the reason she's still alive and so many of her compatriots are not is how she thinks about risk.

People would say things like "there's a 99% chance this will be fine", where "not fine" is fatal and they would then run something that had a 99% chance of working out. She wouldn't do that because, of course, if you regularly take a 1% chance of death, you're going to end up dead unless you're extremely lucky.

Another one is that she would never run something she hadn't observed before, whereas

most people around her would, using the same reasoning as the above. But if you do that often enough, you're not likely to live.

She has a similar attitude when backcountry skiing and would never take a drop of more than a few feet without having inspected it first, which is why she's never been seriously injured in the backcountry, but she's had to carry a partner back who landed on unexpected terrain and broke both legs, a rare occurrence per instance but not unlikely in the long run.

She is also not dead after many years of fairly serious mountaineering where partners would be extremely upset that she wanted to turn back because she thought that were a small chance of weather that would cause an attempt at summitting to be fatal.

If you're around a lot of mountaineers or other people doing high-risk activities, you'll hear about deaths every year because the cumulative impact of summing up small risks is counterintuitive and default human intuition for this is wrong.

@samth If that's the reasoning, that also seems wrong to me because being crippled or dying really puts a damper on both skill development and future chances to accomplish something, e.g., if you look at what people are doing in whitewater today vs. 20 years ago, people are now doing stuff that would've been considered impassable 20 years ago. It would've been more effective to not take fatal risks.

And for things like blind drops / runs, there's no upside in terms of what you can accomplish.

@samth I think that could be true for mountaineering in some cases and some other activities that have a high degree of inherent risk (free soloing is certainly in that category), but I'd still say that, for most extreme sports risk, if you look at where risks are coming from, most of it is on risks with no upside.

It's possible my sample here is highly skewed and and I know people who take more pointless risks than in general, but I would guess that my skew is in the opposite direction.

@samth E.g., with surfskiiing, almost every death could be prevented with mundane standard precautions (have VHF and a beacon, carry a backup paddle, have flares/smoke, etc.), but relatively few people do these things and people die all the time.

Locally, there was a woman who carried all this stuff and was (kindly) made fun of for having her "girly bag" of safety stuff until she had a near death experience that would've been fatal if she wasn't prepared.

@samth Now, locally, guys who are out in big conditions also carry similar equipment, but there was never a reason to not do it in the first place other than people saying "it will probably be fine" in an environment where people have been dying for the same mundane reasons for decades.

At the absolute limit of what a human can do, someone might die because they're doing something that can't be done at low risk, but most deaths were and are preventable in boring ways.