Basejumper.com - archive

Thirty mile per hour winds, temperatures that indicate my local exit will be snowed in for the next few years, and a collection of BASE videos that I can play back by just closing my eyes; what's a man to do but to write on these forums?

Worst case scenario, Mac will show up and give me shit.

Five years ago I decided I wanted to make a BASE jump some day. Four years ago I told a friend I was only interested in doing a couple of jumps from a bridge, just so I could say I had done it. Three years ago I told my then girlfriend I would quit as soon as I got my BASE number. Two years ago the number hundred seemed particularly magic and a good time to retire.

In February of last year I was on my way home from my last jump. No really, my last one! All my close BASE friends received a phone call that day. Which much certainty I called them I had quit and that I hoped they would still hang out with me even if I didn't jump.

Six months later, I was back on the horse.

Here I am, January of 2007 with just over a hundred jumps, and it seems that I have only learned four things...

• One; having confidence in what you believe improves your chance of success today.


• Two; admitting that yesterday's beliefs were wrong improves your chance of success tomorrow.


• Three; the relationship between skill and our chance of dying is beyond my comprehension. No matter what we do, our vision remains twenty-twenty only in hindsight. The odds feel the same today as they did a hundred jumps ago.


• Four; BASE is addictive.

Lesson four tells me that tomorrow is important. Lesson three tells me today may be dangerous. Therefore, lesson two ought to take precedence over lesson one.

To illustrate, here's a great example of the kind of stupid advice you'll get when a person gets too confident. Just two months later he made his last jump. No really, his last one!

What a load of crap...

Soon I'll realize how silly this post is and next year I'll apologize with an even more tangential post. Meanwhile, how about some of you contribute some articles to BASE WIKI?

Cue Dead Man Walking, Mac, BASE 1072, Mountain Lion, and maybe a little Life Without a Net.

 

unless what you believe is incorrect, then having enough confidence in it can improve your chances of injury and death quite severely



Only if you change your course of action.
Admitting that pulling really low is dangerous did not stop several people from getting hurt by low-pulls later anyway.



The relationship between your skill and your chances is not simply a two-way realtionship. The other major player is your judgement. Level of desensitization and level of boredom are factors here too. If you look at all of those, maybe it will seem less random to you.



WHAT? Nobody told me. It doesn't matter anyway because luckily I'm not addicted.



people who say they will never do something and then do it later anyway worry me

it suggests to me that they are not capable of admitting to themselves that there are things that they do not know and/or understand

this would seem a counter-productive way of thinking in this kind of environment

I think the key to longer term base survival might be self-knowledge. Knowing that not only are there things that you know-that-you-don't-know (KDK), but also there are things that-you-don't-know-that-you-don't-know (DKDK) would seem like an effective way to avoid some risk factors that are clearer in hindsight.

that's my 2-cents for today, if you paid more, you got ripped off!

the reason base is addictive is because it's not only fun but it's also somewhat emotionally traumatic. any emotional trauma gets played over and over in the head. that mixed with the fun of it means you will crave it more and more, becoming a major addiction.

Damn, I embarrassingly admit that I have never seen that spelled out so explicitly. Thanks for that, it made my rant worth it.

You ought to have a look at some basic teaching texts (the kind that are used in post-graduate teacher education programs). They tend to break learning into 4 stages:

1) Unknowingly unskilled: "I don't know that I don't know"
2) Knowingly unskilled: "I know that I don't know"
3) Knowingly skilled: "I know how do to it, and I think about it"
4) Unknowingly skilled: "I just do it without having to think about it"

communication is also broken into 4 separate acts...

1) coming up with the thought in one's mind
2) speaking the thought
3) the other person hearing the words
4) the other person interpreting those words

with 4 weak links required to convey a thought, it's amazing we ever communicate at all.

PTFD? Post Traumatic Fun Disorder?