We have an expression in my business: “You can’t bullshit the airplane.”
You can, however, bullshit yourself. And you’re definitely deluding yourself if you believe you will handle anything that comes along out of instinct. It’s not possible to be prepared for everything, and I believe acknowledging that actually helps keep you out of trouble in the first place. But if one assumes they will take correct action without training, it’s asking for trouble.
I’m not hopping in a plane and flying it alone, thinking I will intuit how to do it, if that’s what you think I’m saying. I’ve flown a few times with instructors, and I know that if the instructor dies I should ask for instructions using the radio and follow them. If the instructor dies and there is an equipment malfunction, I’d do my best to land the plane alone, and maybe I’d fail, but what choice would I have?
You are simultaneously claiming that one can’t be prepared for everything and also that I must be eschewing some sort of “training.” Training for every possible situation would obviously take many lifetimes, so that’s obviously out. The question is meaningless if you are going to interpret it as “can you perform an emergency appendectomy/carry a grown man out of a burning building/survive if stranded in the desert/do the Heimlich maneuver on yourself/negotiate the freeing of hostages/fight off a Great White Shark with your bare hands/know what to do if your baby drinks nail polish remover/stop a runaway train/prevent every kind of preventable death that could ever occur in your presence?”
It’s not exactly life-and-death, but an example situation might be: Would you try to catch a falling knife? Of course we all would answer no, but I’m not sure that you would necessarily react that way. Because it happened to me, I know my answer is yes. My first reaction is to try to catch the knife.
My “superpower” if you will, is that I can quickly catch things that fall. I can tip something and catch it before it tips all the way over. I can drop my phone and put out my foot to stop it from hitting the ground. I’ve even done this when other people have dropped their phone. It happens automatically and I don’t even think about it. But it also happens when it shouldn’t. One time I was cutting food and the knife slipped from my hand. I put out my bare foot to catch it as it was falling to the ground. As it was falling towards my foot, a thought slowly rose up in my head–it’s a knife–and I jerked my foot away. There was definitely a time delay between when my foot tried to catch the knife and my brain was able to decide that wasn’t a good thing to do.
I’ve dropped a knife once or twice since then and my reaction is now to get out of the way. So somehow that bit of experience means that I won’t instinctively try to catch a knife, but I’m not sure if that means I won’t try to catch other dangerous objects. Perhaps my brain knows not to catch a knife, but I’m not sure what would happen if pane of glass was falling.
I’ve simply said, in answer to the OP, that no - you cannot predict your performance without specific training. Believing otherwise is delusional. Anyone can panic or behave contrary to how they had hoped. One CAN perform well without training, but I doubt very much that that can be predicted accurately.
So I can’t accurately predict my own performance, but you think you know better? If you can’t predict yourself, that’s your problem. I’m not predicting I’ll wrestle a bear or tackle an armed gunman. No training required–I am quite sure I will not.
I won’t speak for him, but you haven’t given me much reason to trust your self-assessment.
Oh noes, are you not gonna let me fly your space shuttle?
It could happen!
AnaMen, if you are driving and suddenly Mr. Dunning steps in front of your car but Mr. Kruger is driving toward you in the next lane, would you stay straight and hit Dunning or swerve and hit Kruger? Can you know for sure which you’d do?
Shrug
Don’t know why you’re taking this so personally. The only thing I claim to know is that it’s hard to predict performance under pressure without training. And If you re-read my first post you’ll see I included myself as an example of reacting badly when faced with a situation outside my experience.
But frankly, I think people who get their ego caught up in this sort of thing are folks I wouldn’t want around me in a crisis.
Situation: No time to even react = thread is meaningless.
Situation: If time to react, the brain is doing something beside making your muscles move, they are moving a certain way. Brain tells them to at some level even if we are unaware of it.
Situation is different every time and we do not think we have had time to think but the reaction is totally different with different muscles doing different thing each time. Brain is doing something.
Situation: Piloting, an activity that has many dangers and complicated solutions that must be done very quickly. ( mildly complicated airplane that even inputs other than flight control inputs can be very necessary and need doing correctly, in sequence & quick. ) Training & practice & experienced in many different aircraft produce people who and think quick and respond in very good ways even to things with which they have no physical experience.
Hitting animals that you have no idea exist until the actual impact? One in a thousand maybe. Might not have time to do any physical activity but not know for some fraction of time it was going to happen? Very few for me & I am not a lucky person. Any time I had time to move physically, I have always made the correct choice over hit, swerve, others in the car, least damage to transport and/or me &/or passengers.
Reactions & actual time to consciously make a choice, I have been right. Not because I am lucky, but because I have tried to be prepared for them. I have an imagination and I am not afraid to use it nor ever refuse to think of the possibility of anything.
I may not be as sure as some in my ability but many of my actions have been much better than many in this tread judging by their posts.
I do not guarantee that I will be right or never be surprised or not know the correct thing to do or do it except by apparent accident and yet in retrospect, so far, I have never saved the day so to speak by doing something I had no idea of some possibility that I had thought of or a modification of something I had already done in a different situation.
YMMV
[quote=]
Don’t Swerve
The leading cause of accidents, injuries, and deaths from deer-related accidents is when vehicles swerve in an attempt to avoid hitting a deer. Swerving can result in vehicles moving into oncoming traffic, crashing into trees and other objects, or evening rolling over. While it may be against a driver’s first instinct, the safest thing to do is slow down as much as possible and let your vehicle strike the deer. Instincts tell us to avoid an obstruction in the road, but if you can train yourself to not swerve to avoid deer in the road you will keep yourself, your passengers, and other drivers much safer.
[/quote]
Don’t confuse luck for skill.
If you swerve into oncoming traffic, yes, that is bad.
But if you were looking where you were going in the first place and not driving too fast for conditions, why the heck would you not see that there was a vehicle in the oncoming lane?? It’s right in front of you. Don’t confuse swerving to avoid an obstacle with entering the oncoming lane without looking. I would NEVER enter the opposite lane in this manner any more than I would drive off a cliff. Part of driving is the constant search for where your escape route will be and awareness of the obstructions that may be blocking your view of something that may enter your path at ground level.
Sometimes plowing into a deer may be your best choice for the circumstance, but not hitting anything at all is still ideal. I have avoided hitting at least 100 deer, but how does that get entered into a study to work out statistics? It doesn’t, since nothing happened. Looking at deer-related accidents and deciding that the accident-haver did the wrong thing is a pretty silly way to go about deciding what to do, since duh, most accidents are caused by driver error.
So “lost cat training” would have enabled you to behave rationally?
Here ya go:
When your cat is lost, you should check the area immediately around the house, listening carefully for signs of movement. If the cat is not located, gather as many helpers as you can. Dispatch one with a photo and relevant details to print up flyers. You and your helpers should canvass the neighborhood, posting the flyers and chatting up every pedestrian and giving them a flyer so they can call if the cat is seen. Visit each immediate neighbor at home and let them know to give you a call if the cat is spotted. Visit each animal shelter and look for the cat. Insist on seeing every possible cage bank and post flyers wherever they will let you. If your cat is microchipped, alert the microchip company and confirm that they have your correct contact info.
Question Module:
Somewhat related, but I used to do bar/restaurant work in my younger days. Often for wedding/banquets etc.
The mark of an experienced waiter was the ‘I’m carrying a tray of glasses and one of them is about to fall over/off’ test. If you’re carrying a tray full of glasses (full or empty) and you notice one of them wobbling and about to tip, the natural reaction is to try and correct - tilt the tray, try and catch it with your hand, whatever. If you’re experienced you know that rarely works and you’ll more likely end up losing even more glasses or even dropping the tray entirely.
It takes a fair bit of experience to just let that glass go and save the rest of them - you need to essentially be able to override your instincts.
In the sense that car accidents and drownings and the like happen much more frequently than the deranged gunman scenario you are correct, but that isn’t what is generally meant by this type of question. When someone asks how you would handle a life or death situation they aren’t asking if you know how to drive without hitting stuff, they are asking about those incredibly rare situations that cause you to flip into a panic mode. The OP specifically mentions a mass shooting or stabbing spree as their example. You can’t say you don’t panic in extreme situations because you have good reaction time when you’re driving any more than you can say you have an excellent household budget because you don’t spend all your money on hookers and blow. The OP doesn’t seem to want to know if you can avoid hitting a deer with your car. They seem to want to know what you do if, while sitting and watching TV with your kids tonight, a ten point buck bursts through your front window into your living room.
Thanks for the training. Seriously. At the time, I had about zero experience with animals. This would have been useful.
Surely, you can also imagine a situation in which you have no prior experience causing you to take incorrect action?
I don’t have a “panic mode,” so I guess I am doomed to a dull life of ordinary situations, calmly escorting children from the room to escape errant wild animals.
My parents always told me wild animals will leave you alone if you leave them alone and none of us were ever attacked by wild animals, so this rule of thumb has served me well. Remaining calm is extra important when in the presence of a frightened animal, so I have no doubt whatsoever that my choice is appropriate.
I never said I could always choose what in retrospect would have been the best possible action. I evaluate a situation and act accordingly, based on my knowledge and life experience. Panicking is harmful and destructive, so I will never choose that. I know that people insist panicking is not a choice, but I think that is part of what allows them to let themselves panic instead of getting their own mental state under control.
Telling people that they can’t help their reaction to things and encouraging them to seek a label for their “condition,” yet simultaneously telling them that anyone that “judges” them negatively for having this “condition” is a jerk has resulted in a bunch of trembling weenies whose “bravery” consists of freely and unashamedly bragging about their irrational phobias and mental weaknesses.
Maybe I’m a jerk because I’m not “supportive” of someone who weeps and wets themselves at the sight of a spider, but I couldn’t live like that and I don’t think people should be encouraged to tell themselves that it’s okay that they didn’t try because they probably couldn’t have managed to act reasonably anyway. I want it to be normal for people to feel internal pressure to pull themselves together and act rationally, not hand-wave their panic as some unavoidable thing that could strike anyone at any time, because it isn’t.
I was shot at once. Always thought I’d handle it well. First shot I just stood there, with my thumb up my butt, going “Is that a shot? is someone shooting at me?” . duh. Next round I hit cover in a blind panic. Next round I was going “Hey wait, I am well armed, this guy seems to be a real bad shot, why arent I shooting back?” It took a while for the rational brain to kick in. (Turns out it was a crazy guy who actually shot to miss, I was in little real danger, and I am glad i didnt return fire)
My Dad was a WWII combat veteran, with scads of ribbons, in for the whole damn war, and he said that is common, and it’s why the “new guy” often “gets it” while the veteran can survive combat after combat.
So, no- the first time you get shot at, etc- you will not react in a rational manner.