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My specific point is Skydiving is safer than other adventure sports. Here are the numbers: Deaths per year http://www.dropzone.com/fatalities/ http://www.drop

My specific point is Skydiving is safer than other adventure sports. Here are the numbers: Deaths per year http://www.dropzone.com/fatalities/ http://www.dropzone.com/fatalities/ Risk of dying 1/100,000 http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm A comparative table: http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/ http://www.besthealthdegrees.com/health-risks/ Anyway you count it, skydiving properly done is a fairly safe sport.

dahart 10y ago
> Risk of dying 1/100,000 http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm Yeah, so this quite nicely highlights the problem with your argument. You, and this article are both clearly downplaying the risks. One single jump per year. One in a hundred thousand for a single jump actually seems like bad odds to me. Go ahead and call it safe if you want, but plenty of active skydivers are doing hundreds or thousands of jumps in a year. A thousand jumps a year puts your odds, according to these stats you just provided, at one in a hundred. Sounds pretty risky to me! Now, on top of that, this article compares 10,000 miles of driving in a year - an entire year's worth of driving every single day - to one single jump, and then somehow concludes that driving is riskier. Sorry, but that's kinda horse shit, and I think you know it. To me, this smells like an agenda to show skydiving is safer than it really is, and far from an accurate analysis. If they had tried to compare days, or car trips vs jumps, or participation hours, you'd find out that surprise! skydiving is significantly riskier than driving. My question is, what is the benefit to presenting skydiving as 'safe'? Does it make a difference to you if people think it's safe? Are you concerned about validating your choices? Do you want beginners who are unsure to feel like they should try it? What are the risks to calling it dangerous? Does that prevent people from trying it? Does that say something about you? Why does it upset you to suggest that skydiving might hurt you? Seems like the entire problem with wingsuit BASE is people thinking it's safer than it is, so calling it dangerous can only have a positive effect. In fact, that's exactly what happened with skydiving, and what the USPA is still doing. It used to be much more dangerous than it is now, and people calling it dangerous and raising awareness of the risks have increased the safety of the sport. But since we haven't eliminated the risks, why would we stop calling it risky?
dahart 10y ago
BTW, don't forget to check on the source for your comparative table: http://pmj.bmj.com/content/85/1004/316/T2.expansion.html http://pmj.bmj.com/content/85/1004/316/T2.expansion.html This shows that one skydiver dies in every 570 participants on average, per year. That's for average participation. If you jump more, you risk more. 0.006 deaths in 1,000 jumps is 1 in 167. So if you jump 2000 times in a year, your odds of dying are better than 1 in 100 for that year, assuming uniform risk distribution. That's playing russian roulette with a gun that can hold 100 bullets. Sure, it's safer than playing Russian roulette with 1 bullet in 6 slots, but only a single order of magnitude safer. I pulled that trigger once, and I think I'm done. To put this in a more accurate perspective than howstuffworks is capable of, ~210 million licensed drivers in the US in 2014 divided by 34k deaths = 1 driver dies for every 6,176 participants on average, per year. How that works out to riskier than skydiving isn't a mystery, it's simply not true.

dahart 10y ago

> Risk of dying 1/100,000 http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/skydiving8.htm Yeah, so this quite nicely highlights the problem with your argument. You, and this article are both clearly downplaying the risks. One single jump per year. One in a hundred thousand for a single jump actually seems like bad odds to me. Go ahead and call it safe if you want, but plenty of active skydivers are doing hundreds or thousands of jumps in a year. A thousand jumps a year puts your odds, according to these stats you just provided, at one in a hundred. Sounds pretty risky to me! Now, on top of that, this article compares 10,000 miles of driving in a year - an entire year's worth of driving every single day - to one single jump, and then somehow concludes that driving is riskier. Sorry, but that's kinda horse shit, and I think you know it. To me, this smells like an agenda to show skydiving is safer than it really is, and far from an accurate analysis. If they had tried to compare days, or car trips vs jumps, or participation hours, you'd find out that surprise! skydiving is significantly riskier than driving. My question is, what is the benefit to presenting skydiving as 'safe'? Does it make a difference to you if people think it's safe? Are you concerned about validating your choices? Do you want beginners who are unsure to feel like they should try it? What are the risks to calling it dangerous? Does that prevent people from trying it? Does that say something about you? Why does it upset you to suggest that skydiving might hurt you? Seems like the entire problem with wingsuit BASE is people thinking it's safer than it is, so calling it dangerous can only have a positive effect. In fact, that's exactly what happened with skydiving, and what the USPA is still doing. It used to be much more dangerous than it is now, and people calling it dangerous and raising awareness of the risks have increased the safety of the sport. But since we haven't eliminated the risks, why would we stop calling it risky?

dahart 10y ago

BTW, don't forget to check on the source for your comparative table: http://pmj.bmj.com/content/85/1004/316/T2.expansion.html http://pmj.bmj.com/content/85/1004/316/T2.expansion.html This shows that one skydiver dies in every 570 participants on average, per year. That's for average participation. If you jump more, you risk more. 0.006 deaths in 1,000 jumps is 1 in 167. So if you jump 2000 times in a year, your odds of dying are better than 1 in 100 for that year, assuming uniform risk distribution. That's playing russian roulette with a gun that can hold 100 bullets. Sure, it's safer than playing Russian roulette with 1 bullet in 6 slots, but only a single order of magnitude safer. I pulled that trigger once, and I think I'm done. To put this in a more accurate perspective than howstuffworks is capable of, ~210 million licensed drivers in the US in 2014 divided by 34k deaths = 1 driver dies for every 6,176 participants on average, per year. How that works out to riskier than skydiving isn't a mystery, it's simply not true.