Shavarsh Karapetyan | Hacker News Reader

Shavarsh Karapetyan

en.wikipedia.org

204 pointshandfuloflight24 comments

The submitted URL was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavarsh_Karapetyan but we changed it to https://grantland.com/features/the-plunge-shavarsh-karapetya... because in-depth specific articles are preferable to generic wikipedia.org submissions. (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... for past comments about that)

Interested readers may want to look at both, of course.

This is a rare case where I think I preferred the Wikipedia article - the neutral, impassive retelling of events somehow makes more of an impression on me, whereas I don't like so much the breathless style of the new article.

Ok, I'll go with your take and restore the submitted URL. Sorry for the churn everybody!

(I still want to build URL aggregation eventually, so the community can curate sets of URLs about a story rather than just one.)

Probably the most amazing thing about this is that he found himself in or near THREE highly unusual incidents in a span of 11 years: Two catastrophic bus accidents and a burning building. I don't know any other person for whom this is true, except of course those whose jobs by their nature involve regularly confronting such incidents.

Armenia at the time belonged to the Soviet Union. To me, these examples emphasize again how truly dysfunctional that system must have been.

Are you suggesting such incidents were commonplace in the Soviet Union, to the extent that a person could expect to just stumble upon multiple of them in a few years? That would certainly surprise me.

I've seen a lot of work from Stephen Kotkin over the Soviet Union and it wouldn't surprise me. The Soviet Union went through three major famines between 1932 and 1947 [1]. As is often the case, the situation was worse in states that were ruled by the Soviet Union than in the main country itself. For example, the Ukrainian Famine was much worse than the famine in Russia (Russia population grew in this period while the Ukrainian population declined) [2].

I can't find statistics on mortality in Armenia for the 1980s period, but I think it's fair to say that it probably was similar to some modern corrupt regimes like Congo or South Africa. For example, in these countries, the annual death rate from road injuries in 2021 was around 40-50 per 100,000 people [3]. So that means that over a lifetime of about 50 years, a person on average has a chance of (50*50) / 100 000 = 2.5% on dying from road injuries. For comparison, this rate is 4 times higher than the US and 13 times higher than Western Europe. If you then are someone who is outside a lot, then yes I would say it's not unthinkable to be near multiple fatal accidents in one lifetime.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor

[3]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-road-incident...

Life in Soviet states was totally different before vs after Stalin's death. Neither were great, but my impression is that the grim incidents of the 1930s and 40s were something that the Soviets were desperate to avoid repeating.

Incident? It was colonial genocides with red decorations.

Sure. Didn't mean to downplay it.

> For example, the Ukrainian Famine was much worse than the famine in Russia (Russia population grew in this period while the Ukrainian population declined.

It is disingenuous to speak of Russia as a whole here. A number of regions in Russia were severely affected as well as parts of Kazakhstan [1].

> I can't find statistics on mortality in Armenia for the 1980s period, but I think it's fair to say that it probably was similar to some modern corrupt regimes like Congo or South Africa.

It is right there in the link [3] that you provided. 12.5 per 100K per year on par with Monaco (12.4) and Finland (12.8) and almost two times less than US (22.9) (all in 1980).

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_famine_of_1930%E2%80%...

[3]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-road-incident...

This is often the case, whenever a topic like this comes up, people who have grown up in the civilized world struggle to comprehend the absolute tragic comedy that the Soviet Union was. All of my older relatives have similar stories to tell, the ones from the army are even more outlandish.

Is this where that saying about not laughing at the circus after serving in the (Soviet) Army came from?

Is this why induatrial accident porn always seems to be from China? I just assumed it was a numbers thing.

right? i'd be kinda wary about hanging out with the guy =)

small scale catastrophes are not that rare, most of us just duck away from them. It takes some special mindset to run towards danger.

Thanks for sharing this story, what an amazing guy.

Wonder if he would be the kind of persons that would put out a comment like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42629179

I've added that post to https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights. Thanks!

Yes. More like this please handfuloflight. A hero story really sets the day up with positive vibes.

3 separate incidents and he put himself in harms way each time to save others. What a wonderful man.

when the paragraph about the asteroid named after him arrived right after detailing those 3 bold acts, I really thought it was about to say he dove into outer space and diverted a deadly asteroid from hitting the earth (and while doing so he caught an infection of St Bonbon's Itch, and was hospitalized for 13 days.)

I'm torn, either this guy was in the right place at the right time or things seem to keep happening around him. I'm not sure if I want him near me at all times or never at all.

Beautiful.

I was wondering if he's a new startup founder :/

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