Weird to see this article doing the rounds again. I've spent a fair amount of time with Alex (climbing, doing jigsaw puzzles, etc). He's totally normal, just strong, motivated, and disciplined. Nautilus publishes a lot of pseudoscience that wouldn't be accepted in a peer-reviewed journal, and this is perfect example. A claim of reading personality based on fMRI study of a single person's brain, which shows slightly different bloodflow amounts in a particular place. NB: I haven't talked to him about this article so don't know what his opinion is on it.
I know personally my body has (seemingly) felt fear independent of my mind, and I have heard other drivers talk about this too. Typically this happens when you (think you) know you can execute a corner flat out, yet your foot lifts off the throttle just a bit all by itself; is one example that springs to mind.
(Personal experience, and I'm shit, so pinch of salt.)
The difference with what you describe is that you have a time pressure - you're being passively carried into the state where you're afraid and reactions etc come in real time.
Specifically when doing free solo stuff - I have time to "override" my responses if that makes sense? It takes conscious effort but I am moving at my own pace, I can rest, take a deep breath, etc.
Repetition and training, along with conscious intentional recognition and resistance to the automatic response, I imagine. That's how practically any degree of emotional control is always developed.
I briefly really liked Nautilus because it seemed at least at the time that they were doing science journalism right. Maybe I was wrong all along or maybe there were just a few gems.
It’s important to keep in mind that Important Famous People are actually just human beings, who lead real lives and have friends. There are not necessarily enough Important Famous People lying around to comprise their entire set of friends.
The world is big, and climbing is a very small part of it. The most famous climber (to other climbers) is just another guy in the supermarket line if you don’t follow climbing.
I’ve climbed a long time and have a handful of friends who I had “heard of” before meeting them. I admit it was strange at first but they always turn out to be real people with normal boring lives. I imagine its pretty tough making friends if you’re in that weird class of “super famous in this tiny niche” that climbers (and computer programmers) can find themselves in.
So I guess don’t be surprised to find that somebody here knows another rock climber. There aren’t really all that many of us!
I've actually met Honnold. We talked about college a little bit, and he seemed like regular guy. Also knew people who knew people in LA who were acquainted with various A and B listers. Still surprised anyone on HN is in regular contact with him.
I'm sort of barely related to Alex, (if you count girlfriend / boyfriend relationship as related!) so have been on a couple of family vacations with him. I'm not much of a climber -- managed to lead 5.12 sport single pitch a few times but these days I struggle with 11s. I will never forget when Alex talked me up a V2 I was spooked on! Super patient, nice guy.
(I'm a former kinda-good amateur climber who capped out at 5.12 on a (very) good day in my high school years, and who's related to a former national champion climber) (EDIT: 5.12 in a gym, not outdoors)
I won't speak for anyone else, but in my experience: if you hang out with truly world-class climbers, occasionally getting through a 5.12 doesn't feel impressive at all. Nobody's trying to make you feel worse, of course, but watching someone effortlessly nail something I sweated and struggled through permanently puts my opinion of myself in a strongly-caveated place. "Elite amateur" is a label that's very difficult to self-apply because you see the people who are in the tier(s) above you and it's impossible to not make the comparison. It was pretty motivating for a while for me but I think of myself as "just okay" (even at my best) at climbing because I know how high the ceiling is.
> I won't speak for anyone else, but in my experience: if you hang out with
> truly world-class climbers, occasionally getting through a 5.12 doesn't feel
> impressive at all
Yes, it's true that if you hang out with world-class climbers, 5.12 looks like a warm-up.
But it's also true that if you poll amateur climbers, being able to consistently red-point 5.12 is rare. being able to consistently on-sight 5.12 is rarer still. I think we can say that consistently climbing 5.12 is not world-class, but it is statistically rare amongst amateurs.
Both statements are compatible. We can quibble about whether "elite" means top 1%, top .1%, top .01%, &c. But in general, 5.12 is above the gym or crag duffer level, even regular gym or crag duffers.
Occasionally getting through a 5.12 isn't consistently climbing 5.12, mind you. IMO, the only ratings that count are the grades we can consistently red-point, flash, or on-sight. I can say whatever I like about this one Red Gorge 5.12c that had a couple of dynos, but I'm tall and I used to like to dyno. The truth is that the best I ever climbed was to consistently red-point 5.11 outside, with a few flashes and on-sights along the way.
Likewise, I think I have two V5s under my belt, but I absolutely never could count on sending even a V3 in one or two tries, so I really think that I climbed about V2 consistently outside, with bunches of V3s that I projected, with the memories of a few V4s and those two V5s to sustain me though my twilight years.
---
All that being said, advances in training methods and the increasing popularity of difficulty climbing and bouldering as children's sports is rapidly raising the standard of excellence.
Starting young makes as much of a difference in climbing as it does in every other sport. There's nothing quite like hitting your peak physical prowess years with a half-decade or even decade of training under your belt, and your body hasn't put on its adult weight yet.
I'd say that 5.12 is rare amongst a certain generation of climbers, but this is not for long. It will soon be common for fifteen year-olds to swarm up 5.12s in gyms, and not long after that 5.10s will be known as "That thing your parents can play with while waiting to drive you home."
There will always be outliers in any discipline. I do things 100% or not at all, and seeing others being significantly better than me is a goalpost. It's a mindset, and as long as I'm improving why bother that someone who dedicated their life to something is better? Of course they are.
The thing with climbing is that it's a combination of physical and technique. You can train your physique, but you need to be of a certain build to be one of the greatest. And technique is something you never stop improving. So being good in high school, with the right build and perseverance you could have been significantly better in your mid twenties. But it would have been at the cost of the rest of your youth.
Here in Ontario, that very much depends upon the gym and the date the climbs were put up. There are a lot of 80s trad climbs put up with stiff grades, because the OGs that opened the sport were insanely tough and liked nothing more than for visiting climbers to fall off 5.10s.
It was some kind of magnificent but toxic culture, very similar to surf culture, with hidden spots and tribal rivalries.
The first gym to open in Toronto carried over this tradition, but other gyms eventually opened and went with "friendlier" grades, so there can be a big discrepancy between a new gym's ratings and an old trad climb in Ontario. But newer outside routes, especially new hard sport routes, are put up by climbers with newer grade sensibilities, so the indoor and outdoor grades are consistent.
Depends where you live. Here in France, 5.12 is a pretty normal range to be operating in as a reasonably fit, motivated climber. On the crags here, 6th grade (sub-5.11d) sport routes are generally considered warm ups by regular climber folk.
I remember Colorado feeling similar. And Spain being the same, but with the level set to 5.13 In the Basque Country.
Here in Fontainebleau, it’s rare to see a group of road tripping euros rock up who aren’t all projecting at least 7a (V6).
I’ve also lived in Trad communities in the states where 5.10 is something you work up to over years of never falling, so I understand where you’re coming from and how it could seem strange to encounter the Other World where 5.12 is No Big Deal for the first time.
Pro tip: don’t try the “easy” stuff at bas cuvier or sabots (or anyplace sandy). I just ran through the orange circuit at Franchard Hautes Plaines this morning and it was all good friction, even in today’s summer conditions.
There are 20,000 boulder problems here. Try as we might it’ll take a while to
polish them all.
I disagree with that. As long as you keep your bodyweight in check, and climb consistently, 5.12 will be in reach. I started climbing a year ago, am just edging in to the overweight range of BMI, and am leading 5.11b. I see lots of people leading in the 5.12s who are not elite by any measure.
I'm overweight and really not at ease with my body. I'm afraid of hight as well. After a summer of friends getting me to climb, I managed to pull off 5.10a outdoor. So a lean person in a year can easily reach 5.12.
The difference between a 5.10a and a 5.12 is huge. I can do a 5.10a, on a good day I might be able to lead an easy 5.10b. But if I don't put in some serious life changing effort I will never do a 5.12.
Congrats on being a quickly progressing climber. I met woman climbs 100+ days per year and has been doing so for 8 years, and she's in the moderates (10a-10c's). I also met a guy who's been climbing 6 months leading 11b outdoors. Everything I've about grades says that climbing 12 and above is rarefied territory for most people: https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/106352022/number... though there are outliers. Chris Sharma was climbing for a year before he was doing the hardest sport routes in the world, but that isn't most people.
All the comments except for one in that thread were just people making up numbers out of thin air. The one comment that had some data is from 2009. They couldn't even name the source, but even if we assume the data is good, there's been an explosion of climbing gyms since 2009. The number of good amateur climbers has increased massively because of that, and the average grade people are able to climb has risen because of the training opportunities gyms provide.
> Chris Sharma was climbing for a year before he was doing the hardest sport routes in the world, but that isn't most people.
That's true, but 5.12s are not even close to the hardest routes. They're hard, but totally manageable for a dedicated climber.
I mean... it's all relative, right? And exponentially relative. I know people who I climb ten times harder than, and people who climb ten times harder than me... and then Alex climbs 10 times harder than those people. I climbed outdoors 4 days a week in evenings all through grad school (7 years) when I lived near wonderful rocks and that's when I got to 5.12 . Now I live in a big city, spend 60 hrs a week at the office, and am getting weak.
Alex has always been a bit... well, Alex. I'm not surprised that there is something different about his neural anatomy.
Case-in-point: many, many moons ago, he hobbled into the climbing gym with approximately 50% of his limbs interred in plaster casts. Apparently, he had some sort of skiing accident, and had broken... well, lots of things.
Including most of one of his hands -- only the last two fingers poked out.
He then proceeded to train and climb pretty much as normal, flashing routes that I never actually managed to complete. And he wasn't showing off, either. It was just a sort of normal day of training.
I can't imagine most... really, any other athlete I know doing anything like that.
>> He might insist that he feels fear (he describes standing on Thank God Ledge as “surprisingly scary”), but he has become a paramount symbol of fearlessness.
So, this is how to not do science: "This man has no fear. How does he do it? We scanned his brain and found he has no fear!".
It's not like you should automatically discard any experiment that justifies cultural expectations. But you should be really, really suspicious of any such result.
On a side note (and more controversially) modern neuroscience, with its fMRI conjectures, is starting to look a lot like craniometry.
The problem is with collecting evidence for what you take to be the truth in the first place. It's called confirmation bias and it has nothing to do with methodology, instruments, or techniques. What goes wrong is in the space between the experiment and the interpretation of the experiment: if you set out to prove something you already hold to be the truth, you're very likely to "prove" it regardless of what your data, or your results, actually say.
It might sound strange, but the right way to conduct a study is not to start with a hypothesis and gather evidence to support it. Instead, what you're supposed to do (but nobody ever does) is to first collect some observations, then come up with an hypothesis to explain them, then collect more, new evidence and test whether this new evidence supports the hypothesis.
Otherwise, you risk collecting only the evidence that supports your hypothesis- or interpreting it in a way that supports it. Not that doing things "the right way" keeps you safe, either. In practice, everyone will have preconceptions and already-formed ideas about what is true and what is not and no amount of good practice will completely protect you from drawing the conclusions you prefer from whatever data you collect.
So, when you see a study that starts out with the premise that "this man is fearless" concluding that "this man's brain can feel no fear" it should ring all the alarm bells and raise all the red flags. Especially so if the study (or at least the article reporting it) stresses the subject's fearlessness continuously.
In short, this study seems to have found exactly what the researchers expected to find. That's as bad as it gets.
Anyway, yes, this is not a double-blind statistical experiment. Then again, particularly in neuroscience, great leaps in our understanding have occurred due to single cases, see Phineas Gage
I bet the truth is, when it comes to static imagery, Alex Honnold just registers as excitable about different subject matter.
It sounds like they tried a largely negative gore-oriented image set (injuries and depictions of people in distress) to induce what could probably more accurately be interpretted as an unpleasant state of mind. For regular people of middling intellect who live sheltered lives, being subjected to strange viewing habits in a clinical setting probably registers as extremely odd. Alex, on the other hand approached the experiment after reaching a degree of celebrity that puts him beyond the possibility of an assessment that restricts him from acting freely.
He didn't submit to the experiment, until his career was sufficiently rewarding enough to be innately recognized as highly skilled, and thus beyond the reach of ordinary doctors adjucating him as a threat to himself or others, and thus preventing him from doing what he loves.
Therefore, nothing about the experimental setting was threatening, and he felt no pressure to masquerade with a "normal" response deceptively, or else attract psychiatric scrutiny, perhaps warranting medication and inviting pressure from family members and see other facets of his support network turn against him. With broad fame, he effectively deflects any ordinary institutional authority, and he has social proof of success, no matter what the machine records and reveals unexpectedly.
So then, take other conceptual image sets, and see what does catch a rise out of Alex Honnold, and I bet you'll find he's as human as any of us.
Show him sprawling incredible mountain vistas looking at the sun rise over a himalayan cloud deck, rivaling or far surpassing anything you could hope to see from the top of a tall building and I bet something jumps out from deeper within, than showing him images of a train wreck, because it has to be something real to him. Then the measurements will start showing numbers in keeping with other people's reaction to visual stimuli.
In psychology subject matter specific to the individual counts, and Alex has different tastes.
Or perhaps a rope, dangling 20ft too short, would trigger him. I think you’re right. His “mental armor” technique is noteworthy, though. People often overlook the very significant training he undertook.
Yeah, and honestly, I'm willing to bet that just "showing someone pictures" on some level simply doesn't work on a significant number of people.
Within a certain threshold, simply looking at an image will register an amount of activity in anybody's brain, but I think the context of the viewing situation, combined with the power differential of the individual controlling the slide show, obviously plays more heavily on the mind than the subject matter of the image itself.
For example, a kidnapper asking for a million dollars, and showing you a picture of your own child tied to a chair, while cocking a pistol and pointing it at you, is going to stress you a lot more as a credible threat, than a grad student in a doctor's office asking you to "think about things," while showing you a picture of some random crying child, while an MRI clicks and hums around you.
But for some people (probably many people), the grad student with the clipboard and the MRI, is actually kind of scary in it's own strange way.
These days it is not hard to come across a variety of shocking images and I can imagine that exposure to those could be correlated with the sensation seeking thing, making the images much more ordinary and leaving other considerations as stronger effects.
For some of us, the images themselves would be quite disturbing; just the description of them (that I have heard before) was enough to provoke a fairly strong reaction for me. I might have a somewhat unusually strong reaction, but I would have guessed that it was a fairly small percentage of people who would have little or no reaction. OTOH, a lot of things would make more sense if that percentage was quite a bit higher than I would think.
Also, fMRI descriptions always make it sound like the brain is at rest until it is being activated, but that is not how it works. Obviously the imaging tries to take into account how it actually works, but there can still be a number of issues. I don't know enough to have any idea how likely it is that there are technical issues here, but functional imaging is an area where major issues have gone undetected for surprisingly long periods of time so it should always be considered a plausable theory that the imaging isn't actually showing what we would like it to be showing.
Yes, it should come as no surprise that someone who has dedicated themselves to managing their fear is good at managing their fear. He is not immune to panic, but he is very good at pulling himself together and carrying on.
I've always been in awe of Alex and thought, like the others in the "peanut gallery", that there must be something different about the way his brain functions. Very interesting to find out what that is!
He's not the first to come along to receive this kind of attention and even accolades from the general public, and naturally from other climbers who sometimes do this, or would like to...including, I suppose, me.
Most of the ones that did receive a degree of fame from this activity, and got filmed, on TV, and whatnot are now dead.
As a climber myself who sometimes freesolos even up to 400 meters "off the deck" I don't see it as bad. What is stupid as fuck, however, is doing this 'on demand' for TV and film crews, and otherwise making a thing out of it at all.
Sure, go out and do your thing quietly, why not? But the only way he can continue to garner publicity (and let's be clear: money) is to push the limits more and more each time. There is only one way that can go...
Will National Geographic put that on TV, when he 'craters' (as we say) and blood, brains, and chips of bone splatter across the rocks? If they are responsible they will, because by doing this stuff on TV he and they are publicizing only the "glory" side of it, never mind all the people, some quite famous, that did fucking crater...
So, while I do think he has achieved some great feats, I don't like what he is doing for the reasons I just spelled out. And I don't think he will last long. Those "chewing gum" edges do snap off, bats and birds do shit slimy shits on required small edges, thunderstorms and hail storms and even snowstorms in the middle of the summer can come out of the blue sky in minutes in the mountains, and many other things can go wrong, including human error...and needless to say, human error is very frequently preceded by ego and pride....it would be very hard for someone to stay absolutely humble when the whole world is cheering him on and calling him "World's Greatest"....
As a former big wall climber I would add that articles like this forget to mention the difficulty factor. For some people a 5.10 is like walking on a sidewalk. People who would be killed by falling off a sidewalk or down a set of stairs (old people etc) rarely use harnesses. Risk is inversely related to skill and ability.
At least a rock climber's fate is largely in their control. The well-traveled Yosemite stuff isn't going to shift under you. Death zone, or ice climbers, are the real crazies. They role the dice. Skill and ability means nothing when the mountain decides to collapse underneath you. And such climbers tend to die in groups, their fate linked to whoever else is on the rope. Free soloists die alone.
Wow, you explained this very eloquently. Sometimes I've heard this called intrinsic vs extrinsic risk. Alex generally chooses activities with intrinsic risks instead of extrinsic, and mitigates them. It's more responsible than playing around in avalanche zones or at deadly altitudes. By the way, I talked to him about his recent antarctic expedition and he said it was pretty sketchy at times -- there were extrinsic risks he couldn't control, and he didn't like that.
I personally consider the Fitz Roy Traverse to be Honnold's greatest ascent, which he did with Tommy Caldwell, and they certainly faced their share of subjective hazards on that climb:
I don’t think that his capacity to garner attention depends on his pushing the envelope. The thing that brought him to the widest audience was a segment for sixty minutes where they filmed him free soloing a 5.11 in Yosemite — certainly impressive but totally casual by his standards. Nowhere near the envelope. He pushes the envelope for himself because he wants to — the public has no idea the difference in difficulty between the sixty minutes piece and the “envelope”.
He climbed Sentinel for 60 minutes, it was a 1600 foot high 5.11, don't trivialize it, it is absolutely nothing to sneer at. When I was at peak climbing fitness 5.11 was a warm-up, but doing it for 1600 feet ropeless is an entirely different ball game.
No I agree - that route is an impressive solo — but it is not pushing the envelope or anywhere close to it. He does routes of that grade like others take an afternoon stroll or a jog around the neighborhood. It is of epically different difficulty than his hardest solos. My point is not to trivialize but to point out that to a large degree - he could attract significant attention based off his previous deeds without the necessity to further push the envelope. He pushes the envelope because that is what he wants to do not because he thinks society will further reward him for it.
I don’t think he’s opposed to society rewarding him though —- but I also think he’s aware that society deserves to know that they aren’t responsible for his actions — so he describes publicly at great length why he does what he does and it’s clear that he would do it even if society did not reward him for it (as he did for years before becoming well known)... I think he’s a pretty positive role model all things told — and there’s much more to gain from his example than there is risk of inspiring to die of soloing those who wouldn’t otherwise be so inspired...
I agree on those points. You don't get to climb full time and travel the world without playing the sponsorship game, and he certainly has an interest in his legacy, humble is not a word I would use to describe him. But he's not a materialist, he's dedicated to the dirtbag climber lifestyle and gives most of his winnings away.
Honnold is also much more than a free soloist, he's an ultra endurance athlete of the highest order, he's the hardest of hard men. Athletes who dominate other sports tend to be physiological mutants, but what makes Honnold special is what is going on in his head, and I've never seen anything quite like it. Exceptional boldness won't get you very far if it isn't paired with exceptional discipline.
Your comment on the public not knowing the difficulty of climbs reminded me of a great piece about a juggler, which includes this: "Jugglers don’t have to perform difficult tricks to entertain people, because audiences generally don’t know what’s difficult."
First, we all have bills to pay. Don’t knock someone for their chosen profession.
Second, I was lucky enough to be invited to a small group event to hear him speak. Either all or the vast majority of his fee was sent directly to a charity. Never hit his bank account.
Good rule of thumb is to remember not to make assumptions about people you know nothing about.
I know plenty about him and the climbing world, and the history of it, and have been involved in it personally since 1980, and have met many of the same people has, etc.
I stand by my statement. I'm not making assumptions, just observations. If he continues to climb for the audience he will end up dead. And they won't show that on TV, but they should, to be balanced and responsible.
And, yes, 5.11 is 'easy' but there are still hazards that are beyond his control, and 5.11 involves moves that are inherently insecure..that is what the rating means. 5.10a and above implies some level of dynamicism and/or trusting "nothing" holds or some combination thereof.
And, by the way, if he is "giving the money away" then your choice of the word "profession" is poor English.
It's a shame you got downvoted. I agree with you. I too have mixed feelings about the implicit normalisation and glorification of such an activity through profit-led media projects. Most curiously it's not just the media community that feel it's ok, but even the general opinion in the climbing community seems to accept it. Whereas I feel it sends deeply problematic mixed messages. On the one hand as a climber it's drummed into you to make safety the first and foremost concern. Yet here we see the romanticisation of an endeavor fundamentally dependent on the absence of life-saving safety. It makes no sense to me other than the simplistic gimmick of morbid curiosity.
I cannot believe for a moment that Alex Honnold doesn't get something from the attention he receives. There's something almost akin to the social taboo of watching others have sex, such as in pornography. We're not so much watching an athlete, but a psychologically notable person that allows us to vicariously experience the intimacy of emotions that arise from handing over one's very existence to the precipice.
You've posted more than one comment that crosses into personal attack. We ban accounts that do that, so please don't do it again, regardless of how wrong or annoying another comment may be.
I hope you aren't counting starpilot's replies to me as personal attacks... they seemed like legitimate items of discussion to me and I was happy to reply to them. I guess we could both be nicer to XalvinX...
Studies like this are always interesting to me in that they tread the line between neuroscience and philosophy. They show that a persons philosophical outlook and thinking controls a great deal of how we process and respond to the world. It's unfortunate that our societies usual reaction to attempting to help those who have experienced trauma by getting them to deal with it and move past it is to decry that as somehow 'victim blaming' or minimizing the trauma. Our brains are amazingly adaptable. We can be trained to be utterly fragile, or amazingly resilient. When shown an image like those shown to Alex to elicit arousal, a person can either identify with the subjects in the photo (an act which actually takes a great deal of mental effort, since images are so profoundly different from reality), or recognize it as an image and deal with it solely as it actually is. Whether you do one or another has substantial consequences for you subjectively. And of course no one but yourself can make that kind of choice.
“But it could be the case that he has such a well-honed regulatory system that he can say, ‘OK, I’m feeling all this stuff, my amygdala is going off,’ but his frontal cortex is just so powerful that it can calm him down.”
I didn’t know that the frontal cortex can calm one down. Is that what happens in „normal people“ who are very stress resistant?
I'm an online fan of his after watching many videos on yt. What surprises me is that he (and all the climbers I've seen) aren't "ripped". For being able to pull himself straight up half dome, I would expect the body to layer on a lot more muscle.
Also, I hope he stops free soloing. It's amazing he can do that, but it's not fair to all his fans who would be devastated if we lost him.
It's more important in climbing to have a good strength:weight ratio than to have a massive amount of muscle mass. Consider that every pound of muscle you pack on has to be taken up the pitch, has to be borne by your fingertips during the hardest moves. Also, the act of climbing itself is not really the right volume to promote muscular growth. Bodybuilders like Kai Greene laid out their routines, where they do around 10-20 reps for high volume work, then obviously keeping up strength with 1-5 rep sets. Pile on a very large, protein rich diet, performance enhancing drugs, and you can gain incredible amounts of muscle mass.
Contrast that to Alex Honnold, who does climbs for hours on end, which is more of an endurance sport than strength training. He also has a modest vegetarian diet, I don't believe he is slamming multiple chicken breasts per day like a body builder. I can't say if professional rock climbers use PED's, but they certainly are not interested in packing on extra muscle anywhere except the grip strength/forearms, which is crucial to surviving the hardest routes.
While I disagree with your assertion that Honnold isn't "ripped" (a word for which we seem to have different definitions) it is worth noting that the primary muscles(/tendons) used in climbing are hand/forearm based and you can do quite well even with everything else being significantly weaker in comparison.
That is true, the free soloing is the eye catcher. But he has a very likeable and relatable personality too. I would be really sad if something happened to him.
People frequently dying doing roped climbing too, even the most experience and skilled climbers; and often of stupid mistakes or random hazards.
But more importantly, it's probably better to let people do the things they love as long as they're not directly hurting others. Surely the feelings of fans shouldn't override the preferences of the object of their fanaticism.
And people doing roped climbing often fall and recover just fine, which is impossible to do when you...dont have a rope.
I agree that nobody should be prevented from doing risky things. But when they become "famous" I believe it reckless to disregard the feelings of their fans.
What evidence are you aware of that indicates that they're even trying to come across as a scientific journal? I'm pretty sure they're just a standard Science! publication, like Popular Science.
Popular Science, Newscientist, and their ilk generally report about research that's published elsewhere, or write about engineers and scientists. Nautilus, instead, publishes original research, written by engineers and scientists themselves. I am not trying to say that Nautilus is intentionally defrauding the public, but they are pioneering a new grey zone between journal and magazine.
You're just repeating the claim for which I requested evidence. What's the basis for believing that they're publishing 'original research', instead of regular journalism? What's the basis for your claim that their writers are engineers and scientists?
And why is this 'grey'-er than scientists or engineers writing anything other than scientific journal articles, e.g. books, magazine articles, essays, like they've always done?
The idea that honnold is the world's greatest climber is patently absurd and false, he's just the only dude willing to do the crazy solos without a harness -- aka the world's most risk taking climber. But "greatest climber?" Lol give me a break lolololol
In your haste to be derisive you missed the adjective "solo" in the title. While I would agree Alex is probably not in the running for greatest climber, I think one could make the case that he is the greatest solo climber, and or at least the greatest living solo climber.
I did not miss the word "solo." Honnold is not the worlds greatest solo climber by a Longshot. He's the greatest "free solo" climber. A ton of solo climbers are way better than him, they just use ropes
You're getting caught up in technical terminology whereas this article is written for non-climbers. Those of us that have done the activity know the difference between solo and free solo, but in the same way that you can't expect articles for non-climbers to get the distinction between sport and trad right (climbing is a sport, so it's all sport climbing, right?), You can't expect them to get the solo/free-solo thing right either.
Would you please not post snarky dismissals to Hacker News? Even if you're right, you damage the community by doing this—and it's fragile, so we all need to take care of it.
The rope makes it much easier. If you've never climbed you can't understand the psychological factor of "being protected" while climbing. If you climb "roped" at a certain grade, you might be capable of free soloing several levels below that, if
at all.
Similar to your mental state due to other things. If you're having a bad day or distracted, your climbing will be greatly affected, sometimes severely.
Yeah, sorry, I wasn't clear — that was meant as "this is probably what GP is getting at". Of course, even if the rope doesn't make the climb technically easier, the psychological aspect of knowing you can't afford to fail makes it a very different kind of hard.
I’m no climber, but I have to imagine that the weight of knowing a mistake won’t in any way be mitigated by safety devices might actually make the activity harder. It seems like it would require another degree of concentration to shut out the fear of grievous injury or death, to keep the fear under wraps.
