You’re standing on the beach, eyeing the swell. It’s sunny, with shrinking patches of fog. A trip around a prominent headland is in your plans. Pick one: the Brooks, Cape Caution, Cascade Head.
Or maybe you’re in a protected cove, bracing for a long crossing. Maybe God’s Pocket to Shelter Bay via Queen Charlotte Strait, Astoria to Chinook at the mouth of the Columbia River, or Isla Carmen back to Loreto, Mexico.
You’ve listened to the forecast, reviewed the charts, current tables and tide heights. You’ve checked four different sites: Windy for the wind forecast, Surf-Forecast for swell direction and wave energy, DeepZoom for currents, and Weather Underground for the hourly forecast. And you’re still wondering: is the plan solid? Will the fog move in mid-crossing? Will the wind jack up more than forecast? Are there too many shallow rocks for that swell and tide height?
The less you know, the better you decide
If you’d listened to Samantha Kleinberg, instead of triple-checking all those forecast sites, you might have realized you were better off with less information.
Kleinberg, a professor of psychology and computer science at Stevens Institute of Technology, studies how information shapes decision-making. In Less Is More, co-written with psychologist Jessecae Marsh, she found that simple, targeted information leads to the best decision-making. Add any extraneous information and decision quality drops. The worst decisions were made by those who either sought the most complex information or didn’t believe they needed any information at all.
The last part makes sense. But the idea that getting our neoprene-gloved hands on as much information as possible about sea conditions is a bad move might surprise you. Here’s why.
Anyone who’s taken an outdoor leadership class knows these steps when faced with a consequential decision. Assess the situation: the weather, the group, the route, the subjective and objective risks. Make a plan. Check in.
This methodology is designed to slow us down. To resist the urge to charge ahead to get a crossing over with because that’s the plan we made. Mountaineers call it summit fever. Skiers follow the lure of untracked fresh powder into avalanche zones. Slowing down shifts us out of what Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman described as System 1—fast, automatic, instinctive, emotional and often error-prone decision-making—and into System 2—rational, slow, careful, effortful analysis.
System 2 requires time, dispassionate analysis and enough information. It’s done in your tent on the beach, not rafted up on the open coast when the barometer suddenly plunges.
“If you get too much information, your decision-making quickly becomes as bad as if you’d gotten no information at all.”
There are two big problems in wild places. The first is that you quickly run out of information. Forecasts are broad. Will the window between fog burning off and the wind whipping into whitecaps be long enough to make the crossing? We can look at whatever weather sites we want, but we won’t find an answer. System 2 is hard when there’s not much to go on.
The second problem, and one that Kleinberg hones in on, is that we’re very easily bamboozled by one or two tidbits that aren’t relevant.
“What’s really remarkable is that even a tiny amount of surplus information has a big negative effect on our decision-making,” wrote Kleinberg. “If you get too much information, your decision-making quickly becomes as bad as if you’d gotten no information at all.”
In her field of medicine, when she told patients that eating too much salty food is bad for blood pressure, she also added extraneous information that drinking water reduces thirst, leading people to lose the ability to choose healthy diets.
“The problem isn’t just that people are overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of information—it’s more that they’re struggling to figure out which parts of the model they should be paying attention to,” Kleinberg wrote.
It’s easy to apply that problem to our headland paddle or long crossing. These are common reasons we articulate for pushing on or staying put: I need to be back at work on Monday; that campsite we’re heading to is really pretty; our original plan was to get to X. Those have no bearing on whether crossing conditions will be within the group’s ability. But because they are part of our overall trip plan, we often don’t realize they’re extraneous to the decision we’re making.
The trick, Kleinberg argues, is to boil down the information to what’s relevant. But that’s easier when a dispassionate doctor is advising a patient. It’s harder when the trip leader is as eager as anyone else to get to that fantastic island.
So, what are we fallible paddlers to do?
One strategy is to keep simple checklists—wind, currents, fog, swell, strength of group, are conditions improving or worsening? A friend of mine keeps his checklist on a laminated card in his day hatch. Assess, decide and move on.
“If you give people the opportunity to overthink, even when they ask for additional information,” said Kleinberg, “things go poorly.”
Another method is very powerful but elusive.
Psychologists call it Recognition-Primed Decision-Making. National Outdoor Leadership School instructor Ian McCammon calls it pattern recognition. People with extensive experience in a field—wilderness leaders, firefighters, high-risk investors—can often intuitively recognize a pattern emerging and know what to do.
“Typically, the expert is unaware of the exact pattern that triggers their response; they just know it when they see it,” McCammon wrote in an outdoor risk management journal. The expert’s unconscious mind is flagging subtle patterns, sorting through a very large database of experience, and extrapolating what will happen and what to do.
But pattern recognition has limits, too. You must be an expert. And expertise doesn’t often cross disciplines. An expert at mountaineering won’t know how to manage a group at sea. And there are enough differences between the ocean and whitewater that pattern recognition doesn’t translate there, either.
And now, back to our beach, where we’re eyeing the swell.
Keep it simple. Are you an expert? Then it’s time to trust your gut. If you’re not? Then keep the information quick, absolutely relevant, and think, but don’t overthink. Strip the decision down to the essentials. A team of psychologists will applaud you when you get back to civilization. Just because you want more information doesn’t mean it’s good for you. Just like ice cream.
Neil Schulman paddles and writes from Portland, Oregon. The location of the next cup of coffee, while interesting, is not directly relevant to his paddling decisions.
This article was published in Issue 75 of Paddling Magazine. Stop refreshing the forecast. | Feature photo: Mike Hayes
