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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

When I walk in a city I don't spend my time constantly scanning the sky and every building around me for a potential falling object. Or research the structural history of every bridge I drive over then spend hours avoiding certain ones. Or a hundred other rare things that do kill people but statistically not often. Everyone dies one day and everyone has a single life. I don't see the point of spending that one life in constant fear of the end that cannot be avoided anyways without even meaningfully changing the timeline of that end.

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Why do you perceive wearing a seatbelt on a flight and minimising time out of a seat as such a high cost/inconvenience? I hear this line of thought a lot, particularly nowadays around masking to avoid COVID, and I’m always intrigued by this idea that avoiding this tiny act that barely impacts you is somehow sticking a big middle finger up to fear

Because there's millions of those tiny acts and I doubt you've read the risk analysis of each one to decide which fifty thousand to follow. But if you actually do consider them rationally and act on them then cool. Most people who say what you do however don't but rather act based on an irrational perception of risks usually due to things like media attention or misclassifying lack of control as risk.

I've met people who actually and rationally consider all the potential risks and I respect them. It's also an exhausting life to lead from my observation.

To be honest, time out of seat is a deliberate choice. My legs are long, and the seats are tiny!

I do wear a seatbelt when in seat, though more out of fear than expectation something like that will ever happen. It just seems like an incredibly stupid way to die, and mitigating it costs me nothing.

If humans beings were perfectly rational at all times everywhere then the world would look a lot different (and much less exciting I presume)

If human beings were even marginally rational most of the time it would look a lot different!

Solid.

Fear and greed drive markets - Anon.

And humans - Me.

> particularly nowadays around masking to avoid COVID

Ah ok, as I suspected a covid authoritarian that’s deluded and ruthlessly mocking ANY recognition of cost in the cost-benefit analysis of safety measures, meanwhile overestimating the benefit all together.

I don't believe I mocked anyone, maybe I mocked the idea that anyone who wears a seatbelt on a flight is gripped by fear. I apologise to the concept.

nah it's this covid authoritarianism that blows risks out of proportion and usually with scant evidence and does it in a categorical way that ignores impacts which often have WORSE harms than the thing they're trying to protect against

in the flight case, it could very well be that if you were able to count, there's more harm from DVT from sitting in a seat all flight, versus getting up to walk around regularly and potentially being hurt by turbulence

just a cursory search shows ~300 serious injuries in 30 years tracked by the FAA

Sure, but if someone told me they were getting up for a walk on a flight because they didn’t want to get DVT, I wouldn’t go on a tirade about how their life was ruled by fear. That’s what my original comment was intending to address.

but the point is that walking around a plane is relatively safe, and severe turbulence is rare, so much so that you'd probably better off walking around fairly regularly if only due to less DVT risk

Do you look both ways when crossing the road?

There are reasonable measures those around you can take to ensure that falling objects don't crash into you from the sky, or that the bridge you're on does not collapse as you're driving over it. The risk is mitigated by reducing likelihood and impact.

There is nothing a pilot can do to avoid an air pocket. There is little mitigation possible.

But then it's not about safety. It's about your need to feel in control of the situation even if the control is an illusion. That is fair in a way but saying it's a safety thing or that people are crazy for not needing to feel in control all the time isn't fair. Or even calling them crazy for not doing the same ultimately meaningless actions as you to create an illusion of control for themselves

No, I'm talking about risk mitigation, not control.

So let's say the media started a campaign promoting wearing a helmet all the time. The anti-helmet people would be painted as reckless, feckless, and generally deplorable. All the celebrities would endorse wearing a helmet at all times. There would be New York Times editorials about "those people".

Questions:

Is this still about risk mitigation? If yes, are you at risk now? Why don't you wear your bike helmet at work all day? (never know when a ceiling tile could fall down)

Would your opinion change following this hypothetical media blitz? Would you hop on the bandwagon and decry the irresponsibility of the anti-helmet folks?

If you think about this for a second before hitting that downwards pointing triangle, does this dumb example mean that it's actually more about what's socially acceptable than actual safety? Why would you feel dumb wearing a helmet all day now, and dumb for not wearing it in that world?

A smart, independently minded person, would do the following risk analysis:

- Planes fly through the atmosphere in varying conditions. - The conditions that lead to uncomfortable or dangerous turbulence are not at all uncommon. - These conditions are unpredictable and have little warning. - Wearing a seatbelt is a very minor inconvenience, and will protect me from the worst of the harms that can come from common turbulence. - I will wear a seatbelt.

This doesn't seem complex.

The argument about bike helmets, although nuanced, should have nothing to do with celebrities wearing them or not.

>These conditions are unpredictable and have little warning.

Sometimes zero warning, and major harm, as in the current case.

> - These conditions are unpredictable and have little warning

Not true at all. The vast vast majority of turbulence incidents are very well predictable. It's not 1930 anymore.

> - The conditions that lead to uncomfortable or dangerous turbulence are not at all uncommon.

Except your flawed logic in the previous point flows to this point. The question isn't turbulence but unpredictable severe turbulence which is much rarer. About 1 per million flights I think which is far from common.

> A smart, independently minded person, would do the following risk analysis:

Given the flaws in the risks analysis I find this sentence hilarious.

"The vast vast majority of turbulence incidents are very well predictable."

On the large scale, yes, on the scale that causes a plane to drop a meter at very short notice, no they aren't. If they were, I wouldn't have been in planes that dropped a meter without any warning. Your "1 per million flights" is probably based on statistics relating to reported injury (correct me if I'm wrong). Those statistics would be skewed by many factors, not least people wearing seatbelts.

I've flown probably around a few hundred times. I've experienced uncomfortable (spilt drinks, rollercoaster feelings) probably about ten times. I've had actual dangerous turbulence (both times, as you say, with warning) twice. Once into Frankfurt, once into Singapore.

On a couple of flights the turbulence warning from the flight crew has come through after the initial experience of turbulence.

I'm not saying we're not good at detecting it, and I'm not saying it's super common, but your one in a million number is wishful thinking.

By the way, I actually love flying, and I still regard it as an incredibly safe way to travel, but wearing a seatbelt is still a good idea.

If “the vast majority … are predictable”, why wouldn’t the airline pilot warn the passengers in advance?

Pilots warn about upcoming turbulence all the time. Sometimes so much they don’t do food and beverage service because they are worried about it.

This flight experienced "clear air" turbulence. Such turbulence is not visible on radar and is not predictable.

Turbulence due to weather is what you are talking about.

They do. I've flown many (more than 100x in some years) and I can't count how many times that pilot / co-pilot has announced upcoming turbulence and turned on the seat beat light.

The chance of an airplane hitting major turbulence unexpectedly, while pretty small, are much higher than the chance of some random debris falling from a building while you are passing by. Ultimately it's all weighing the inconvenience against the possible safety improvement: when you are sitting in your seat in a plane, the seatbelt is a very minor inconvenience. Wearing a helmet all the time is a much bigger inconvenience, with a much smaller benefit.

We DO recommend that individuals with high risk of injuring themselves wear helmets. People have varying levels of risk tolerance before they take steps to mitigate them; I'm sure some people choose to wear helmets because they estimate the risk of falling to be too high. In your hypothetical, I would probably not care, because to I and to most people the risk of falling at any given moment isn't high enough to warrant mitigating it. On an airplane, your risk of encountering turbulence is markedly high, enough so that it is worth mitigating. If you disagree then feel free to take your belt off, but don't complain if you die a very avoidable death. (Not that you could at that point.)

Well, and in fact, helmet wearing at least in the US has become normalized in situations where no one other than competing athletes wore helmets for things like skiing or casual biking a few decades ago. Today you stand out by not doing so. Heck. Professional hockey players didn’t use to wear helmets.

yes, your example is still about risk mitigation, but it's also a not-so-effective slippery slope argument likely motivated by a contrarian anti-masking stance. the reason there is no social pressure to helmet at all times is that we generally agree as a society that the inconvenience is not worth the minimal risk reduction.

this risk calculation is messy of course, as we all have different tolerances for inconvenience and risk, and we also have different responses to individual vs. collective risks.

It's not "constant fear" to just leave the seatbelt buckled. It literally requires less thought and effort to just leave it buckled, because you'll inevitably be re-buckling it when the plane encounters turbulence or lands.

Using PPE is not about living in fear, it's about taking appropriate precautions.

Did you read what OP wrote? It's not mostly about wearing your seatbelt when seated but mostly about never ever ever leaving your seat. That's the constant fear part.

That isn't what I said.

We are all playing a giant game with no real winners called "Don't Die". Few play it actively, most just try to avoid too much pain before they reach the end, and others play it a bit like Russian Roulette.

> When I walk in a city I don't spend my time constantly scanning the sky and every building around me for a potential falling object. Or research the structural history of every bridge I drive over then spend hours avoiding certain ones.

Of course not, because all of those scenarios are extremely high effort for low reward.

Wearing a seatbelt on an airplane is very low effort and takes a few seconds at most.

Your examples are in no way comparable to putting on a seatbelt.

This is the type of fallacious thinking that gets people in trouble: Instead of discussing the issue at hand, they try to substitute a ridiculous, exaggerated alternative scenario and argue against that instead.

You don't have to look very deep to see why your example scenarios, which take enormous amounts of time and effort, are pure strawman arguments in the context of a simple discussion about seatbelts.

There's a second fallacy wherein people try to argue an "all or nothing" perspective: They list out exaggerated things that they can't/won't do (like looking in the sky all the time) and then try to make the claim that because they can't do all of those exaggerated things, they shouldn't be expected to do any safety-related thing. It's another fallacious argument tactic.

Do you use a seat belt when you drive?

do you walk around outside and hang out under lone trees in thunderstorms?

Agree. Has anyone died at Emirates A380 bar or Qatar minibar? Nope. I'll take my chances just as I do in thousands of scenarios a day that I just dont care to register.. This seems like a guy that when pair programming on someone else's keyboard uses gloves - we've all met them...

If you don't understand risk mitigation, or think it's someone else's job - even when, in the case of turbulence the professionals are telling you there is absolutely nothing they can do about it - then eventually you're just going to end up getting injured or killed by something that could be avoided.

Yes, death by turbulence is rare, but there are dozens of serious injuries a year caused by turbulence in US air space alone. Hundreds a year, globally. We're not talking about a small graze or cut, we're talking head injuries, broken bones, life changing injuries. Costs US airlines half a billion dollars a year dealing with it in terms of payouts and maintenance costs. Why you think that doesn't apply to you is a strange take to me, but you do you.

Because dozens out of hundreds of millions of passengers is a risk they're willing to take, I guess.

Accepting risk and believing it doesn’t apply to you are two vastly different things. I take it you don’t fly? How about driving? There is assumedly some line you draw for acceptable vs unacceptable risk

I don’t really understand what you’re trying to say here or what you’re suggesting we should do

It’s a cost-benefit relationship. Since wearing a seatbelt is such a minor inconvenience (you’re already sitting in that seat), it’s an obvious thing to do even though the risk is exceedingly rare.

In a hypothetical case where a seatbelt cost an extra $100 to use, then the cost would probably not be worth the benefit.

Use a seatbelt most of the time in a plane is his suggestion, which really isn't hidden. I for one take the suggestion and will do so, because there is no inconvience, but the OP clearly stated that you're supposed make your own decisions.

Other people’s keyboards are most of the time borderline disgusting so I can sympathise with _that guy_ to some extent

A bird shat on my head like 10 years ago and I look up at everything now. Street lights, overhangs, anything a bastard pigeon could be sitting on.

I don't fear death, for I will be dead. I fear unexpected inconvenience

If anything, getting shat on would make me avoid looking up for some time

Look up in advance rather than directly under, haha. Strains the neck less too

I just want to be reborn as a bird to do exactly this all day

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