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Claim analyzed
“Snowboarding is more dangerous than skiing in terms of injury rates.”
The Conclusion
Executive Summary
The claim is directionally plausible but not well-supported by the evidence provided. Several secondary sources repeat that snowboarders have higher injuries per visit, yet they rely on unlinked/unclear “NSAA” figures and inconsistent metrics. With missing context (skill level, exposure, severity), “snowboarding is more dangerous” overstates what can be concluded.
Warnings
- Most cited materials are non-independent secondary summaries (law firms/clinics) that reference “NSAA” without providing verifiable primary reports or consistent methodology.
- “Injury rate” metrics are inconsistent (per-1,000 visits/days vs percentages/shares), and at least one source appears internally inconsistent—so comparisons may be apples-to-oranges.
- The claim omits key context: injury frequency varies by beginner status, terrain-park use, and exposure time, and “danger” can also mean severity/fatality risk, which may not track overall injury counts.
The Claim
How we interpreted the user input
Intent
The user wants to know if snowboarding has a higher risk of injury compared to skiing.
Testable Claim
The user's input, neutralized and hardened into a testable hypothesis
“Snowboarding is more dangerous than skiing in terms of injury rates.”
The Research
What we found online
Summary of Findings
All sources are listed in the Sources section at the end of this report.
The Debate
The for and against arguments
Multiple independent summaries citing National Ski Areas Association data report higher injury incidence for snowboarding than skiing—for example, Source 1 (fhvlaw.com) gives 3.9 injuries per 1,000 snowboard visits versus 2.5 per 1,000 ski visits, and Source 2 (Physio Inq) likewise states snowboarders are 50%–70% more likely to be injured. Clinical/physio-focused compilations reinforce the same direction of effect, with Source 3 and Source 4 (Dunsborough Physio) reporting snowboarders are several times more likely to be injured and showing higher head-injury share (10% vs 5%), so the weight of the provided evidence supports the claim that snowboarding has higher injury rates than skiing.
You conveniently ignore that your own cited sources contradict each other—Source 1 (fhvlaw.com) claims 3.9 per 1,000 visits while Source 5 (Rosenbaum Injury Firm) impossibly states a "30%" injury rate, proving the data is unreliable and cherry-picked from questionable sources with authority scores of only 0.3-0.6. Your focus on minor injuries while dismissing that Source 2 (physioinq.com.au) shows skiers are "a third less likely to be killed" reveals you're conflating frequency of minor bumps with actual danger—death rates are the true measure of which sport is more dangerous.
The claim relies on outdated and inconsistent data from low-authority sources, with Source 5 (Rosenbaum Injury Firm) providing contradictory statistics claiming snowboarders have a "30%" injury rate which is mathematically impossible when compared to the per-1,000-visit metrics from other sources, undermining the credibility of the entire dataset. Furthermore, multiple sources acknowledge that snowboarders are "a third less likely to be killed" than skiers according to Source 2 (physioinq.com.au), indicating that while minor injuries may be higher, skiing poses greater risks for severe, life-threatening outcomes that represent true danger.
You commit a hasty generalization by using the obvious outlier in Source 5 (Rosenbaum Injury Firm)—whose “30%” figure isn't even in the same unit as injuries per 1,000 visits—to dismiss the consistent direction of effect reported elsewhere, including the NSAA-based comparisons in Source 1 (fhvlaw.com) and Source 2 (Physio Inq) showing higher injury incidence for snowboarders. And your pivot to fatalities is a red herring: the motion is explicitly about injury rates, so Source 2's note that snowboarders may be “a third less likely to be killed” doesn't rebut that snowboarding has higher injury rates than skiing.
Jump into a live chat with the Proponent and the Opponent. Challenge their reasoning, ask your own questions, and investigate this topic on your terms.
The Adjudication
How each panelist evaluated the evidence and arguments
All provided sources are low-to-moderate authority and non-independent summaries (law-firm/clinic blogs) that largely cite unspecified “NSAA” figures without linking to primary NSAA reports; the only quasi-quantitative comparison (Source 1, fhvlaw.com) is not a primary dataset, and Source 5 (Rosenbaum Injury Firm) contains an internally inconsistent, likely misinterpreted “30%” claim that further undermines the pool's reliability. Given the absence of any high-authority primary epidemiology/NSAA publication in the evidence pool and the presence of clear metric/quality problems, trustworthy evidence here is insufficient to confirm the claim, so it rates as effectively unsupported/likely false on this record.
The claim specifically concerns "injury rates," and Sources 1, 2, 3, and 4 consistently report higher injury incidence for snowboarding (3.9 vs 2.5 per 1,000 visits in Source 1; 50-70% more likely in Source 2; 2-5 times more likely in Source 3), creating a coherent logical chain from evidence to the claim's narrow assertion about injury frequency. The opponent's rebuttal commits a scope-shift fallacy by pivoting to fatality rates—which measure severity, not frequency—and the proponent correctly identifies this as a red herring; Source 5's anomalous "30%" figure is indeed an outlier (likely a unit error) but does not invalidate the convergent evidence from four independent sources, so the claim is mostly true with the logical chain intact.
The claim frames “more dangerous” purely as overall injury incidence but omits key context that injury rates vary strongly by skill level and behavior (e.g., beginners are overrepresented among injured snowboarders in Dunsborough Physio, Sources 3–4) and that severity differs (Physio Inq notes lower fatality risk for snowboarders, Source 2), while the pool relies on secondary summaries with inconsistent/unclear units (notably Rosenbaum's “30%,” Source 5). With full context restored, it's plausible snowboarders have higher reported injury frequency per visit in some datasets (fhvlaw.com citing NSAA, Source 1), but the evidence as presented is too inconsistently framed to treat the broad “more dangerous” conclusion as clearly true rather than misleading.
Adjudication Summary
The Logic Examiner found the argument internally consistent because multiple sources state higher snowboarding injury incidence. But the Source Auditor flagged that these are mostly law-firm/clinic blogs with weak independence and no primary data links, plus at least one clearly suspect statistic. The Context Analyst noted major framing gaps (definitions, comparability, severity, confounders), making the broad conclusion misleading even if some datasets show higher injury frequency.
Consensus
Sources
Sources used in the analysis
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