High Crimes
Apr. 1st, 2014 07:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI have this case study that I'm supposed to be writing up that the teacher has not really explained at all how we're supposed to write up, so--procrastination!
I have continued with my reading about Everest. The 1996 disaster comes up a lot, but as Krakauer pointed out in the book, there were actually a lower than average number of deaths that year as percentage of climbers. I think it gets remembered in particular for a couple of reasons: one of the people who survived it happened to be an amazing writer who wrote a bestseller about it; eight of the deaths that year happened in one storm (though, despite this number being bandied about in reference to the book a lot, only five of those people were in Krakauer's group--the other three died on the other side of the mountain); as my dad mentioned, what caught the news at the time was that one of the stranded climbers called his wife on his satellite phone. The fact that someone dying, inaccessible, on the top of Everest could talk to his wife in New Zealand but not be rescued was mind boggling. But I think the main reason it's remembered is that three of the dead were guides, two of them well-known, well-loved, and well-respected. I think it's that that hits people. A lot of the deaths on Everest can easily be written off as stupidity, but for two of the best known mountaineers to die I think reminded people that no one is safe.
One other note about Into Thin Air: it launched a war of words between Krakauer and one of the guides who survived who was not portrayed in a positive light in the book. Krakauer addresses it in an afterword written in 1999. What struck me about the afterword is that, only three years after the disaster described, a lot of the eyewitnesses had already died, including the guide at the center of the controversy. One person died in a car accident, but the others died in mountaineering accidents, which is sobering.
Now I am reading High Crimes. It has some serious structural problems (timeline says what?), but it raises a lot of interesting issues that Into Thin Air doesn't get into. Into Thin Air points out the danger of the mountain itself. High Crimes talks about everything else.
Basically, Everest is like a gold rush town. All the factors at play there make it even less likely that you'll summit and come home unscathed.
- You have hordes of Westerners (largely Americans) with far more money than sense showing up in some of the poorest places on the planet, Nepal and Tibet. They are spending tens of thousands of dollars outfitting an expedition. One tank of oxygen costs almost as much as the average national income in Nepal, and you need several to summit. As with any place where rich tourists bring in loads of money to a poor place, this causes problems. (Or put another way, how sure are you there's actually oxygen in that tank you just bought?)
- For many people trying to summit, they are either so blinded by dreams or ambitions that they don't really have an exit plan for when they'll bail if they can't. It's so expensive, for a lot of people, this is their one and only shot. They have gotten corporate sponsorship or borrowed money, making a decision to turn around a failure not just for them. For some people, summitting Everest is necessary for career advancement: if they want to become a promotional speaker, or to be a professional guide. So they can't really afford not to make it. Yet most people who try don't make it.
- This pressure means that people try to summit with as little as they can. If it is supposed to take them two tanks of oxygen to summit and get back down, then that's all they bring, leaving no margin for if there's a storm or if someone's in distress. It takes weeks or months to fully acclimatize to the altitude, but it's possible to summit when you've only acclimatized just enough to get up and get down with no physical reserves left. This means there is no margin for error, if any of what you expect to happen doesn't work out that way. And that's, frankly, insane with a risk like Everest.
- There's no park service there, and no regulation of who is on the mountain beyond the requirement to buy a permit. This means that there are very well-outfitted expeditions there, with extra oxygen, extra supplies, extra Sherpas, and their own medic. Knowing this, there are also tiny expeditions or solo climbers who assume that if they get in trouble, the medic someone else is paying for will still help them.
This last one adds an extra layer to the debate about the death of people like David Sharp, who forty climbers walked past without rendering aid to while he slowly died. Like I talked about in the previous entry about The Summit, there's the code that says if saving someone's life means losing your own, you don't save it. But what about if saving someone's life means not losing your life but losing your own chance to summit? That seems awful and callous. (And has happened a lot on Everest.) But what if the reason that person is in distress is because they went cheap and didn't bring what they needed, knowing someone else would have it. Does that mean someone who paid $70,000 to summit Everest should abandon that entire investment to help a moocher? I'd say yes. But you can start to see why people don't help.
High Crimes also describes a number of hair-raising crimes on the mountain. Like when a man who summitted Everest came back to the highest camp--keep in mind, this is after 20 hours in the death zone, where his body is literally dying and he is on the edge of his ability to survive--to find everything stolen out of his tent, including sleeping bag and cooking stove. Had someone not helped him, he would have frozen to death.
One of the main stories in the book is about the death of Nils Antezana. He hired a guide to take him up Everest, mostly based on the fact that this guide had summitted before. One problem. He hadn't. He'd been on an expedition, but failed to summit. When a teammate came back from summitting, this guide stole the film from his camera off his unconscious body. He then later published the photos of the masked and goggled figure on the summit as himself.
So. Nils goes up the mountain with this guide. They fight constantly--Nils doesn't trust him. The guide has abandoned him before. Nils is getting sick, too. But he refuses to turn back. So he summits. The guide--who had been using him to fund his own summit bid, effectively, summits and abandons him. Nils gets delirious and can't get himself down. Two Sherpas try, and get him about halfway, but have to abandon him to save their own lives.
The guide gets back to high camp. Tells NO ONE that he left his client up there. Sleeps. Calls his web master, who posts on his website about the guide's triumphant summit of Everest. Still tells no one that his client is missing. Two and a half days later, he calls Nils's wife and tells her that her husband just wanted to stay on the mountain--he said it was his home--he was happy there. So sorry, your husband's dead.
Red flags ALL OVER that entire expedition, but ambition kept them climbing anyway.
The other story is about the author's own expedition. This one featured things like-- It was led by a husband and wife team who had both climbed Everest before. The night before they fly to Nepal, the wife calls the author in tears because her husband beat her. Author felt very weird about this. But went anyway.
That's the thing about Everest that's just madness. All the incentives are in the wrong places, so even when there are enormous red flags, people keep pushing into this highly dangerous situation because, goddammit, it's their shot. Things like the oxygen bottles don't match the gauge of the masks, so they don't screw together. Some guides file down the valves so they sorta fit, and the whole group goes on. Despite the fact that their lives depend on that connection working. It seems like the existence of guides helping novice climbers to the top fosters this shift of responsibility: you pay the guide to get you up there, so they better do what you paid them for. Even when all signals are screaming that this is not a situation you should risk your life with.
Krakauer in Into Thin Air talks about his own responsibility in the catastrophe, in not noticing that one of his guides was in trouble. He says in retrospect it was obvious the guide was suffering from acute mountain sickness, but at the time, since this was someone paid to take care of him, not the other way around, he didn't even think about the guide's well-being. Krakauer had a lot of experience climbing, so had experience monitoring his climbing partner's health. Given that severe health problems can strike anyone at that altitude out of the blue, he should have known to check in with the other people he was climbing with, including the guides. But being part of a paid expedition freed him from feeling like that was in any part his responsibility.
I think there's a fundamental problem when you're paying someone else to be your good judgment. Especially if that person gets a bonus if they get you to the summit. In corporate governance, we call that an asymmetrical incentive.
I have continued with my reading about Everest. The 1996 disaster comes up a lot, but as Krakauer pointed out in the book, there were actually a lower than average number of deaths that year as percentage of climbers. I think it gets remembered in particular for a couple of reasons: one of the people who survived it happened to be an amazing writer who wrote a bestseller about it; eight of the deaths that year happened in one storm (though, despite this number being bandied about in reference to the book a lot, only five of those people were in Krakauer's group--the other three died on the other side of the mountain); as my dad mentioned, what caught the news at the time was that one of the stranded climbers called his wife on his satellite phone. The fact that someone dying, inaccessible, on the top of Everest could talk to his wife in New Zealand but not be rescued was mind boggling. But I think the main reason it's remembered is that three of the dead were guides, two of them well-known, well-loved, and well-respected. I think it's that that hits people. A lot of the deaths on Everest can easily be written off as stupidity, but for two of the best known mountaineers to die I think reminded people that no one is safe.
One other note about Into Thin Air: it launched a war of words between Krakauer and one of the guides who survived who was not portrayed in a positive light in the book. Krakauer addresses it in an afterword written in 1999. What struck me about the afterword is that, only three years after the disaster described, a lot of the eyewitnesses had already died, including the guide at the center of the controversy. One person died in a car accident, but the others died in mountaineering accidents, which is sobering.
Now I am reading High Crimes. It has some serious structural problems (timeline says what?), but it raises a lot of interesting issues that Into Thin Air doesn't get into. Into Thin Air points out the danger of the mountain itself. High Crimes talks about everything else.
Basically, Everest is like a gold rush town. All the factors at play there make it even less likely that you'll summit and come home unscathed.
- You have hordes of Westerners (largely Americans) with far more money than sense showing up in some of the poorest places on the planet, Nepal and Tibet. They are spending tens of thousands of dollars outfitting an expedition. One tank of oxygen costs almost as much as the average national income in Nepal, and you need several to summit. As with any place where rich tourists bring in loads of money to a poor place, this causes problems. (Or put another way, how sure are you there's actually oxygen in that tank you just bought?)
- For many people trying to summit, they are either so blinded by dreams or ambitions that they don't really have an exit plan for when they'll bail if they can't. It's so expensive, for a lot of people, this is their one and only shot. They have gotten corporate sponsorship or borrowed money, making a decision to turn around a failure not just for them. For some people, summitting Everest is necessary for career advancement: if they want to become a promotional speaker, or to be a professional guide. So they can't really afford not to make it. Yet most people who try don't make it.
- This pressure means that people try to summit with as little as they can. If it is supposed to take them two tanks of oxygen to summit and get back down, then that's all they bring, leaving no margin for if there's a storm or if someone's in distress. It takes weeks or months to fully acclimatize to the altitude, but it's possible to summit when you've only acclimatized just enough to get up and get down with no physical reserves left. This means there is no margin for error, if any of what you expect to happen doesn't work out that way. And that's, frankly, insane with a risk like Everest.
- There's no park service there, and no regulation of who is on the mountain beyond the requirement to buy a permit. This means that there are very well-outfitted expeditions there, with extra oxygen, extra supplies, extra Sherpas, and their own medic. Knowing this, there are also tiny expeditions or solo climbers who assume that if they get in trouble, the medic someone else is paying for will still help them.
This last one adds an extra layer to the debate about the death of people like David Sharp, who forty climbers walked past without rendering aid to while he slowly died. Like I talked about in the previous entry about The Summit, there's the code that says if saving someone's life means losing your own, you don't save it. But what about if saving someone's life means not losing your life but losing your own chance to summit? That seems awful and callous. (And has happened a lot on Everest.) But what if the reason that person is in distress is because they went cheap and didn't bring what they needed, knowing someone else would have it. Does that mean someone who paid $70,000 to summit Everest should abandon that entire investment to help a moocher? I'd say yes. But you can start to see why people don't help.
High Crimes also describes a number of hair-raising crimes on the mountain. Like when a man who summitted Everest came back to the highest camp--keep in mind, this is after 20 hours in the death zone, where his body is literally dying and he is on the edge of his ability to survive--to find everything stolen out of his tent, including sleeping bag and cooking stove. Had someone not helped him, he would have frozen to death.
One of the main stories in the book is about the death of Nils Antezana. He hired a guide to take him up Everest, mostly based on the fact that this guide had summitted before. One problem. He hadn't. He'd been on an expedition, but failed to summit. When a teammate came back from summitting, this guide stole the film from his camera off his unconscious body. He then later published the photos of the masked and goggled figure on the summit as himself.
So. Nils goes up the mountain with this guide. They fight constantly--Nils doesn't trust him. The guide has abandoned him before. Nils is getting sick, too. But he refuses to turn back. So he summits. The guide--who had been using him to fund his own summit bid, effectively, summits and abandons him. Nils gets delirious and can't get himself down. Two Sherpas try, and get him about halfway, but have to abandon him to save their own lives.
The guide gets back to high camp. Tells NO ONE that he left his client up there. Sleeps. Calls his web master, who posts on his website about the guide's triumphant summit of Everest. Still tells no one that his client is missing. Two and a half days later, he calls Nils's wife and tells her that her husband just wanted to stay on the mountain--he said it was his home--he was happy there. So sorry, your husband's dead.
Red flags ALL OVER that entire expedition, but ambition kept them climbing anyway.
The other story is about the author's own expedition. This one featured things like-- It was led by a husband and wife team who had both climbed Everest before. The night before they fly to Nepal, the wife calls the author in tears because her husband beat her. Author felt very weird about this. But went anyway.
That's the thing about Everest that's just madness. All the incentives are in the wrong places, so even when there are enormous red flags, people keep pushing into this highly dangerous situation because, goddammit, it's their shot. Things like the oxygen bottles don't match the gauge of the masks, so they don't screw together. Some guides file down the valves so they sorta fit, and the whole group goes on. Despite the fact that their lives depend on that connection working. It seems like the existence of guides helping novice climbers to the top fosters this shift of responsibility: you pay the guide to get you up there, so they better do what you paid them for. Even when all signals are screaming that this is not a situation you should risk your life with.
Krakauer in Into Thin Air talks about his own responsibility in the catastrophe, in not noticing that one of his guides was in trouble. He says in retrospect it was obvious the guide was suffering from acute mountain sickness, but at the time, since this was someone paid to take care of him, not the other way around, he didn't even think about the guide's well-being. Krakauer had a lot of experience climbing, so had experience monitoring his climbing partner's health. Given that severe health problems can strike anyone at that altitude out of the blue, he should have known to check in with the other people he was climbing with, including the guides. But being part of a paid expedition freed him from feeling like that was in any part his responsibility.
I think there's a fundamental problem when you're paying someone else to be your good judgment. Especially if that person gets a bonus if they get you to the summit. In corporate governance, we call that an asymmetrical incentive.
no subject
Date: 2014-04-02 03:41 pm (UTC)