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If you two people are drowning and they grab onto each other, does that increase their odds of survival?

Literally, probably yes. You decrease the freedom of movement, which likely decreases the unstructured thrashing that is often detrimental. Then, you may also leverage each others' buoyancy.

What happens when two drowning people grab onto one another is that they both start trying to push the other down in order to push themselves up. The result is that both of them drown.

One of the things any lifesaving class will teach you is to always approach a drowning person from behind, because if they can get their hands on you they try to push you under.

This is what I was thinking of when I wrote the original comment. Lifesaving techniques are a bizarre mix of completely control them/help them.

It just came to mind as soon as I saw this headline. I read it as TWO COMPANIES WITH ABSOLUTELY DOOMED CURRENT BUSINESS MODELS JOIN FORCES TO ANSWER A QUESTION NO IS ASKING

So the real question is which one drowns and which one gets to use the corpse as a life raft?

Very interesting! So people really get so frantic as to not understand that someone is trying to save them. Reminds me of Survival by John Wyndham (good, quick read of sci-fi horror). The ending was not so scary as it was baffling.

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