• JohnEdwa
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    1 year ago

    If it somehow guaranteed your success it would be safer to play a round of russian roulette at the base camp before you begin your climb as that has only one in six chance of killing you. That’s how crazy your odds of success on the climb sound like.
    Yet they all know the statistics and the risks, and go do it anyway. Are they mental, suicidal, or do they truly believe they are so awesome and everyone who died clearly was their inferior?

    • grahamsz
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      131 year ago

      Also I can understand taking that risk for yourself. Certainly it’s way outside my comfort zone, but I’m not going to tell someone else they can’t do something dangerous. But how can you go out and hire people to help you knowing there’s a 25% chance they’ll be giving their lives for you?

            • grahamsz
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              31 year ago

              But most mountaineers get by without having to hire people to carry their shit for them. Certainly people here in Colorado use guides from time to time, but i’ve never heard of anyone using a porter. Maybe i’m ignorant, but it seems like mountaineers only use porters in the himalayas because they are cheap and disposable.

              Perhaps if you can’t summit a mountain without another human to carry your equipment then it should be ok to not summit that mountain.

                • grahamsz
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                  21 year ago

                  Thanks for the terminology - that makes it easier!

                  Only very few people have accomplished climbing one of the 14 peaks “alpine style”.

                  I’m quite ok with that.

                  If the rockies were 28k instead of 14k then I still don’t think there’d be a situation where we hire poor villagers from the outskirts of Denver to put their lives on the line. I really believe the high peaks are summited expedition-style because the poverty makes that practical, which in turn allows many more people to reach the top

          • Zima
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            11 year ago

            Unless you have no hobbies and no free time You can lead by example and show them.

        • grahamsz
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          41 year ago

          Sure - and i’m sure I could find people who’d play a game of russian roulette for $1M but it’d be massively unethical to hire people to do that.

          So there’s obviously some line - as a society we consider it ethical to hire forestry workers or deep sea fishermen even though they have a significantly higher risk of death that most other professions. I think a 25% death rate is just unethical in the extreme, even Everest is something like 1%.

          • @wahming
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            11 year ago

            Everest appears to be 5%. Where would you draw the line, and how would you justify it?

            • grahamsz
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              11 year ago

              I have no idea, but hiring someone for a job that has a 1 in 20 chance of killing them seems fundamentally immoral - especially given the massive financial imbalance.

              It’s certainly a good philosophical question though

              • @wahming
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                11 year ago

                Yeah, taking it to the extreme, the same logic applies to delivery guys on scooters and motorcycles. There’s definitely no good answer, except maybe that they accepted the risk

                • grahamsz
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                  21 year ago

                  Looking at it more, there seems to be an entire field of Risk Ethics associated with this.

                  Still the most dangerous job in the US is a Commercial Fisherman with a risk of death of 132 per 100,000. That’s a very long way from the risk of dying on Everest or K2.

      • livus
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        1 year ago

        knowing there’s a 25% chance they’ll be giving their lives for you?

        There isn’t. The person above is using a misleading stat, based on a misunderstanding of the stats.

        Look at how many people are in the photos of the climbers all stepping over Mohammed Hassan here.

        In common sense terms if this bizarre “25% die” stat were real, at least a dozen of them would have died that same day.

        @grahamsz
        @bernieecclestoned @dulce_3t_decorum_3st @JohnEdwa

        • grahamsz
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          21 year ago

          Yes, that’s obviously taking the lifetime K2 deaths and dividing by the summit attempts - though actually I get 19% in that situation. However we really dont have enough data to form a good confidence interval there - it’s possible we’ve had a lucky few years or maybe we’ve got better at deciding when to make the summit attempts.

          But it doesn’t really change my point. There’s some threshold where it seems fundamentally immoral to hire someone for a job that has a good chance of killing them. Mountain porter on k2 or everest is a higher risk job than “astronaut” without the same glory that comes with the space faring job title. Even if the chance of death is 1 in 200, I still think its immoral to take advantage of someone who’s so desperate for work that they’ll overlook it.

          • livus
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            1 year ago

            Definitely. I may not agree with your stats but I agree that it’s immoral to take advantage of people’s poverty - in this case he was motivated by his mother’s medical bills - to make them risk their lives, especially given it’s in order to help do a recreational activity that has no use.