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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

Drunk driver, war, etc. Am I callous to believe that the two are not equally deserving of our empathy?

I've always thought that a good comparison was drug addiction. Ultimately, what's the difference between someone who engages in high-risk extreme sports and someone who just sits at home doing meth in the basement?

They are both doing dangerous, unnecessary things to manipulate their brain chemistry, without creating or learning anything useful or affecting anything in the larger world around them. Why is one considered heroic and adventurous, and the other criminal or at best pathetic?

I'm not saying that pleasure-seeking for its own sake is inherently bad or wrong, but how would you compare and contrast the behavior of a drug addict and a high-risk climber, if you were explaining it to an alien anthropologist?

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In general I agree with you, but a counterexample to our rejection of their supposed heroism (and ascription of it to brain-chemistry-seeking identical to heroin addiction) is Alex Honnold [0], famous for his free solo of El Capitan in Yosemite. There's an excellent documentary on him, Free Solo [1], where it's very clear that he's neuro-diverse and that extreme climbing efforts put him into the zone, calming and focussing him. There's zero machismo to it. For him, it's an act of supreme, extended concentration.

I suppose in some sense it's still just manipulating one's own brain chemistry, but it seems a very distinct kind from adrenaline junkies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Honnold [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Solo

You didn't say it outright so this is not me correcting you specifically, but there's this semi-myth that "Honnold doesn't feel fear because that region of his brain is smaller than everyone else's". He, at least, disputes this. He feels fear but he knows how to focus it, and it's a combination of some kind of innate talent and conditioning as he's put himself in scary situations before

Not quite the same, but Youtuber Ally Law (known for climbing cranes and tall structures) started doing it specifically because he used to be terrified of heights and now seems to not have a problem with it

I do tend to agree that Honnold is an exception to the "why don't they just do drugs" argument. He's teaching us that we can do things we didn't think we could do, and I have to believe there's real value there. He's genuinely inspirational.

Climbing some random mountain in Russia, though... that's not "Holy fuck, what's this guy made of?!" but "Yeah, a bunch of other people already did that, and it was cool, I guess, except for the ones that died."

>I'm not saying that pleasure-seeking for its own sake is inherently bad or wrong, but how would you compare and contrast the behavior of a drug addict and a high-risk climber, if you were explaining it to an alien anthropologist?

the argument is probably that today's extreme sports risk takers were last epoch's explorers who helped humanity conquer the planet.

I'd be willing to buy that if she had died while diving in an unexplored cave system, for instance, working to bring us knowledge and insights about nature that we didn't already have.

But there was nothing left to discover on that mountain peak, except how much frostbite sucks.

I suspect high risk extreme sports are in fact worse, as they seem to require a constant ramp-up of the risk, and there does not seem to be any detox mechanism (other than old age) that would allow one to reset the required risk.

There is an appalling number of people in these sports who die young, e.g. Ueli Steck (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ueli_Steck), recently Felix Baumgartner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Baumgartner). Many of them had already see friends and family die in these sports (as had Natalia Nagovitsyna), so it's not like they were not aware of the dangers.

Life is for living silly bear. I cannot imagine anything worse than getting to the end of your life and finally realizing you never lived it. That you wasted this once in a live time experience. But that is just me.

are you planning to try meth before you die?

Right before.

I find the analogy quite apt. I have known drug addicts who I thought were recovered, but who could not fathom simply going to work and then going home to their families every night. They thought that was an incredibly boring life. Predictably, they relapsed. They could’ve caused significantly less stress to their families and loved ones by having more socially acceptable thrillseeking methods.

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