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Death by Pokémon Go: The costs of using apps while driving (2017)
- paulpauper 5y ago56 pages. back in the 80s and earlier, papers were much shorter. It's not like the claim being made here necessitates such a long paper compared to earlier studies.
- jonchang 5y agoHow exactly would you make this paper shorter? Do you have any specific suggestions beyond your analysis here?
- dylan604 5y agoBullet points like all of the major websites do, and then stop at the end of the list. No need for details. Don't have time to read while I'm driving to my next PokeStop anyways. /s
- Sebb767 5y agoWhile we're at it, the abstract should really be named TL;DR - who still says abstract?! (/s, obviously)
- Fomite 5y agoI've read plenty of lengthy and long-winded papers from the 80's and earlier. Also it's not typeset, so it's taking up a lot more room than it appears to.
- paulpauper 5y agothey have indeed gotten longer as I suspected https://jeffbloem.com/2018/07/27/are-economics-papers-too-long/ https://jeffbloem.com/2018/07/27/are-economics-papers-too-lo... I duno why the original comment was down-voted so much. shorter papers are quicker to read and faster to compose. If shorter papers were good enough 30 years go, why not now?
- wyager 5y ago> If shorter papers were good enough 30 years go, why not now? Society can only support so many high-status cathedral positions, but the competition has increased significantly.
- Fomite 5y agoYet people also rant about publish-or-perish resulting in minimum publishable unit churning. Maybe the answer is some researchers just wrote a paper, non-typeset spacing is pretty wasteful, and Word does a bad job at tables, rather than some deep rooted societal crisis in "high-status cathedral positions".
- sergiomattei 5y agoI downvoted because it’s such a shallow dismissal of the author(s) work. There was zero substance, just a petty complaint over the length of the paper.
- jayd16 5y agoThis paper doesn't seem to know that all gyms are also pokestops but bases a lot of the analysis on this incorrect understanding.
- jerrysievert 5y agoThe paper is based on the first 148 days of the game. At that point, gyms were not pokestops. That addition came later.
- alasdair_ 5y agoSomewhat embarrassingly, I was the person that wrote the code that put the gyms into the game and even I forgot that they didn’t function as pokestops in the beginning. That being said, safety was the number one criteria for placement every time. I spent so much time making sure we didn’t have things showing up in dangerous places like freeways. The idea that I did something wrong and that as a result someone may have been harmed is terrifying.
- zpk65 5y agoWhat are you talking about? There are gyms at seemingly every travel stop on I-80 in Ohio and I can easily spin them passing by at highway speed as a passenger. They’re in range of several travel lanes because the gym dots are at the entrance door. They’re also not accidents because many are Starbucks promotions. Do you mean “don’t accidentally create pokestops literally on the freeway?” As in, 12345 I-80 as an address? Because I can think of many counterexamples to what you’re saying here.
- alasdair_ 5y agoYes, I mean literally on the freeway (or inside a nuclear power plant, or in the ocean, or many many other restrictions). A "travel stop" is a place designed for stopping so that sounds perfectly reasonable there would be one there.
- CrazyStat 5y ago
- jonplackett 5y agoDoes the paper itself have figures for increased casualties? The abstract only has specifics for $$$ cost.
- jonchang 5y agoIt does, on page 4.
- Fomite 5y ago"The 134 incremental crashes give rise to 31 incremental personal injuries in the vicinity of PokéStops. These account for 25% of the aggregate increase in the number of personal injuries experienced county-wide over the same time period. Based on data from the Insurance Information Institute and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the incremental claims for bodily injuries and the estimated loss of lifetime income imply a county-wide total incremental cost of $988,621. On a sadder note, our analyses point to two incremental vehicular fatalities in the vicinity of Pokéstops following the introduction of the game."
- Alex3917 5y agoThis is also a problem in the foraging community. Once you have the ability to identify all the mushrooms and trees while driving at highway speed, it's a very difficult to just turn it off.
- jurassic 5y agoIs this a real thing? I can’t tell if you are joking or not.
- Alex3917 5y ago100% a real thing. I haven't heard of anyone actually getting into an accident due to looking for mushrooms while driving, or at least admitting to it, probably in part because it's a hobby that people don't usually take up until they're well out of their most accident prone years. But I know a lot of people who have paid extra for lane assist and automatic emergency braking. There is even a whole subset of mushrooms called the 55-mile-per-hour-mushrooms, so called because they're especially easy to identify while driving at highway speeds. Here is an old post referencing this: http://mpb.ou.edu/ben/ben416.html http://mpb.ou.edu/ben/ben416.html
- CydeWeys 5y agoThis has all got to be a joke.
- bingidingi 5y agoIt's a little eccentric, but it's not all that different from geocaching. Plus, free food! I've also dumpster dived a little bit (decent amount of crossover between foragers and dumpster divers), grocery stores toss out tons of food that's still perfectly good.
- addingnumbers 5y agoGeo-noshing?
- syntheticnature 5y ago(2017), and posted multiple times before, but only one such thread that I found had any comments on it -- just one here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16423434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16423434
- redleader9345 5y agoSounds like Darwin award material. But seriously, those who can't survive the sea change of digital onslaught are eliminated from gene pool. Do the evolution.
- ipython 5y agoExcept for the innocent drivers and passengers who weren’t playing the game but were involved in a crash anyway…
- foxpurple 5y agoAlso the fact that car safety is so advanced now that the Pokémon go driver will most likely live and some random person on the street dies.
- serf 5y ago>Do the evolution. humans adapting evolutionarily to shitty interfaces produced by lack of fore-thought and research sounds like a tech-horror writing prompt. The lisp-alien comes to mind. Is this the face of perfection?[0] [0]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Lisplogo_alien_256.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Lisplogo...
- shrimp_emoji 5y agoRofl Sadly, evolution doesn't tend toward perfection -- only toward what reproduces best, like Windows and JavaScript.
- june11 5y agoHaha, leave the lisp alien alone, he just wants to enlighten you
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- seg_lol 5y agoThink about this when you are making any app that is used on mobile, esp if it helps someone get to a destination. Think about that for a second. Seemingly innocuous changes in UX for a maps app can literally kill people, either inside or outside of the car. Gives a whole new meaning to an A/B test.
- ashtonkem 5y agoThe Instagram speed badge was associated with a few deaths iirc. Encouraging higher speed is obviously bad, but encouraging users to look at their phone while traveling extremely fast is particularly dumb. Edit: it actually was Snapchat.
- ekianjo 5y agoJust briefly went through the paper, the model seems overly simplistic to make this extraordinary claim. Plus, they are not looking at confounding factors, time of day, etc, etc... If you want to prove that one variable is stronger than others, you need to include more than one variable...
- lixtra 5y agoThe title and the fact that they calculated the damage down to the dollar are good signs that the value of the paper is in learning from its flaws, not the conclusions.
- scotty79 5y agoThey didn't calculate health benefits that Pokemon GO induced by making people walk and bike more.
- emodendroket 5y agoIt would seem to indicate a wild lack of focus if the same paper was analyzing traffic fatalities and the health benefits of walking.
- aaron695 5y ago"policy recommendations require a consideration of both costs and benefits and we have made no attempt to calculate the economic benefits of using mobile devices while driving. We acknowledge, though, that identifying any economic benefits of playing Pokémon GO while driving stretches our imaginations" They narrowed it down to just driving. It's a bit weaselly to not try and find the value. Napkin Maths, a movie is $5 per hour. Driving for a hour playing Pokemon Go is worth ~$5. But it's also worth ~$5 per hour walking. So the Napkin Maths fails.
- fito 5y agoIndeed. It’s tiring for me to keep reading papers written by people who believe in money as if it were the only driving force in people’s lives.
- Sparkyte 5y agoTLDR the app isn't the problem, people are the problem. Pokemon GO is demonstrative, not exclusive, marking high enough sample data to show that humans are not capable of doing many things at once.
- iamacyborg 5y ago> TLDR the app isn't the problem, people are the problem. The app has multiple mechanisms to keep people “engaged”. It absolutely bears some responsibility here.
- makeitdouble 5y agoIsn’t the whole purpose of it to make you walk ? They even added speed limits to prevent cheating distance by driving.
- iamacyborg 5y agoNo, the purpose is to make money.
- biehl 5y agoIt tries to dis-engage when it detects the phone moving faster than walking speed. But it is not perfect.
- Amezarak 5y agoThe phone manufacturer bears the most responsibility. If it wasn't Pokemon Go, it would be TikTok or Snapchat. Instead of having every single app implement some kind of restriction, cut it off at the root. If Android and iOS disabled any phone screen moving faster than 5mph, a lot of deaths would have been prevented at the cost of a few people unable to text on their Uber ride. People simply cannot not look at their phone while they're driving. We've had ample time to learn this lesson and do something about it. We haven't done anything about it except pass ineffectual phone-use laws and some very ineffectual software nags. I suppose there's a lot of money invested in people using their phones while riding or driving. Consequently, I know a lot of people who have been seriously injured or killed.
- nirui 5y agoWas analyzing the statistics to proof my point, which was "there are not so many people playing this kind of games, so the risk is manageable". After I saw the statistics (Hope I got everything right), which are: - Pokemon Go: over 2.2m comments, 4.3 stars on Google Play Store - Ingress: over 0.1m comments, 3.6 stars on Google Play Store - Minecraft: over 1.1m comments, 4.6 stars on Google Play Store - Call of Duty: over 1.4m comments, 4.5 stars on Google Play Store - Clash Royale: over 1.8m comments, 4.2 stars on Google Play Store - Roblox: over 4.6m comments, 4.5 stars on Google Play Store - GTA: over 0.99m reviews, "Very Positive" on Steam - CS: GO: over 5.6m reviews, "Very Positive" on Steam - Apex Legends: over 0.23m reviews, "Very Positive" on Steam - PUBG: 1.4m over reviews, "Mixed" on Steam - DOTA: 1.5m over reviews, "Very Positive" on Steam Oh boy, Pokemon Go really wasn't "just a small game nobody plays" after all.
- sharken 5y agoExtrapolating the numbers to cover the whole nation has so many pitfalls that they should have left it out and kept to the facts instead. With that said it does seem like Pokemon GO poses a substantial risk, i am reminded of this clip from the early days https://youtu.be/MLdWbwQJWI0 https://youtu.be/MLdWbwQJWI0
- makeitdouble 5y agoI feel like it’s unfair to attribute all the crowd behaviors to a simple game, especially as these spawn must have been random. These people would have done the same if their idol was spotted in the park. I mean, we can look at other stampedes and we wouldn’t fault religion or celebrities for being crazy popular. There can be efforts made into limiting the ill effects, but bursts in popularity are hard to plan for. The systemic issue would be people not giving a shit about society rules. https://youtu.be/ucyia07AlMk https://youtu.be/ucyia07AlMk
- neolog 5y agowhoa
- globular-toast 5y ago
- NalNezumi 5y agoPokemon Go got a lot of negative rep when it came out but I were quite (positively) surprised that local kids that used to sit at cafe with friends, not talking to each other for hours glued to their phone, now was walking around parks talking to each other glued to their phone. Funny how the negative consequences was mostly among adults (that can drive) and the behavior change among kids was pretty positive. That said I also remember heartwarming messages from Parents with autistic kids that for their first time in their life had something they could do together outside and interact with their kids. So I'm surprised it still gets a lot of negative rep.
- djmips 5y agoThe closest I've come to this is that my daughter who often plays this in the car while I'm driving can no longer assist me with navigation and other sundry help which I miss and means I guess my driving is slightly more distracted without the help.
- tim333 5y agoFor reference here's footage of a Pokemon player hitting a police car (2016) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD51pg9iTN8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD51pg9iTN8
- MichaelMoser123 5y agoyou can't catch any pokemon from within in a moving car (the pokemon just puff and disappear while on the move, it used to upset my daughter when she was into this stuff), so what is the point of looking at the pokemon screen while driving?
- emodendroket 5y agoI think they added that in in response to the accident stories. I also think some people would drive around to the vicinity and then get out.
- emodendroket 5y agoIt goes further than just games, of course. Many otherwise sensible people believe they can use their phones while driving — often making up rules like “it’s OK if I’m in heavy traffic” or “it’s OK if I’m waiting at the light,” as though they aren’t at best losing situational awareness and contributing to traffic even in that scenario.
- swiley 5y agoI run FVWM on my pinephone. I've had people ask how I use it while driving. Nearly everything about smartphones is upsetting.