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Survivor bias in hiking is a safety issue. So is an optimism bias. This is a quick intro to both ideas.
I heard about this idea of โsurvivor biasโ recently and I really love it as it relates to hiking, because it connects with overconfidence in hiking, which is a safety issue.
We have to make sure that, when weโre on the trail, weโre always assessing our risks fully and correctly.
Listen Here
You can listen right hereโฆ
And hereโs the direct link to this swell-cast.
What is Swell?
Swell is a micro-podcasting platform where all the podcasts are 5 minutes max. But itโs also conversational, because you can reply to the podcast via voice messaging and it becomes far more interactive. Download the app and listen now.
Show Notes
- Definition
- Best example I could find of a definition of it is from Diagoras of Melos who was a 5th century Greek philosopher, famous for being an atheist
- Somebody asked him about paintings of people who had escaped shipwrecks (this is a kind of genre in painting)
- Somebody asked Diagoras โLook, you think the gods donโt care about humans, so what do you say about all these people saved from death by the hand of god?โ
- And Diagoras just replied: โYou know whose paintings you donโt see here? All the people who didnโt survive โ who, by the way, are much greater in number. Nobody paints those people. We only have paintings of the survivors. These paintings are stupid.โ
- He didnโt actually say, โThese paintings are stupid.โ I said that.
- Wrong focus
- So we focus on successes and pay hardly any attention to failures and the risks
- And itโs important because a failure in the wilderness, on a mountain, can be catastrophicโฆ
- And even when we do pay attention to the deaths that we see in hiking, which are always a shock, we immediately slip into a related bias called the Optimism Bias which is the idea that the bad things that happen to other people wonโt happen to this person, i.e. me
- But just this season there was a hiker taken off Sugarloaf Mountain in the Catskills with a broken ankle and he was a well-prepared and experienced hiker
- And Julian Sands, the British actor who went missing on Mount Baldy in California, his body still hasnโt been found, and he was a very experienced life-long hiker
- so bad things can really happen to anyone
- Back on the trail
- But for most of us, most of the timeโฆ
- When things are going well
- and we donโt have any major mishaps
- we get a little cocky
- and we think, โHey this isnโt so hard. I got this.โ
- Which is a miscalculation that leads to further miscalculations
- Itโs a real factor in our experience on the trail
- Especially if we have a peakbagging mentality where we kind of fetishize the summits and have them in mind as almost the point of a hike
- Maybe weโre pursuing a peakbagging list: like Catskills 3500 list or the Adirondack 46er list
- And especially in winter, if you hit a tricky spot, say, just below the summit, after hiking for a couple of hours and youโre almost at your goal..
- youโre adding pressure to a situation where, really, itโd be wise to keep a clear head
- Because if something goes wrong there, youโre also as far as from the trailhead as you can be, at that point, and a potential rescue scenario
- But you may feel this impulse to push on, and take that risk to do the sketchy thing
- Ego
- And our psychology can be very slippery
- Thereโs an element of working with oneโs own ego, here, and even just being able to catch when oneโs ego is even in play
- We have to watch for these kinds of biases โ survivor bias and optimism bias โ and make sure, when weโre on the trail, that weโre always assessing our risks fully and correctly
Read More
BTW, you might also enjoyโฆ
- ADK โบ Whiteface Mountain via Marble Mountain
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- ADK โบ Hurricane Mountain Fire Tower
- CATSKILLS โบ Catskills Fire Tower Challenge 2025
- Follow โบ My Instagram @TotalCatskills
- Follow โบ My writing for Times Union
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