Training Your Intuition

[TBS]

Occasionally when the skiing is good and nothing has been going wrong I forget that the wicked environment is still there, I am not seeing it due to my complacency. A good example was banging out good south facing lines on a early spring day, only to find that the line we skied an hour earlier has now slid, and even taken out the up track. Just a degree or two of temp, a degree or two of sun angle, and another year to forget about spring slides.

Perceived lenient consequences can kill when we forget the basics. This was a failure of intuition, and basics, among a very experienced group. The incident was extensively rehashed, is rehashed every year when the sun becomes more powerful, and has been passed on to many "

Now that right there was some awesome instant feedback you got to pass on.

This kind of stuff happens a lot. An example - several years ago at Mt Hood Meadows, the AC crew fired some howitzer shells into upper Heather due to Avy concerns. No result.

So they sent a couple of guys over to throw some hand charges and kick stuff. Again no result. So they opened the area and a hordes of powder locusts descended.

That evening - after closing - the whole canyon slid fuckin Hudge.

[TBS]

Question for the avy instructors - do you perform a field exercise where you start directing your class toward riskier lines/routes, and then see whether someone speaks up?

I've never seen this in a class but seems like it would be a good drill, so long as you have the coachable moment - "what the fuck is wrong with you people? I'm leading you into what you should know is big shit and you say nothing!" - before Teh Suck happens.

[Hugh Conway]

If decision making were such a black/white obvious process people wouldn't associate value with intuition would they?

A bit like this gem from the paper

The optimal conditions, under which intuition will be more accurate, include an environment that provides relatively consistent indicators as to its true nature. The second and perhaps more important aspect is whether the decision maker has had the opportunity to learn the meaning of these indicators.

"if mountains weren't mountains and were regular and predictable, and if we humans were pretty good at analyzing everything with out some negative catalyst (eg an avalanche) it'd be really easy to generate good intuition on what they'd do"

[covert]

Here's a little bibliography for people that are into the subject:

Klein, Gary A. Sources of power: How people make decisions. MIT press, 1999.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan, 2011.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. The Black Swan:: The Impact of the Highly Improbable Fragility. Random House LLC, 2010.

And a podcast series...

http://youarenotsosmart.com/podcast/

[dewam]

Now that right there was some awesome instant feedback you got to pass on.
This kind of stuff happens a lot.

Often times, luck is the thing that keeps you alive long enough to learn. Den

[TBS]

^^^My Dad used to say "You started out life with a bag full of luck and an empty bag of experience. Yer supposed to fill up the experience bag before the luck bag is empty. Don't be a dumbfuck".

[lynnsonya]

Interesting post !

[kootenayskier]

8 pages to say that the qualities of the learning environment determine the effectiveness of the automatic decision making processes. Duh. Rather than footnoting the obvious (standard academic practice), this could have been useful if it had explored the extent to which trained intuition can be more effective than the application of protocol, because of its inherent capacity to simultaneously evaluate multiple constantly changing variables. In my experience Zen Buddhism provides a useful intellectual framework for understanding how and why this can be applied to managing risk in the backcountry.

[_Aaron_]

8 pages to say that the qualities of the learning environment determine the effectiveness of the automatic decision making processes. Duh.

How the view from up on your horse?

[gnarhuckerr]

how to train and develop intuition? well if you are just going on knowledge then you just have to practice but thats not intuition, intuition is what psychics use so perhaps you can ask at a new age spiritual forum? they probably know better than tgr

[SkyIsland]

Seems there's a bit of a continuum in terms of environments being conducive versus not to developing intuition of the sort that's useful rather than dangerous. A fairly consistent and relatively benign environment sounds like some types of inbounds a/c work, for instance. Where decision making tools that override intuition become particularly useful includes things like highly variable environments with potentially severe consequences (including some types of inbounds environments, I don't mean to minimize the risks there). One thing I've taken to doing myself, for instance, is if I read a slide report, quickly calculating the ALP TRUTH score. It can be stark compared to a narrative where you can see intuitively why something felt safe.