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Comment by quasse | Hacker News Reader

My alma matter (which is directly on a lake) has been gradually banning all unsupervised swimming for students because someone gets blackout drunk and drowns themself in the lake every year.

I think it's a tragedy; I spent a lot of my formative time enjoying the lake and the outdoors (not to mention it being one of the few healthy ways to escape the stress of engineering school).

The school is also gradually eroding all of the student run outdoor clubs (sailing, mountaineering) because they aren't directly controlled by the university bureaucratic system. Young adults today are having that taken away from them and replaced with nothing.

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There's a highly dubious serial killer theory that exists simply because so many young college men drown while drunk:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiley_face_murder_theory

I heard a stat once that most adult male drowning victims had their fly down. This points to someone very drunk trying to pee into a body of water at night. One should always pee away from open water. I recall the suggested distance 100 feet for pee and more for number two.

What's interesting is that we may be causing much more loss of life with these bans than we are saving.

We ban or severely restrict many physical activities then we wonder why childhood obesity is so high and why so many kids have metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular issues.

Since the link is indirect we ignore it and a heart-attack is just considered bad luck.

Swimming is not the only form of cardiovascular exercise and open water is not the only place to swim.

Of course, there are still non-banned activities but it's not only swimming. Cheerleading, football, skateboarding, even lifting are risky activities and do have some chance of injury.

It's easy to cite the injury stats for these and use that as a reason to avoid, but my point is we rarely look at the other side. Kids' interest differs and the more activities we ban, the more we curtail the set of potential interests that get kids off the couch and outside.

My point is that no one is trying to "ban swimming" - it sounds like the university is banning "unsupervised swimming," a proposal that seems more nuanced and might merit discussion of its precise implementation than preventing people from going to the pool.

Also, it sounds like the problem is the school's administration is behaving tyrannically for its own institutional self-perpetuation and a lot of the bans are not actually motivated by saving lives.

I get that while modern society is often overprotective, but this sort of hysteria about hysteria seems to be un-nuanced and one-sided. I mean, you want to talk skateboarding, apparently they're letting kids compete these days and 9-year old Ema Kawakami became the very first person to land three 900s in a row, something that Tony Hawk spent years trying to accomplish.

https://twitter.com/XGames/status/1802378553985499425?

The problem is the university never considers the other side. What is the cost of banning unsupervised swimming? Has Phelps really never swam/trained unsupervised?

The issue is the visibility is very one-sided. Everyone reads about the rare case where a kid drowns while unsupervised swimming. No one reads about the hundreds of thousands of kids that do it with no issues.

Let people take risk if they understand it and accept the risk. The university should not be held liable but the kid should not be prevented. Risk is often the price of freedom.

Michael Phelps swam in pools and not in lakes. The university is likely banning unsupervised swimming only in the latter.

> Everyone reads about the rare case where a kid drowns while unsupervised swimming.

It doesn't seem to be all that infrequent when it's happening on an annual basis.

Anyway, ultimately the danger isn't even necessarily a swimming issue, so much as college men getting drunk and going near bodies of water (to swim or otherwise).

Short term vs. long term effects.

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