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Nothing on this website or in direct communications received from us, or in our articles in the media, should be construed to mean or imply that offshore voyaging is anything other than potentially hazardous. Dangers such as, but not limited to, extreme weather, cold, ice, lack of help or assistance, gear failure, grounding, and falling overboard could injure or kill you and wreck your boat. Decisions such as, but not limited to, heading offshore, where you go, and how you equip your boat, are yours and yours alone. The information on this web site is based on what has worked for the authors in the past, but that does not mean it will work for you, or that it is the best, or even a good way for you to do things.
John,
This is brilliantly succinct and represents, in my opinion, the battle all of us do within ourselves over when to “pull the ripcord”. In emergency medicine, we always had to be on guard to avoid solely relying on what we had seen (bias confirmation/early closure), without also including what we had read or heard about. In other words, we form emotional “motivating, probability forming” memory from things we’ve done and what has happened to us; whereas we form intellectual “probability debating” memory from things we’ve read or heard about but not experienced. Add in personal risk aversion/tolerance and I believe ten different people will give ten different probabilities about any unfamiliar scenario.
Best,
Paul
Hi Paul,
That makes sense and I can certainly see the similarity to emergency medicine. Thanks for the useful expansion on the though.
This may be a variation on the theme of differential risk between things you know you don’t know and things you don’t know you don’t know.
Absolutely. I have quoted Mr Rumsfeld many times in the past.
The reaction by many in the news media to Donald Rumsfelt’s “known knowns … unknown unknowns” comment convinced me there wasn’t much wisdom amongst journalists. I well recall my farming father and his mates talking about “the stuff you know you know, the stuff you don’t know you know, the stuff you know you don’t know and the stuff you don’t even know you don’t know” so this was all common sense to me.
Recently one of my sons, who had similarly grown up hearing me articulating this doctrine talked of having a similar response to Rumsfelt when he discussed this in a class he was taking conducted by a university, especially the condescending response of the professor. My response, “get to hell out of that class, you’ve got a lot more to teach them than they have to teach you!”
Good point that this was hardly invented by Rumsfelt, that said, while his politics and mine are very different I think we can give the man credit for articulating the concept well at an important time.
If I may paraphrase Mark Twain, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble; it’s what you think you know that ain’t so.”
Hi Bruce,
So true! And particularly around offshore sailing where so much of the common wisdom is wrong.