Try this: on your next mountain bike outing, go about your standard operating proceedures.
Then, right before you commence your ride, leave your helmet off.
Then, report back to me on your thoughts, decision making, and risk perception. What changed?
Good luck.
This is the classic risk compensation thought experiment, however I think there is something wrong with it. If you have a helmet and leave it off, you ride gingerly because the added risk is not worth the fun of riding more quickly, when you could always go back, get your helmet, and ride at your preferred pace. If helmets didn't exist, the added risk might be more worth it because you have no alternative if you want to have fun MTBing. If you were standing at the top of Repack in 1975 without a helmet, you rode it. But now that we have helmets, you would wear a helmet (if Repack were legal to ride ...)
That is, the proper hypothetical comparison is not between you with helmet and you without helmet, but you with helmet and you in a hypothetical world without helmets. (But then what would people on cycling forums argue about?)
If I can go back to skiing for a moment, suppose you are making a decision about whether to ski some line or do some particular outing, and you have a fat modern ski and a skinny ski from 1990. If you only had the skinny ski, in today's world, you might dial back your ambitions for the day and go meadow-skipping. But it doesn't literally mean that in 1990, all people did was meadow-skipping, and that having the fat ski is causing risk compensation by enabling you to ski bigger mountains.
The dichotomy between the theory of risk homeostasis and the real world has not gone unnoticed by others:
"Risk homeostasis proponents start with the plausible notion that individuals' perceptions of risk can influence behavior, but then the proponents implausibly extend this notion to develop a theory of universal behavior. Thus, according to the “theory”, if you acquire a brand new car with airbags, which reduces the risk of a life threatening head or chest injury in a serious frontal crash, you will decide to drive your new car with more reckless abandon than your old one because your risk of a serious injury is now lower. You will be unconcerned that your more reckless driving behavior will increase the chances of crashing and damaging your new car because returning to your previous level of injury risk is what you really crave! Only abstract theoreticians could believe people actually behave this way, and one wonders whether some advocates of risk homeostasis have even thought about their own behavior when they get a new “safer” car."
RHT is an interesting theory, but the data just doesn't support or deny it's validity. _________________ Card carrying member of the Scientific-Technological Elite and bent on world domination!
Try this: on your next mountain bike outing, go about your standard operating proceedures.
Then, right before you commence your ride, leave your helmet off.
Then, report back to me on your thoughts, decision making, and risk perception. What changed?
Good luck.
Try this: next time you go for a drive turn all of your airbags off, and don't put on your seatbelt.
Then as you are driving as cautiously as you always do, tell me how this will have an influence on what other drivers are doing and their capacity to make horrendous mistakes, like jump a center divide.
While you're at it, tell the person in the passenger seat not to wear their seatbelt, as they will likely be taking more risks by putting it on.
-Can some other change in cycling during that time period have had an influence on results? I can sure think of one.
Yes an influence, but 51%??????
Exactly-that's a big number, you are on the right track-now just continue with that thought..
Where did the data come from and what type of injury gets reported? How about incidents in which the helmet mitigates injury and the user walks away? What about sociological factors related to who reports accidents and to whom? What ages were involved? What type of riding? In what type of environments?
I'm not being facetious here-I work in risk management in the health care industry and deal all day every day with weeding out the facts from the fallacies and the bottom line from the bulls#$t. The fact is that, with all due respect, Mitch's "hard facts" are a complete load of typical media fluff until they are backed up by the data.
I could say the same about risk homeostasis theory in general-where's the data? I've read Wildes' work and if there is a weaker set of arguments out there, I have yet to encounter them. Not entirely useless..just weak.
Can we use RHT to make predictions about individual behavior? No.
So, can we use RHT to make predictions about groups of individuals? Not reliably-the signal is simply not strong enough. So what use is it? Well, it's really good for making sweeping generalizations in forums, I guess. _________________ Card carrying member of the Scientific-Technological Elite and bent on world domination!
I wear my helmet while mountain biking too, however I'm also aware that from 1991 to 2001, just as bicycle helmet use became widespread, the rate of head injuries per active cyclist increased by 51%.
That's a pretty poorly written article, starting with the first two lines:
NY Times in 2009 wrote:
Quote:
Millions of parents take it as an article of faith that putting a bicycle helmet on their children, or themselves, will help keep them out of harm's way.
That's a huge, and likely erroneous, assumption about millions of parents. It then sets up what really is a poorly written mix of anecdotal evidence and extremely general data.
In that period mountain biking became extremely popular within the user group, even if overall bike use went down. That might explain the increase in head injuries.
Once again, this type of safety device serves to mitigate the risks, and no one is claiming that it is the magic pill for avoiding injury and death. But the neurologist interviewed for the article says it all:
NY Times in 2009 wrote:
Quote:
Dr. James P. Kelly, a neurologist and a concussion expert at Northwestern University Medical School, said that even as helmets were currently designed, patients who were wearing them when they were injured were much better off than those who were not.
''Bicycle helmet technology is the best we have for protecting the brain,'' Dr. Kelly said. ''The helmets serve the function of an air bag.''
Bold by me.
No one ever claimed that wearing a helmet would prevent breaking one's neck, and as the good doctor explains, a helmet reduces the severity of a head injury (as the article even states after the intro).
It seems that poor point the article (and risk.reduction) is trying to make is that helmets are not a magic pill for navigating through this dangerous world unharmed. My question is, who is even making that claim?
Joined: 20 Oct 2005 Posts: 17755 Location: following Diogenes, but the ba$tard threw away the lamp so I'm just stumbling along in the dark!
Posted: Wed May 16, 2012 11:01 am Post subject:
Well, hang on a bit. Parental concern in a society that is afflicted with Sound-Bite knowledge sharing may be exactly as described by the opening remarks in the Times piece.
Adventuring people who take training courses in AVI awareness (etc) are exposed to the demands of rigorous logic and various mental traps relating to an unforgiving reality. Military lifers, especially the combat seasoned also have a reality based demands for interpreting information. Cops, and other emergency response pros do likewise.
Put those (USA based) populations together and you are still at less than 10% of the USA populace. The rest get their information concering reality as filtered for commercial advantage.
Understanding risk? Comparing the assesments of (any mountain professional) vs a 35th year, risk-averse accountant in suburbia...
...seriously?
The frames of reference are so divergent, how the heck does one study them? _________________ "Moderate is not the new Low" - Chris Joosen, USFS Lead Snow Ranger (Tuckerman Ravine, White Mountains National Forest)
Joined: 06 Dec 2004 Posts: 1599 Location: Tell you if we ride together
Posted: Wed May 16, 2012 11:09 am Post subject:
Further, who cares if they are studied? Seriously, who pays attention? Who would consider results from a well-done study in their lives? (risk pros excepted, of course)
Bottom line: Natural Selection is at work and you n me n that guy over there will all make our own decisions and good luck _________________ If you are doing less than loving whatever you are giving your attention to, you are not who you were really born to be.
Joined: 20 Oct 2005 Posts: 17755 Location: following Diogenes, but the ba$tard threw away the lamp so I'm just stumbling along in the dark!
Posted: Wed May 16, 2012 11:28 am Post subject:
nice db!
Back in the day of USCF mandated hair-net helmets
I was one of the few wearing an hard shell hockey helment (Sport-Cap)
sorry, no pic at present _________________ "Moderate is not the new Low" - Chris Joosen, USFS Lead Snow Ranger (Tuckerman Ravine, White Mountains National Forest)
Try this: on your next mountain bike outing, go about your standard operating proceedures.
Then, right before you commence your ride, leave your helmet off.
Then, report back to me on your thoughts, decision making, and risk perception. What changed?
Good luck.
This is the classic risk compensation thought experiment, however I think there is something wrong with it. If you have a helmet and leave it off, you ride gingerly because the added risk is not worth the fun of riding more quickly, when you could always go back, get your helmet, and ride at your preferred pace. If helmets didn't exist, the added risk might be more worth it because you have no alternative if you want to have fun MTBing. If you were standing at the top of Repack in 1975 without a helmet, you rode it. But now that we have helmets, you would wear a helmet (if Repack were legal to ride ...)
That is, the proper hypothetical comparison is not between you with helmet and you without helmet, but you with helmet and you in a hypothetical world without helmets. (But then what would people on cycling forums argue about?)
If I can go back to skiing for a moment, suppose you are making a decision about whether to ski some line or do some particular outing, and you have a fat modern ski and a skinny ski from 1990. If you only had the skinny ski, in today's world, you might dial back your ambitions for the day and go meadow-skipping. But it doesn't literally mean that in 1990, all people did was meadow-skipping, and that having the fat ski is causing risk compensation by enabling you to ski bigger mountains.
The dichotomy between the theory of risk homeostasis and the real world has not gone unnoticed by others:
"Risk homeostasis proponents start with the plausible notion that individuals' perceptions of risk can influence behavior, but then the proponents implausibly extend this notion to develop a theory of universal behavior. Thus, according to the “theory”, if you acquire a brand new car with airbags, which reduces the risk of a life threatening head or chest injury in a serious frontal crash, you will decide to drive your new car with more reckless abandon than your old one because your risk of a serious injury is now lower. You will be unconcerned that your more reckless driving behavior will increase the chances of crashing and damaging your new car because returning to your previous level of injury risk is what you really crave! Only abstract theoreticians could believe people actually behave this way, and one wonders whether some advocates of risk homeostasis have even thought about their own behavior when they get a new “safer” car."
Joined: 06 Dec 2004 Posts: 6410 Location: with flavor crystals
Posted: Wed May 16, 2012 11:50 am Post subject:
<<(db)>> wrote:
Further, who cares if they are studied? Seriously, who pays attention? Who would consider results from a well-done study in their lives? (risk pros excepted, of course)
Bottom line: Natural Selection is at work and you n me n that guy over there will all make our own decisions and good luck
Yep
The natural selection/ risk assumption thing would make an awesome anthropology thesis
until somebody PROVES that helmets are not 100% effective, I'll put SOME faith in them.
Joined: 08 Jan 2005 Posts: 3147 Location: Wenatchee
Posted: Wed May 16, 2012 12:08 pm Post subject:
robrox wrote:
Just one more:
The most frequently used safety gear for cycling is a good pair of gloves. The hands always try to be the first part down...the mellon tries to be the last part down.
Consequences related to a failure to use gloves are usually trivial compared to the consequences of failure to use a helmet, yet frequency make gloves the more useful protective gear...
If folks would stop being attracted by their suseptibility to ghoulishness and contemplated the above calulation about gloves for a while, perhaps safety would be more a matter of reason than equipment.
Wear the gear, ride smart!
I've logged many thousands of road(dirt and gravel too) and trail miles without using gloves or a helmet. Most of the time alone and in remote terrain. I don't think about falling and almost never do, but when I fall I roll and don't post my hands. I don't ride as fast as I used to but I'm still having fun. It's a lot like ski touring, you don't ski like you do inbounds.
Joined: 08 Jan 2005 Posts: 3147 Location: Wenatchee
Posted: Wed May 16, 2012 12:22 pm Post subject:
freeheelwilly wrote:
I'm sure there are some people who take more risks because they are wearing a helmet. But RR seems to suggest that EVERYBODY does. That's just nonsense. And sure, my road bike examples are anecdotal but I think anybody who logs at least a couple of thousand road miles a year for at least a few years or so won't find them even slightly out of the ordinary. Sometimes you come off the bike, slap your head and break your helmet. It's rare but it does happen and it's just ridiculous to assume that you only came off the bike because you were wearing a helmet.
I don't think there was ever a time I got on a MTB without a helmet. I've pretty much always rode single track and I wouldn't ride without one. So in that case, RR is technically correct: I wouldn't even take the risk of getting on the bike but for the helmet. But I wouldn't go skiing without a good jacket. Therefore can one assume that good jackets increase my risk tolerance? I just think this logic quickly devolves into sophistry at least as applied to most people.
I rode bicycles as my main form of recreation for nearly 20 years when I lived in the Bay Area. I logged 5-10k miles a year commuting and road and mtbing. I fell off my road bike once in that entire time. I was riding back from the store on my fixed gear trainer with no hands and quart of Miller High Life in one hand and smoking a cigarette with the other. Stupid right? I was wearing shorts, a wife beater and flip flops with pedals with clips and straps. Fortunately I had the sense to roll as I hit the pavement and only suffered road rash on my shoulder, arm and hip. The beer shattered in the gutter, but I saved the smoke. I never did that again.
I didn't ride slow most of the time and trained with racers and rode fast off road. So, not everyone who rides a lot can relate to your experience. Wear a helmet if you choose, skiing or biking, do what you want. Other people aren't stupid for not wearing one. I don't think people who wear helmets are stupid.
Wow - very passionate arguments going on here. I read the first page, skipped to the last, and it appears nothing has been resolved. If nothing has by this point, nothing will be. Time for this thread to die.
Joined: 06 Dec 2004 Posts: 8413 Location: on your nerves....
Posted: Wed May 16, 2012 1:26 pm Post subject:
mapadu wrote:
and it appears nothing has been resolved. If nothing has by this point, nothing will be.
We've resolved that RR thinks that anybody who puts a helmet on is immediately going to go launch themselves off a 100' cliff. We've further resolved that RR is an idiot.
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