afiori 5y ago
      A pet peeve of mine is that the slippery slope fallacy can be defined as "modus ponens but wrong". A fallacy should be a incorrect shape of an argument, a incorrect reasoning, not just a false statement.
  - aaronblohowiak 5y ago
    but the risk is independent. so once you do the N+1 time safely, you are back to N and your next time is _also_ just an N+1.
    - pessimizer 5y ago
      Continuing to do something regularly doesn't ever mean you're just going to do it once more.
      - nefitty 5y ago
        Psychologically, behaving in a certain way makes it more likely that you'll behave in the same way in the future. That's an integral idea underpinning justice systems.
    - twobitshifter 5y ago
      True but it would be incorrect to assume that you can safely keep basejumping every day in a year, just because you haven’t died in the last 50 days. Eventually the stats say you will be 87% likely to have an accident when you consider your choice at the beginning of the year. It might be day 20 or day 300, but you won’t know what case you end up in. The chance of your next jump being your last is always the same, but that doesn’t decrease the risk of repeated trials.
      - jrochkind1 5y ago
        Not exactly. If you've done it 50 days without an accident, your current chances of the accident happening in the remainder of the year are NOW less than 87%. If you've made it Jan 1 to July 1 months without an accident, the chances of you making it to Dec 31 are now better than they were on Jan 1 -- because now they are just the chances of you making it six months, not a year. The chances of flipping 6 heads in a row are 1/64. But if I've already flipped 3 in a row... the chances of flipping three _more_ heads in a row is 1/8, the same as always for flipping 3 heads in a row. The ones that already happened don't effect your future chances.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  If you'll die if a roll of three dice comes up sixes, you're not really in a lot of danger. If you do it every day, you have about 15 months to live.
  - barrenko 5y ago
    Yup. Don't do stuff (repeatedly) that have an absorbing barrier - https://medium.com/ml-everything/nassim-taleb-absorbent-barriers-and-house-money-8b21cff2e338 https://medium.com/ml-everything/nassim-taleb-absorbent-barr...
  - moralestapia 5y ago
    >you have about 15 months to live Or a few minutes ... or 20 years. That's the thing w/ statistically independent trials.
    - ska 5y ago
      That's like the difference between You could win 100mm in the lottery (true statement!) Lottery tickets are a good investment (almost always, false statement). Planning on "well it could happen, technically" isn't a good approach.
      - blunte 5y ago
        But when looking at a possible positive outcome, such as the lottery case, it can "make sense" to buy one ticket. Your chance of winning goes from No Chance to A Chance, which is an infinite improvement.
        ska 5y ago
        That's not how this works as a rational investment choice. It's true that you can never win a lottery you don't enter, but the expected value of that ticket is vastly lower than what you paid for it. That means, as an investment, your $10 will be expected to do better in literally anything with a positive return. If you are buying > $10 worth of dreaming (for you), fine - but that's consumption.
- montebicyclelo 5y ago
  The parent comment talks about scaling back the amount of rock climbing they do in order to reduce risk.. And now you are saying that they should go one more time, because a single climb is low risk?
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    Yes. I am saying their analysis of risk is incorrect, and therefore if that's the only reason they aren't climbing then they should climb more often.
    - MattPalmer1086 5y ago
      I disagree, their analysis is perfectly correct. The more frequently you take a risk, the greater the chance that risk materialises. Parent wants to lower their overall risk, but doesn't want to stop climbing entirely. So they climb less often.
    - mort96 5y ago
      I think you're reading it wrong. After a long life of rock climbing, there's no significant risk of doing it one last time or 10 last times (ignoring the effect of old age itself and whatever). But when you're in earlier stages of your life, you're asking a different question: You're asking, is this something I want to do hundreds or thousands of times in my life, knowing that each of those times has a small chance of ending my life? This becomes a completely different question. If I'm 35, maybe I will climb 30 times per year on average for 30 years until I'm 65. That's 900 climbs in total. If my goal is to not die or experience serious injury from rock climbing even once in my life, I have to consider the chance that any one of those 900 climbs will result in serious injury or death. I don't know the numbers for the risks involved, but it seems reasonable to be cautious. Maybe I don't want to give up on rock climbing altogether, but maybe I can scale it back. If I limit myself to 1 climb per year, that's 30 climbs in total. Much lower risk than with 900 climbs. This is not a logical fallacy.
      - HWR_14 5y ago
        That would be a reason to have not climbed more than a specific rate ever. It wouldn't be a reason to scale down the rate of climbing as you age.
- srcreigh 5y ago
  Under this assumption, by the principal of mathematical induction, you can easily do it K more times for any K without taking on barely any risk at each step of the way.
- 323 5y ago
  This is called the Turkey fallacy: the turkey was feed by humans for 1000 days, and after each feed event he updated his belief that humans care for him until it's now almost a statistical certainty.
  - lapetitejort 5y ago
    Is this the reverse of the Gambler's Fallacy? Instead of "The numbers haven't hit in a while, therefore they're going to hit soon." it's "The numbers haven't hit yet, therefore they're never gonna hit."
    - jaggederest 5y ago
      Also known as complacency. Working in a woodshop, one of the things you are most vulnerable to is failing to respect the danger you're in. This is why many experienced woodworkers have been injured by e.g. a table saw - you stop being as careful after such long exposure.
      - 323 5y ago
        A related thing is normalization of deviance. You start removing safety because you see nothing bad happened before, until you are at a point where almost no safety rules are respected anymore. You can see this a lot in construction videos.
      - toss1 5y ago
        Yup, complacency can kill you. In this case [0], a skydiver forgot to put on his parachute... https://reverentialramblings.com/2018/08/15/the-skydiver-who-forgot-his-parachute/ https://reverentialramblings.com/2018/08/15/the-skydiver-who...
        ask_b123 5y ago
        Wow, that's terrifying and a good cautionary tale. Also, when I read > I’m hoping you can you forgive me as a minister of religion for likening this story to a spiritual cautionary tale. Yes, we do need to live each day as if it might be our last. I thought, "Hmm, sounds adventist", and sure enough :-)
- jvanderbot 5y ago
  In a skill-based game, N+1 has less incremental risk than adding 1 more trial with N-1 games did.
- mrow84 5y ago
  This assumes a lot about the underlying process, particularly independence. Whilst assuming independence might hold reasonably well for low numbers of samples, the assumption might be increasingly (and dangerously) misleading. The intuition expressed by GP captures that.
- NineStarPoint 5y ago
  The point is that they're changing their habits. Of course we ignore the n times they've gone before, now instead of their habits meaning they'd go m more times in the future, they're going to be going p times in the future for some p that is much less than m. So it's not about how often they've done it over their lifetime so far, but about how many times they will be doing it over the rest of their life.
derbOac 5y ago
"There are bold X, and old X, but no old, bold X." Replace X with any practitioners subject to sufficient risk as a result of their practice. I first heard it in the context of mushroom foraging.
- TeeMassive 5y ago
  Yet the older they are the more they test in production.
- marttt 5y ago
  A WTA top 70 tennis player from my country (aged 35+, thus possibly facing the end of her pro career) recently rephrased a well known proverb: "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger -- or, crippled."
- pugets 5y ago
  This line is famous in aviation, where X = pilots
  - derbOac 5y ago
    Yeah after I read that many years ago I saw it come up in several other contexts (including aviation) and realized it probably originated elsewhere.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  Mountaineers is where I heard it.
- timClicks 5y ago
  The risks are highest when learners are at a beginner to intermediate stage. They know the basics, and have gained some confidence, but don't know enough to get themselves out of trouble. This is called Stage 1 in the Gordon Model of learning: unconscious incompetence.
  - Breza 5y ago
    That reminds me of when a family friend from church needed help clearing his land and thought the easiest approach would be to teach an overconfident 14 year old (me) to drive his tractor. He told me I would never be worse at operating it than the second time we went out. He was right.
segmondy 5y ago
I would imagine that if you scale back enough tho, you won't be as sharp. Sure the odds increase the more you do it, but not just because you do it, but often because of other variables, such as the weather, not listening to your body, over confidence, etc.
hgomersall 5y ago
"Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end" ~Edward Whymper
kqr 5y ago
Also known as the Kelly criterion. If one possible outcome of an action is associated with a great enough loss, it doesn't make sense to perform the action no matter how unlikely the loss.
- Fernicia 5y ago
  Isn't that called Pascal's Wager?
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    Which of course directly leads to Pascal's Mugging: I can simply say "I'm a god, give me $10000 or you will burn in hell for all eternity". Now if you follow Pascal's Wager or GP's logic you have to give me the money: I'm probably lying, but the potential downside is too great to risk upsetting me.
    - kqr 5y ago
      There's actually a rational explanation for that: humans don't care very much about burning in hell for all eternity, when it comes down to it. There's actually a similar though experiment that might seem even more bizarre: I could tell you "give me $100 or I will kill you tomorrow" and you probably wouldn't give me the $100. That's because when it comes down to it, humans don't see the loss of their life as that big a deal as one might think. It's a big deal, of course, but in combination with the low likelihood, still not big enough to forgo the $100.
      - dsr_ 5y ago
        Here's the thing: if you have just killed five people, "give me $100 or I will kill you tomorrow" becomes a much more effective threat. One-time games and repeated games have different strategies.
        kqr 5y ago
        It becomes more effective only because it changes the probability estimation of the outcome. Life is a repeated game of decisions that compound on each other, so that difference is irrelevant.
JadeNB 5y ago
> It's a great example. This is the very reason I have scaled back the amount of time I rock climb as I've gotten older -- not because any individual outing is dangerous, but there's an element of Russian roulette wherein the mere act of doing it more often dramatically changes the risk. Indoor climbing, and especially bouldering, can be a lot of fun at the right gym, and with dramatically reduced risk of death (though injury is still a very real possibility, I say, recalling all the time I spent nursing my sprained ankle).
vincentmarle 5y ago
This is called ergodic theory, the more you repeat an action that could result in catastrophe, the likelihood of that catastrophe occuring will be close to 100% if the number of events is high enough.
- epolanski 5y ago
  But that doesn't imply any higher probability. Say chance of dying when doing alpinism is one in a thousand. The 1000th time you go climbing the chances of dying are still 1/1000. If you get 100 heads in a row, the 101th time you launch a coin the chance of getting heads is still 50%.
  - ska 5y ago
    Right, but it's easy to conflate two very things here: "What are my chances of dying in a climbing accident", and "What are my chances of dying today if I go climbing". If you are on a plane, you* have a lower risk of some kinds of cancer than the airline staff do. This has nothing to do with the flight you are both on, and everything to do with accumulated flights "you*" = for most people, i.e. barring a counteracting risk factor.
  - kenjackson 5y ago
    This is exactly why people who do high risk think it will never happen to them.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
yodsanklai 5y ago
That's the reason why I don't cycle in London. When I moved there, I thought I would be using my bike daily like I was used to. But over the span of a few years, I'm pretty sure the risk of serious injury becomes significant. For rock climbing, you're probably right. I remember training in a climbing hall, when I saw someone falling off the highest wall. The tenant of the hall didn't look surprised at all. Apparently, it happens frequently. That being said, if you serious about security, I'm sure the risk can be minimal.
- chimprich 5y ago
  You can contrast the odds of getting injured with the health benefits. The cardiovascular benefits would seem to outweigh the risks of getting injured from a mathematical point of view. See e.g. https://blogs.bmj.com/bjsm/2018/12/12/pedal-power-the-health-benefits-of-cycling-outweigh-the-risks-by-far/ https://blogs.bmj.com/bjsm/2018/12/12/pedal-power-the-health...
  - kenjackson 5y ago
    Lots of ways to get even better cardio benefits with much less risk.
e40 5y ago
Same reason I sold my motorcycle when I was 30. I had a good run of not being maimed, but the odds were not good for the future.
blunte 5y ago
You would probably be at less risk if you continued rock climbing but eschewed driving (or riding in) a car.
zmmmmm 5y ago
I took the same approach with motorcycling. I decided to do it for 3 years while at university because it had a transformative impact on my lifestyle. But I also decided the odds were way too bad to keep doing it my whole life. So I stopped and haven't done it since then.
- gilbetron 5y ago
  I only owned a bicycle for several years at the same age, and have since mostly used a car to get around. I've been in various, relatively minor accidents with both, and have always wanted to try using a motorcycle, but it seems to take the risks of both biking and driving and puts them together!
throwaway6532 5y ago
This is why I don't drive or talk to people anymore.

HWR_14 5y ago

> the mere act of doing it more often dramatically changes the risk. Kind of. However, you already know that the first N outings didn't have a disaster. So those should be discarded from your analysis. Doing it N times more has a lot of risk, doing it the N+1th time has barely any.

HPsquared 5y ago
The "slippery slope" principle applies here though: N+1 enables N+2, which enables N+3 and so on.
- mkolodny 5y ago
  Slippery slope is a fallacy, not a principle. Just because you took N steps, that doesn't necessarily mean you will take N+1 steps. It's a convincing fallacy because sometimes you do take N+1 steps. But just like in the article, heuristics aren't always right.
  - vojvod 5y ago
    Slippery slope arguments aren't inherently fallacious. If you can justify one more climb on the grounds that probability of injury or death is very low then you will be able to justify every subsequent climb on the same basis.
    - mkolodny 5y ago
      Slippery slope arguments are inherently fallacies. They don't prove that something will happen. Just because you can justify the next climb on the same basis, that doesn't mean you will. You could decide that you've already tested the odds one too many times.
      - vojvod 5y ago
        "You could decide that you've already tested the odds one too many times" was the original point. Someone responded that the N previous times don't matter and N + 1 has barely any risk. Another poster countered that that argument as stated applies not just for N + 1 but for (N + 1) + 1 etc and therefore the slippery slope principle applies. Of course if you add in "you could decide that you've already tested the odds one too many times" then it's a fallacy to invoke slippery slope because an off-ramp is explicitly specified. In this case slippery slope was mentioned only because N was dismissed as irrelevant.
      - bhuber 5y ago
        Don't get on that greased sliding board that ends at the top of a cliff. Once you start sliding, it will be hard to stop because of the grease, and then once you slide off then end you will fall and die. Do you really think this slippery slope argument is a fallacy? FWIW, wikipedia acknowledges slippery slope can be a legit argument when the slope, and it's chain of consequences, are actually real. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope . Indeed, this is the very basis of mathematical induction.
        mkolodny 5y ago
        From your linked article: > The fallacious sense of "slippery slope" is often used synonymously with continuum fallacy, in that it ignores the possibility of middle ground and assumes a discrete transition from category A to category B. In this sense, it constitutes an informal fallacy. "If you take N steps, you will take N+1 steps" is a fallacy whenever it's possible that you won't take N+1 steps.
        5y ago
    - bear8642 5y ago
      >If you can justify one more … Reminds me of Terry Pratchett quote "No excuses. No excuses at all. Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.” Full quote is fifth here: <https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/819104-thud https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/819104-thud>
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    When accounting for human psychology it does have validity: doing an enjoyable activity "one more time" has a risk of a habit forming, which has a non-zero probability. It is indeed possible. The argument can certainly be used in a fallacious manner (e.g. by greatly exaggerating the probability of the further steps, saying they are inevitable if the first step is taken, etc.). It's logically valid to say that the first step enables subsequent steps to be taken. Edit: I'd say that the slippery slope is perfectly valid rule of thumb in a lot of 'adversarial' situations. Once one side makes an error or fails somehow, the balance between the two sides can be disrupted leading to one 'side' gaining momentum. Just as between people, a similar 'adversarial' process can occur within the minds of individuals: between two ideas or patterns of thought/behaviour, one idea can gain momentum after a decision has been reached. Precedence is a strong force.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 5y ago
    Like all fallacies, it's only a fallacy when it's fallacious. Otherwise, it's just a regular d argument.
    - HPsquared 5y ago
      Maybe fallacies could be renamed "logical hazards" or something like that. Arguments that are at high risk of being false and require extra care, but not automatically false.
  - afiori 5y ago
    A pet peeve of mine is that the slippery slope fallacy can be defined as "modus ponens but wrong". A fallacy should be a incorrect shape of an argument, a incorrect reasoning, not just a false statement.
- aaronblohowiak 5y ago
  but the risk is independent. so once you do the N+1 time safely, you are back to N and your next time is _also_ just an N+1.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Continuing to do something regularly doesn't ever mean you're just going to do it once more.
    - nefitty 5y ago
      Psychologically, behaving in a certain way makes it more likely that you'll behave in the same way in the future. That's an integral idea underpinning justice systems.
  - twobitshifter 5y ago
    True but it would be incorrect to assume that you can safely keep basejumping every day in a year, just because you haven’t died in the last 50 days. Eventually the stats say you will be 87% likely to have an accident when you consider your choice at the beginning of the year. It might be day 20 or day 300, but you won’t know what case you end up in. The chance of your next jump being your last is always the same, but that doesn’t decrease the risk of repeated trials.
    - jrochkind1 5y ago
      Not exactly. If you've done it 50 days without an accident, your current chances of the accident happening in the remainder of the year are NOW less than 87%. If you've made it Jan 1 to July 1 months without an accident, the chances of you making it to Dec 31 are now better than they were on Jan 1 -- because now they are just the chances of you making it six months, not a year. The chances of flipping 6 heads in a row are 1/64. But if I've already flipped 3 in a row... the chances of flipping three _more_ heads in a row is 1/8, the same as always for flipping 3 heads in a row. The ones that already happened don't effect your future chances.
pessimizer 5y ago
If you'll die if a roll of three dice comes up sixes, you're not really in a lot of danger. If you do it every day, you have about 15 months to live.
- barrenko 5y ago
  Yup. Don't do stuff (repeatedly) that have an absorbing barrier - https://medium.com/ml-everything/nassim-taleb-absorbent-barriers-and-house-money-8b21cff2e338 https://medium.com/ml-everything/nassim-taleb-absorbent-barr...
- moralestapia 5y ago
  >you have about 15 months to live Or a few minutes ... or 20 years. That's the thing w/ statistically independent trials.
  - ska 5y ago
    That's like the difference between You could win 100mm in the lottery (true statement!) Lottery tickets are a good investment (almost always, false statement). Planning on "well it could happen, technically" isn't a good approach.
    - blunte 5y ago
      But when looking at a possible positive outcome, such as the lottery case, it can "make sense" to buy one ticket. Your chance of winning goes from No Chance to A Chance, which is an infinite improvement.
      - ska 5y ago
        That's not how this works as a rational investment choice. It's true that you can never win a lottery you don't enter, but the expected value of that ticket is vastly lower than what you paid for it. That means, as an investment, your $10 will be expected to do better in literally anything with a positive return. If you are buying > $10 worth of dreaming (for you), fine - but that's consumption.
montebicyclelo 5y ago
The parent comment talks about scaling back the amount of rock climbing they do in order to reduce risk.. And now you are saying that they should go one more time, because a single climb is low risk?
- HWR_14 5y ago
  Yes. I am saying their analysis of risk is incorrect, and therefore if that's the only reason they aren't climbing then they should climb more often.
  - MattPalmer1086 5y ago
    I disagree, their analysis is perfectly correct. The more frequently you take a risk, the greater the chance that risk materialises. Parent wants to lower their overall risk, but doesn't want to stop climbing entirely. So they climb less often.
  - mort96 5y ago
    I think you're reading it wrong. After a long life of rock climbing, there's no significant risk of doing it one last time or 10 last times (ignoring the effect of old age itself and whatever). But when you're in earlier stages of your life, you're asking a different question: You're asking, is this something I want to do hundreds or thousands of times in my life, knowing that each of those times has a small chance of ending my life? This becomes a completely different question. If I'm 35, maybe I will climb 30 times per year on average for 30 years until I'm 65. That's 900 climbs in total. If my goal is to not die or experience serious injury from rock climbing even once in my life, I have to consider the chance that any one of those 900 climbs will result in serious injury or death. I don't know the numbers for the risks involved, but it seems reasonable to be cautious. Maybe I don't want to give up on rock climbing altogether, but maybe I can scale it back. If I limit myself to 1 climb per year, that's 30 climbs in total. Much lower risk than with 900 climbs. This is not a logical fallacy.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      That would be a reason to have not climbed more than a specific rate ever. It wouldn't be a reason to scale down the rate of climbing as you age.
srcreigh 5y ago
Under this assumption, by the principal of mathematical induction, you can easily do it K more times for any K without taking on barely any risk at each step of the way.
323 5y ago
This is called the Turkey fallacy: the turkey was feed by humans for 1000 days, and after each feed event he updated his belief that humans care for him until it's now almost a statistical certainty.
- lapetitejort 5y ago
  Is this the reverse of the Gambler's Fallacy? Instead of "The numbers haven't hit in a while, therefore they're going to hit soon." it's "The numbers haven't hit yet, therefore they're never gonna hit."
  - jaggederest 5y ago
    Also known as complacency. Working in a woodshop, one of the things you are most vulnerable to is failing to respect the danger you're in. This is why many experienced woodworkers have been injured by e.g. a table saw - you stop being as careful after such long exposure.
    - 323 5y ago
      A related thing is normalization of deviance. You start removing safety because you see nothing bad happened before, until you are at a point where almost no safety rules are respected anymore. You can see this a lot in construction videos.
    - toss1 5y ago
      Yup, complacency can kill you. In this case [0], a skydiver forgot to put on his parachute... https://reverentialramblings.com/2018/08/15/the-skydiver-who-forgot-his-parachute/ https://reverentialramblings.com/2018/08/15/the-skydiver-who...
      - ask_b123 5y ago
        Wow, that's terrifying and a good cautionary tale. Also, when I read > I’m hoping you can you forgive me as a minister of religion for likening this story to a spiritual cautionary tale. Yes, we do need to live each day as if it might be our last. I thought, "Hmm, sounds adventist", and sure enough :-)
jvanderbot 5y ago
In a skill-based game, N+1 has less incremental risk than adding 1 more trial with N-1 games did.
mrow84 5y ago
This assumes a lot about the underlying process, particularly independence. Whilst assuming independence might hold reasonably well for low numbers of samples, the assumption might be increasingly (and dangerously) misleading. The intuition expressed by GP captures that.
NineStarPoint 5y ago
The point is that they're changing their habits. Of course we ignore the n times they've gone before, now instead of their habits meaning they'd go m more times in the future, they're going to be going p times in the future for some p that is much less than m. So it's not about how often they've done it over their lifetime so far, but about how many times they will be doing it over the rest of their life.

derbOac 5y ago

"There are bold X, and old X, but no old, bold X." Replace X with any practitioners subject to sufficient risk as a result of their practice. I first heard it in the context of mushroom foraging.

TeeMassive 5y ago
Yet the older they are the more they test in production.
marttt 5y ago
A WTA top 70 tennis player from my country (aged 35+, thus possibly facing the end of her pro career) recently rephrased a well known proverb: "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger -- or, crippled."
pugets 5y ago
This line is famous in aviation, where X = pilots
- derbOac 5y ago
  Yeah after I read that many years ago I saw it come up in several other contexts (including aviation) and realized it probably originated elsewhere.
thehappypm 5y ago
Mountaineers is where I heard it.
timClicks 5y ago
The risks are highest when learners are at a beginner to intermediate stage. They know the basics, and have gained some confidence, but don't know enough to get themselves out of trouble. This is called Stage 1 in the Gordon Model of learning: unconscious incompetence.
- Breza 5y ago
  That reminds me of when a family friend from church needed help clearing his land and thought the easiest approach would be to teach an overconfident 14 year old (me) to drive his tractor. He told me I would never be worse at operating it than the second time we went out. He was right.

segmondy 5y ago

I would imagine that if you scale back enough tho, you won't be as sharp. Sure the odds increase the more you do it, but not just because you do it, but often because of other variables, such as the weather, not listening to your body, over confidence, etc.

hgomersall 5y ago

"Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end" ~Edward Whymper

kqr 5y ago

Also known as the Kelly criterion. If one possible outcome of an action is associated with a great enough loss, it doesn't make sense to perform the action no matter how unlikely the loss.

Fernicia 5y ago
Isn't that called Pascal's Wager?
- wongarsu 5y ago
  Which of course directly leads to Pascal's Mugging: I can simply say "I'm a god, give me $10000 or you will burn in hell for all eternity". Now if you follow Pascal's Wager or GP's logic you have to give me the money: I'm probably lying, but the potential downside is too great to risk upsetting me.
  - kqr 5y ago
    There's actually a rational explanation for that: humans don't care very much about burning in hell for all eternity, when it comes down to it. There's actually a similar though experiment that might seem even more bizarre: I could tell you "give me $100 or I will kill you tomorrow" and you probably wouldn't give me the $100. That's because when it comes down to it, humans don't see the loss of their life as that big a deal as one might think. It's a big deal, of course, but in combination with the low likelihood, still not big enough to forgo the $100.
    - dsr_ 5y ago
      Here's the thing: if you have just killed five people, "give me $100 or I will kill you tomorrow" becomes a much more effective threat. One-time games and repeated games have different strategies.
      - kqr 5y ago
        It becomes more effective only because it changes the probability estimation of the outcome. Life is a repeated game of decisions that compound on each other, so that difference is irrelevant.

JadeNB 5y ago

> It's a great example. This is the very reason I have scaled back the amount of time I rock climb as I've gotten older -- not because any individual outing is dangerous, but there's an element of Russian roulette wherein the mere act of doing it more often dramatically changes the risk. Indoor climbing, and especially bouldering, can be a lot of fun at the right gym, and with dramatically reduced risk of death (though injury is still a very real possibility, I say, recalling all the time I spent nursing my sprained ankle).

vincentmarle 5y ago

This is called ergodic theory, the more you repeat an action that could result in catastrophe, the likelihood of that catastrophe occuring will be close to 100% if the number of events is high enough.

epolanski 5y ago
But that doesn't imply any higher probability. Say chance of dying when doing alpinism is one in a thousand. The 1000th time you go climbing the chances of dying are still 1/1000. If you get 100 heads in a row, the 101th time you launch a coin the chance of getting heads is still 50%.
- ska 5y ago
  Right, but it's easy to conflate two very things here: "What are my chances of dying in a climbing accident", and "What are my chances of dying today if I go climbing". If you are on a plane, you* have a lower risk of some kinds of cancer than the airline staff do. This has nothing to do with the flight you are both on, and everything to do with accumulated flights "you*" = for most people, i.e. barring a counteracting risk factor.
- kenjackson 5y ago
  This is exactly why people who do high risk think it will never happen to them.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

yodsanklai 5y ago

That's the reason why I don't cycle in London. When I moved there, I thought I would be using my bike daily like I was used to. But over the span of a few years, I'm pretty sure the risk of serious injury becomes significant. For rock climbing, you're probably right. I remember training in a climbing hall, when I saw someone falling off the highest wall. The tenant of the hall didn't look surprised at all. Apparently, it happens frequently. That being said, if you serious about security, I'm sure the risk can be minimal.

chimprich 5y ago
You can contrast the odds of getting injured with the health benefits. The cardiovascular benefits would seem to outweigh the risks of getting injured from a mathematical point of view. See e.g. https://blogs.bmj.com/bjsm/2018/12/12/pedal-power-the-health-benefits-of-cycling-outweigh-the-risks-by-far/ https://blogs.bmj.com/bjsm/2018/12/12/pedal-power-the-health...
- kenjackson 5y ago
  Lots of ways to get even better cardio benefits with much less risk.

e40 5y ago

Same reason I sold my motorcycle when I was 30. I had a good run of not being maimed, but the odds were not good for the future.

blunte 5y ago

You would probably be at less risk if you continued rock climbing but eschewed driving (or riding in) a car.

zmmmmm 5y ago

I took the same approach with motorcycling. I decided to do it for 3 years while at university because it had a transformative impact on my lifestyle. But I also decided the odds were way too bad to keep doing it my whole life. So I stopped and haven't done it since then.

gilbetron 5y ago
I only owned a bicycle for several years at the same age, and have since mostly used a car to get around. I've been in various, relatively minor accidents with both, and have always wanted to try using a motorcycle, but it seems to take the risks of both biking and driving and puts them together!

throwaway6532 5y ago

This is why I don't drive or talk to people anymore.