You know, I once read an interesting book which said that, uh, most people lost in the wilds, they, they die of shame. Yeah, see, they die of shame. ‘What did I do wrong? How could I have gotten myself into this?’ And so they sit there and they… die. Because they didn’t do the one thing that would save their lives. Thinking.
ETA: Gwern checked the book and posted the relevant section below. I got it backwards—seven to twelve are the ages most likely to die. Six and under are more likely to survive.
Actually, there’s something rather like that in Deep Survival, a book that’s mostly about wilderness survival. IIRC, six to twelve year olds are more likely to survive than adults, and it’s because of less fear of embarrassment.
However, the author didn’t go into a lot of details about which mistakes the adults make—I think it was that the kids seek cover, but the adults make bad plans and insist on following through with them.
One of the many baffling mysteries concerns who survives and who doesn’t. “It’s not who you’d predict, either,” Hill, who has studied the survival rates of different demographic groups, told me. “Sometimes the one who survives is an inexperienced female hiker, while the experienced hunter gives up and dies in one night, even when it’s not that cold. The category that has one of the highest survival rates is children six and under, the very people we’re most concerned about.” Despite the fact that small children lose body heat faster than adults, they often survive in the same conditions better than experienced hunters, better than physically fit hikers, better than former members of the military or skilled sailors. And yet one of the groups with the poorest survival rates is children ages seven to twelve. Clearly, those youngest children have a deep secret that trumps knowledge and experience.
Scientists do not know exactly what that secret is, but the answer may lie in basic childhood traits. At that age, the brain has not yet developed certain abilities. For example, small children do not create the same sort of mental maps adults do. They don’t understand traveling to a particular place, so they don’t run to get somewhere beyond their field of vision. They also follow their instincts. If it gets cold, they crawl into a hollow tree to get warm. If they’re tired, they rest, so they don’t get fatigued. If they’re thirsty, they drink. They try to make themselves comfortable, and staying comfortable helps keep them alive. (Small children following their instincts can also be hard to find; in more than one case, the lost child actually hid from rescuers. One was afraid of “coyotes” when he heard the search dogs barking. Another was afraid of one-eyed monsters when he saw big men wearing headlamps. Fortunately, both were ultimately found.) The secret may also be in the fact that they do not yet have the sophisticated mental mapping ability that adults have, and so do not try to bend the map. They remap the world they’re in.
Children between the ages of seven and twelve, on the other hand, have some adult characteristics, such as mental mapping, but they don’t have adult judgment. They don’t ordinarily have the strong ability to control emotional responses and to reason through their situation. They panic and run. They look for shortcuts. If a trail peters out, they keep going, ignoring thirst, hunger, and cold, until they fall over. In learning to think more like adults, it seems, they have suppressed the very instincts that might have helped them. But they haven’t learned to stay cool. Many may not yet be self-reliant.
- David Mamet
ETA: Gwern checked the book and posted the relevant section below. I got it backwards—seven to twelve are the ages most likely to die. Six and under are more likely to survive.
Actually, there’s something rather like that in Deep Survival, a book that’s mostly about wilderness survival. IIRC, six to twelve year olds are more likely to survive than adults, and it’s because of less fear of embarrassment.
However, the author didn’t go into a lot of details about which mistakes the adults make—I think it was that the kids seek cover, but the adults make bad plans and insist on following through with them.
Downloading the book, pg236, you forgot one interesting detail:
http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Valley_of_bad_rationality ?
All I can say at the moment is WOW.
I think I read that book, but I can’t put my hands on it just this second.