Re: [Paddlewise] Give me Liberty or Give Me Death

On Tue, Apr 23, 2002 at 07:33:54PM -0400, Dana wrote:
> Gosh darn!! kayaking seems like a too dangerous sport to me. Maybe it ought 
> to be BANNED.

I don't think anyone here has suggested that it be banned.

> If you need all that safety maybe it ought to only be done by 
> professionals and we could watch it on tv . 

And I'm puzzled by the all-of-nothing approach expressed here.  Risk isn't
a binary quantity, with rare exceptions.   It's a probabilistic measure,
and one which (unfortunately) a lot of us aren't very good at estimating --
including even the ones who study risk and are familiar with statistics.

(Aside: one of the most interesting things I've learned about actual
risk vs. perceived risk is that people perceive lower risk when they believe
they have control of the situation.  Of course, the actual risk is precisely
the same: what changes isn't reality, only the perception of it.)

I don't think anyone is advocating that kayaking be made 100% safe because,
short of convincing everyone to abstain from it entirely, it can't be.

Nor is anyone (so far) advocating that kayaking be made 0% safe because
that's equally unobtainable.

What's being advocated is that some number of measures which -- as far
as we can tell from accumulated experience in the sport, reasonable
attempts at statistical incident analysis, and first-order physics --
are likely to take big bites out of that mythical 100% safety.
Things like "don't go off and paddle a storm surge on your first day"
or "class V+ waterfalls in flood are a bad idea" or "wear a drysuit
or a wetsuit when it's cold" or "wear a PFD" all do that.  NONE of them
are a panacea: some people who do everything right get nailed anyway.
(One of the consequences of this being an exercise in probability; it's
an error to assume that these outlier data points are anything else.)

But in combination these measures greatly reduce risk, to the point where
it is somewhere between unlikely and very unlikely that a given set of Bad
Things will happen. 

Personally, I like that, because I like enjoying my time paddling and
I don't like having to worry that an easily-preventable Bad Thing will
happen, or having to cope with a Bad Thing in progress.

Now, as to codifying this into law: I'm not particularly in favor of
that, but I do recognize the reality that it WILL BE codified into law,
perhaps badly, if a sufficient number of people do a sufficient number
of stupid things.  (It works that way in every other area; I see no reason
for this one to be an exception.)

So I just wear my PFD and helmet and focus on what I think the real battles
are: Colorado laws that allow landowners to prevent paddlers from navigating
navigable streams; the pollution in the Cheat; access to Johns Creek in
Virginia; the PCB contamination in the Hudson; the excessive damming
and leveeing of the Missouri and Mississippi; and just what to do, if anything,
about Dimple on the Lower Yough.

---Rsk
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