3 ms·
Another cognitive bias at play is that people are bad at statistics. I'm a great driver. I make a mistake maybe once a year (and I apologize for it by waving m
by alain94040 6y ago
Another cognitive bias at play is that people are bad at statistics.
I'm a great driver. I make a mistake maybe once a year (and I apologize for it by waving my hand). Whereas every day on my commute to work, I see a bad driver doing something dangerous. Guess what, I drive by more than 365 cars on my commute, so my stats are actually no better than everyone else. But it feels like it.
- Archelaos 6y agoYour numbers need to be adjusted: I reckon you are not observing the 365 cars during the whole time-span you are commuting.
- leafmeal 6y agoI'm confused... why don't you believe they could drive past 365 cars during their commute?
- hervature 6y agoThey are saying you can't simply drive past the 365 cars. You need to observe those 365 cars for the entirety of your commute. Otherwise comparing 365 drive by comparisons to your 365 commutes isn't exactly the same.
- DavidSJ 6y agoIt’s an ironic error in a comment about being bad at statistics. :) And no shade intended by that. We might all have made an error like this.
- heavenlyblue 6y agoQuoting one of the comments in this thread: “maybe you don’t yourself notice your own mistakes in the first place”
- caterama 6y agoSo, it’s more like you observe somewhere in the range of 5-10 cars for the duration of the commute depending on how densely you’re surrounded on average? That’s really interesting, and if you see 1 mistake per commute, then the average driver is actually quite a bit worse than the gp assumed!
- tfehring 6y agoThe unit I'd use is car-minutes. In a 30-minute commute you might observe 200 car-minutes (this is a total shot in the dark to be clear) closely enough to notice a mistake if it happened. So if you notice 1 mistake per commute on average, and you yourself make a mistake every 200 minutes of driving, you could estimate that you're an average driver.
- julianlam 6y agoAnd why not? In some commutes, if you enter a busy freeway you'll be passing by tens of cars a minute.
- retzkek 6y ago> I make a mistake maybe once a year That you know of. How many mistakes do you suppose you make that you aren't aware of? Or maybe not even a real mistake, but a perceived "mistake" as seen by the other driver? I suspect the latter happens far more often than real mistakes, due to information asymmetry - I know exactly what I am doing and intend to do, while I can only guess and infer what you're doing, beyond the very meager data provided by brake lights and turn signals. If your real behavior differs from my expectation, I call you a bad driver who made a mistake, while you really did nothing wrong.