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Researchers point out that people tend to take any information as confirmation of their mental models.
Trivial events begin to shape an accident long before it happens.
Once an emotional reaction is underway, there can be an overwhelming impulse to act.
A closed attitude, an attitude that says, “I already know,” may cause you to miss important information.
Our failures are so common that it’s easy to write them off as inexperience, stupidity, or inattention.
The word “experienced” often refers to someone who’s gotten away with doing the wrong thing more frequently than you have.
“Strange things happened near the boundaries.”
had chosen to devote his life to the ministry. “The hardest moment,” Hillman said, “was not being able to respond with the equipment and training I had.”
What we call “accidents” do not just happen.
They are hijacked by their own experience combined with ignorance
he found that efforts to make those systems safer, especially by technological means, made the systems more complex and therefore more prone to accidents.
They begin to believe that the orderly behavior they see is the only possible state of the system.
Traditional economics assumed perfectly rational agents. So does traditional survival training. Neither assumption reflects the messy real world.
science aimed at predicting an outcome, then conducting an experiment to confirm it. But natural systems don’t behave so neatly.
“processes happen very fast and can’t be turned off…recovery from the initial disturbance is not possible; it will spread quickly and irretrievably for at least some time….
self-organizing behavior seen everywhere in nature,
two worlds, on Mount Hood. One is tailored for the comfort and survival of people.
invisible dividing line between what has been adapted for us and what demands that we adapt to it.
The people were part of the mechanical system, but they were also a system in themselves.
This mountain is just not taken seriously. Fat people go up there.”
“risk homeostasis.” The theory says that people accept a given level of risk. While it’s different for each person, you tend to keep the risk you’re willing to take at about the same level. If you perceive conditions as less risky, you’ll take more risk. If conditions seem more risky, you’ll take less risk. The theory has been demonstrated again and again.
“We were normalizing risk: We’d been through a similar situation and had emerged just fine…. If you’ve tallied a lot of experience in dangerous, iffy environments without significant calamity, the mental path of least resistance is to assume it was your skill and savvy that told the tale.” That same trap kills a lot of experienced
Experience is nothing more than the engine that drives adaptation,
“A rope without fixed protection is a suicide pact.”
Laughter again: humor. The deescalating emotional response.
it is part of the natural cycle of human emotion to let down your guard once you feel you’ve reached a goal.
People routinely fail to realize that an accident not happening is no guarantee that it won’t happen.
“It is normal for us to die, but we only do it once.” Which is too bad, for it might be the ultimate learning experience.
Al Siebert, a psychologist, writes in The Survivor Personality that the survivor (a category including people who avoid accidents) “does not impose pre-existing patterns on new information, but rather allows new information to reshape [his mental models].
And plan for everything to take eight times as long as you expect it to take.
One of the things that kills us in the wilderness, in nature, is that we just don’t understand the forces we engage.
We are the domestic pets of a human zoo we call civilization.
He was ignoring the Rules of Life. He wanted to get there now.
for that right stuff, that hard-soft, willful-flexible adaptability
“If you’re not afraid, then you don’t appreciate the situation.”
On the occasion of every accident that befalls you, remember to turn to yourself and inquire what power you have for turning it to use. —Epictetus
PSYCHOLOGISTS WHO study the behavior of people who get lost report that very few ever backtrack.
The urge to get to a specific place, the drive toward a goal, appears to be emotional.
The fact of not having a mental map, of trying to create one in an environment where the sensory input made no sense, is interpreted as an emergency and triggers a physical (i.e., emotional) response.
Generally, they would be wiser and safer to stay put and get as comfortable and warm as possible,
‘bending the map.’”
Part of the terror of being lost stems from the idea of never being seen again.)
going from the protection of society
into the wild can have a profound effect on the balance of ...
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Thrashing does not save a drowning person either, but it’s just as natural. Those who can float quietly have a better chance.
Being lost, then, is not a location; it is a transformation. It is a failure of the mind. It can happen in the woods or it can happen in life.
Like it or not, you must make a new mental map of where you are.
denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Consciousness is a murky, intermittent phenomenon that has yet to be debugged. It sees the world through a glass darkly, not face to face, as Paul the Apostle said.
the final stage that separates the quick from the dead: not helpless resignation but a pragmatic acceptance of—and even wonder at—the world in which he found himself. He had at last begun to model and map his real environment instead of the one he wished for.
