How Chris McCandless Died: An Update
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
From http://www.alaskacommons.com/2013/09/22/what-everyone-is-get...:
"The forensic question “Were the seeds poisonous?” is of interest only because it sheds light on broader, more contentious question, expressed bluntly as “How stupid was Chris McCandless?” If, like Alaska Dispatch reporters Dermot Cole and Craig Medred (and again), you think McCandless was a clueless, crazy knucklehead, arrogant in his disdain for wild nature and its perils, then you want to think the seeds weren’t poisonous; the kid just died of starvation because he was too stupid/crazy/arrogant to make it to safety."
"But if, like Jon Krakauer (and, in the interest of full disclosure, like me), you have some level of empathy with or sympathy for McCandless, you want to think the seeds were poisonous—he was doing his best to survive a difficult enterprise and was done in because he consumed something that was not known to be poisonous until two decades after his death."
He was probably just unaware, like most people, how hard it is to subsist in nature alone, and how harsh the beautiful landscape can be.
In the right context, ignorance is a kind of superpower. When you survive and it all works out, you are a genius. Many successful people start their story with: "If I had known what I was getting into, I would never have started..."
So yeah, I kind of admire this ignorance ... in other people. I am WAY too self-conscious and introspective to embark on some enterprise where I know that I know nothing.
Oh, and the poisonous seed thing - he was just eating a plant whose edibility was not established. I dunno, maybe people think nature is benevolent, and sure I can think of a bunch of edible plants in the woods near my house ... but I can think of plenty that are poisonous, or mildly toxic, or carcinogenic, or indigestible, or otherwise liable to disagree with you. He didn't know if he should or shouldn't eat it. He was rolling the dice. If you roll the dice and you live, you're a genius and in a few years you get to write your memoirs as the next Thoreau.
"But clearly he didn't know what he was getting into
didn't prepare and unwittingly contributed to his own
death."
"If this adventure proves fatal and you don't ever hear from me again I want you to know your (sic) a great man. I now walk into the wild"
And earlier he asks his friend to return all mail to sender for the foreseeable future.
That and everything else I've ever read has made me think he was entirely aware of the potential for danger in the wilderness. He walked in & did it any-ways.
Plenty people look to test themselves in nature's crucible with minimal preparation, fully cognisant of the risks. Sometimes they lose. I think looking down upon them with the rosy vision of decades hindsight from the comfort & safety of home does them a disservice. Their lives, their choices.
I hope Chris found what he was looking for.
So far he's been out there for the better part of a year, sleeping in a bivy sack, eating what nature provides, riding his mountain bike and towing his trailer with his few worldly possessions, a backwoods hobo by choice. He's documenting the entire adventure and plans to write about it. He is fully aware of successful adventurers before him, as well as those who died to soon like McCandless. Who knows how long he'll live this life, but he looks to McCandless as an inspiration, not a "clueless kid", and he's doing just fine.
But other than living outdoors, your friend has little in common with McCandless.
(Nothing says you can't consider someone to be both clueless and an inspiration. I consider all of history to be an inspiration to do better, including the less-clueful half of the past.)
Another way to look at it is that he knew there were unknown risks of various kinds, and he decided to prepare as well as he could and go anyway.
IIRC there was a ferry or similar a few miles upstream of where he was "trapped" (because he didn't expect the river to swell as it did) and died.
Learning about seasonal weather and checking alternate routes are a basic part of wilderness survival.
The only thing sadder than McCandless pointless depth is the people whose own lives are so devoid of meaning that they seek inspiration from a fool who killed himself.
Many of us were fascinated by this story because it hit so close to home; that Krakauer continues to examine this definitely hits the empathy and sympathy button, and also the fascination that McCandless was not stupid but had the huevos to do what he did, and sadness with how it ended.
Edit: come to think of it, I've read pretty much everything that Jon Krakauer has written. The guy's grocery lists are probably well thought out and have a compelling narrative.
"Into Thin Air" is a fantastic read. It's got its flaws, but they're very minor and quickly forgotten.
These are very minor literary lapses, of course, and I don't want to make a mountain out of them. It's a damned good book, and I should be so lucky to write something like it some day.
All the controversy lately over American Sniper has me wondering where the Hollywood drama about Patrick Tillman is.
10 years on and this story still resonates ~ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/20/10-year...
his legacy in providing scholarships for vets & spouses http://pattillmanfoundation.org/about-us is a big FU to those in Government and the Military who tried to cover up the how he died.
(Or maybe you're specifically referring to a hollywood-ized drama, not a documentary)
If you like Into The Wild, you might also like One Man's Wilderness about Richard Proenneke: http://www.amazon.com/One-Mans-Wilderness-Alaskan-Odyssey-eb...
Great alternative perspective.
Because the author took Clausen's consideration seriously, they were able to uncover their mistake and correct it.
Furthermore, since peer review is fallible, I don't believe Clausen's identical mistake making it through peer review proves the process any less important.
Perhaps Clausen's criticisms were not well intended, but wouldn't any respectable scientist demand rigor before seriously considering such a hypothesis? After all, the burden of proof is not on Clausen.
The valuable thing isn't individual peer-reviewed papers, it's bodies of peer-reviewed works.
"Peer-review" as most people think of it -- the vetting of papers by a few reviewers before publication -- is the start of the process, not the end. Peer-review is what happens after your paper is published and your peers -- the people who read the papers you publish -- read your paper and discuss your paper and try and succeed or fail to replicate your results. A journal isn't "peer-reviewed" because a couple of schmucks read the paper before publication; that's just the scientific equivalent of Fizz-Buzz to avoid wasting everyone's time with obvious crap. It's "peer-reviewed" because it is widely and critically read by a large number of practitioners in a field.
You should never regard an individual paper uncritically just because it is published. Later, in light of a larger body of research, you might regard a paper as particularly insightful or seminal.
To generalize a little more: science isn't about single pieces of data or single experiments. Science is about the process. Experiment/data -> idea -> experiment/data -> refined idea -> ... until the idea and the data match to the greatest possible degree (a temporary state of affairs, until science in other areas makes it possible to refine measurements even more tightly.)
A single paper, even one with solid methodology, extensive data, and clear patterns, is just one part of science. Replication, refinement, methodological improvements, identification of weaknesses, etc. are what make the whole institution of science so powerful.
http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mike_Oaksford/publicatio...
http://www.pfeifer-research.de/pdf/pfeifer08rh.pdf
I can see how Clausen comes off as snotty. But his response is pretty neutral, even if he praises peer review as a filter beyond its actual merits. He sees a lack of appropriate effort to establish the claim from a nobody, why should he not be skeptical of such claims in general? It's the same heuristic people like Aaronson make on being highly skeptical of the latest P==NP or P!=NP proof uploaded to arxiv.
Had the data come from someone with a proven track record in the field, he may have found it worth his time to peer review it himself.
Appeal to authority is not always a fallacy. It would have been fallacious if he was outright denying or accepting a hypothesis as being the logical conclusion based on one's standing. All that I read from it, however, was that he had a hard time believing it, and would not spend the time to look into the data personally, but that it should be reviewed.
I don't think it's illogical to take more seriously the hypothesis of someone with a proven track record of good research.
Are you describing logic/science/debate as you believe it to be or as you believe it should be? If the latter, are you suggesting ending peer review?
He deduced that this "strongly suggested" they were not toxic. He was wrong because the plants contain a non-alkaloid compound that is toxic to mammals (and presumably not bacteria). So there is a lesson here about what kind of conclusions you can draw from scientific data.
Krakauer's excerpt of Cole's article was poorly done. If you go to the source article, Clausen says,
“First, it seems like a rather remarkably lucky shot in the dark for a person to suspect the presence of a specific toxin on so little evidence," he wrote. "Couple this with the observation that ODAP is only reported in certain plants of the genus lathyrus which is not the genus hedysarum and the conclusions are even more remarkable (though not impossible). I would be much more convinced if I was reading the report from a credible peer-reviewed professional journal such as the Journal of Natural Products or equivalent. I have often heard a key indicator of bad science that is highly suspect is having its results published in the popular media."
...
"Again, I don't make any claims that the report is wrong since I have no data to analyze, but I am skeptical and will remain so until I see a better forum for the results to be published in." [1]
which to me sounds reasonable and, as a professional scientist, sounds just like what I (and I expect, my colleagues) would say. The peer review process isn't perfect, but it is consistently superior to the crap that is scientific journalism appearing outside of peer reviewed journals. Here's why, and why I don't understand why you would hold Krakauer as an example of citizen science.
Krakauer made (by his own admission) a "rash intuitive leap" [2] that an unidentified alkaloid contributed to McCandless' death, based on one of McCandless' journal entries and unpublished preliminary research by Clausen. As an aside, if one wants to piss off a scientist, that's a good way to go about it. When Clausen completes his research and finds the mystery alkaloid theory doesn't work, Krakauer intuits that a mystery toxic mold must have been involved, a theory he announces on Oprah and NPR. This second theory doesn't hold up (as was demonstrated by Clausen, again). Despite your conjecture, it sounds like Clausen actually investigated Krakauer's theories, up to a point. Krakauer then latches on to ODAP, which was close but still not there. His fourth theory may be correct, but Krakauer disseminated a lot of incorrect information along the way. I wonder, did he publish retractions as a professional scientist would?
I'm not sure why you would hold Krakauer's methodology as "citizen science FTW", but I'm interested to hear.
[1]: http://www.adn.com/article/20130917/krakauers-wild-theory-mc... [2]: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/how-chris-mccandl...
Definitely, the most obvious example is potatoes. The fruit and other parts contain solanine. In general there is a great amount of danger around us, within 100 square meters of my home I can recognize at least 5/6 toxic species, so when one learns to eat a plant, it is important to also learn how all the similar plans that are dangerous look like, and what part of the plans are edible and what not.
That Chris' story has a proper resolution is important to the author and for those of us who took Chris' journey by reading Krakauer's book. There are still plenty of mysteries within it aside from the cause of death. Why did he do what he did? There's a theory out there that he may have been suffering an onset of schizophrenia. We have a good record of what he said to people and his journaling, but we will always be limited by what remains of that.
He was in many ways a very amazing person. If you recall he sought to 'kill the false being within' him. His seeming desperation to seek his most authentic self through a journey and a physical and emotional withdrawal from his family and familiar lifestyle (as I understand, which I may not) is something that is as relatable as it is strange and unique.
Nuggets of the idea you hear elsewhere by some pretty amazing individuals. For example, I have loads of respect for Bruce Lee. He was a celebrity and a person of deep thought but of massive action in his life. He made a point in an interview of the challenge to being able to actually express yourself honestly in what you do. To anyone seeking authenticity in themselves rather than whatever expectations or reactions real or imagined the rest of the world may have, to be completely free of that mindset.
I hope Chris believed he succeeded in the end. But I selfishly wish a lot more that he would have maybe almost succeeded but instead came back to tell the rest of us about it in his own words.
Cautionary tales are just that, tales. It's entertainment pure and simple.
Cautionary tales have never taught, if anything they do the opposite and create wrong thought patterns.
We don't need to know to not go off to live in the crazy wilderness unprepared. Eat less cheese burgers is a boring story(Morgan Spurlock aside) but a better lesson.
The fact people seem to have the need to self justify that they are entertained about stories of someone else's downfall is an interesting condition.
I do agree the beginning was a great story about being free and what I enjoyed most.
i also watch pro wrestling.
"And because many people—both admirers of McCandless and his detractors—regard “Into the Wild” as a cautionary tale, it’s important to know as much as possible about how McCandless actually may have died."
But as a cautionary tale, yeah it still matters. Say you meet some guy planning on taking this same "adventure", you show him Into the Wild, he says "no problem, I've been hunting and trapping for 10 years, no way I'll starve".
People who just think "It's a bad idea in general, I don't need to know exactly how he died" were probably not in any danger of making the same mistake. If you want to convince people on the fence, you need specifics.
You seem to be implying that foraging isn't an OK way to feed oneself in the wilderness.
The story of how he died is a good cautionary tale, and the story of how the exact cause was discovered is also interesting.
I think the same applies here: Death by starvation feels easier to avoid to a layman wilderness expert: forage more, hunt effectively, conserve supplies better, etc.
But death via an obscure chemical even while in possession of a book on edible seeds...that's scary and much more likely to give one reservations about their confidence.
That different parts of a plant may differ in toxicity is surprising at all given that some of the most common edible food such as tomatoes and potatoes exhibit similar characteristics.
If he would have brought a map or done a little more preparation he could have taken the hand operated tram 8/10ths of a mile away. He's stupid.
I bring up McCandless's hubris and the dumb mistakes he made-the
two or three readily avoidable blunders that ended up costing him
his life. "Sure, he screwed up," Roman answers, "but I admire what
he was trying to do. Living completely off the land like that, month
after month, is incredibly difficult. I've never done it. And I'd bet
you that very few, if any, of the people who call McCandless
incompetent have ever done it either, not for more than a week or
two. Living in the interior bush for an extended period, subsisting
on nothing except what you hunt and gather-most people have no idea
how hard that actually is. And McCandless almost pulled it off.
"I guess I just can't help identifying with the guy," Roman allows
as he pokes the coals with a stick. "I hate to admit it, but not so
many years ago it could easily have been me in the same kind of
predicament. When I first started coming to Alaska, I think I was
probably a lot like McCandless: just as green, just as eager. And I'm
sure there are plenty of other Alaskans who had a lot in common with
McCandless when they first got here, too, including many of his
critics. Which is maybe why they're so hard on him. Maybe McCandless
reminds them a little too much of their former selves."