4 ms·

I actually do try to stay away from cars. I think we are absolutely horrible at addressing risk accurately, and someday when we have some sort of carless societ

I actually do try to stay away from cars. I think we are absolutely horrible at addressing risk accurately, and someday when we have some sort of carless society (or maybe self-driving cars?) we will not understand how we could possibly have accepted the mortality rates associated with cars. Not to mention the less immediate effects on long term health from exhaust, etc. Although I feel you were trying to make the opposite case, I think events like COVID should illuminate the dangers and inadequacies of other elements of our lives. If you've read "The Maniac of New York" comic, it makes a similar point: a murderer that can't be stopped eventually just becomes accepted by society. Perhaps we have recency bias with COVID, but we have a more worrying complacency bias with other elements of our lives, like cars. Dramatic life extensions and quality of life improvements come when people stop accepting that "meh, people get sick and die," and instead get curious and start pushing for "burdensome" things like public sanitation. Perhaps more importantly though, the ICU is getting filled up and causing other unrelated ailments to become worse. This isn't the case with most the other things you listed. > babies have 0.6% chance of dying around birth This one is hard to avoid unfortunately, unless you believe in Pixar's "pre life" world from "Soul". Also, arguably avoiding it leads to 100% mortality depending on how you count "not living". Neither here nor there, but I wasn't really a fan of that movie.

clairity 5y ago
rather than being so dichotomous and partisan, my actual position is that we focus on the wrong problems because of biases and fallacious thinking, both individual and systemic. death by car is a real problem, but we’ve long accepted that and similar risks to our lives (as an aside, cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases are more pressing, to which auto pollution does contribute). covid is comparable to that level of risk and yet there’s no constant uproar and heightened emotion around car deaths. we need to couch novel threats in relation to existing risk tolerances developed over millennia rather than the other way around (because those exist already for good reasons, à la chesterson’s fence). the “hospitals filling up” narrative is mediopolitically-motivated justification, not grounded in deductive reasoning nor meant to drive effective mitigative policy.
- tolmasky 5y ago
  > yet there’s no constant uproar and heightened emotion around car deaths. I think you may have a recency bias towards the mitigation techniques. The reason it seems like there's no hysteria around cars is because we've already gone through that phase and implemented the best safeguards we could come up with: the right analogy here is to see what a stickler our society is for having car insurance, which is the closest thing to a "car accident vaccine" we could come up with. Given the reality of the frequency of car accidents, and how they can potentially affect others just as much as yourself, we've implemented a system where it is a requirement to have a way to compensate the other person if an accident happens (not to mention the various laws we have around driving, the big deal that was Mothers Against Drunk Driving, breathalyzer checkpoints which could be seen quite analogously to covid testing, the fact that we need a license to drive and are tested for driving proficiency, the penalties for driving unsafely, laws requiring you to buckle your safety belt, laws around safety belts and airbags needing to be included in cars, etc. etc.). If we had an actual hypothetical "car accident vaccine," we'd probably just require you to have that instead of this tremendously complicated and expensive infrastructure around driving. So I'd argue that what we actually don't see is heightened emotion around this onerous car infrastructure, to the point where you are essentially presenting cars as some sort of model for c'est-la-vie attitudes both from the general population and the government, which couldn't be farther from the truth. The reality is you've just gotten used to the burdens we've taken on to make our activities livable with respect to cars. Go watch the "Not Just Bikes" YouTube channel and you'll see just how much of your life is actually completely governed around accommodating cars (and a big part of that is in making their presence safer). > the “hospitals filling up” narrative is mediopolitically-motivated justification, not grounded in deductive reasoning nor meant to drive effective mitigative policy. Source?
  - clairity 5y ago
    > "The reason it seems like there's no hysteria around cars is because we've already gone through that phase and implemented the best safeguards we could come up with..." no, we've just collectively decided that we're willing to put up with the small risk. it's nowehere near all that we could come up with. we could be much more stringent (stricter licensing & testing, tougher and more diverse training, more danger-apparent roads, better segregating roads from streets, fewer in-car and out-of-car distractions, more rigorous enforcement, higher carbon/fuel taxes, congestion pricing, stricter pollution standards, dense mixed-use neighborhoods, greater transit investment, etc.) and further reduce that risk, but we've collectively decided that the imposition and cost are not worth it (though i personally disagree). cars are a visible and imminent threat every day, in much the same way that covid is perceived to be, as a new member of the constellation of endemic infectious diseases we now live with. as for the rest, torturing analogies that way merely to coerce them into fitting a desired explication is cruel and unusual punishment imho. i can't partake in good conscience.

clairity 5y ago

rather than being so dichotomous and partisan, my actual position is that we focus on the wrong problems because of biases and fallacious thinking, both individual and systemic. death by car is a real problem, but we’ve long accepted that and similar risks to our lives (as an aside, cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases are more pressing, to which auto pollution does contribute). covid is comparable to that level of risk and yet there’s no constant uproar and heightened emotion around car deaths. we need to couch novel threats in relation to existing risk tolerances developed over millennia rather than the other way around (because those exist already for good reasons, à la chesterson’s fence). the “hospitals filling up” narrative is mediopolitically-motivated justification, not grounded in deductive reasoning nor meant to drive effective mitigative policy.

tolmasky 5y ago
> yet there’s no constant uproar and heightened emotion around car deaths. I think you may have a recency bias towards the mitigation techniques. The reason it seems like there's no hysteria around cars is because we've already gone through that phase and implemented the best safeguards we could come up with: the right analogy here is to see what a stickler our society is for having car insurance, which is the closest thing to a "car accident vaccine" we could come up with. Given the reality of the frequency of car accidents, and how they can potentially affect others just as much as yourself, we've implemented a system where it is a requirement to have a way to compensate the other person if an accident happens (not to mention the various laws we have around driving, the big deal that was Mothers Against Drunk Driving, breathalyzer checkpoints which could be seen quite analogously to covid testing, the fact that we need a license to drive and are tested for driving proficiency, the penalties for driving unsafely, laws requiring you to buckle your safety belt, laws around safety belts and airbags needing to be included in cars, etc. etc.). If we had an actual hypothetical "car accident vaccine," we'd probably just require you to have that instead of this tremendously complicated and expensive infrastructure around driving. So I'd argue that what we actually don't see is heightened emotion around this onerous car infrastructure, to the point where you are essentially presenting cars as some sort of model for c'est-la-vie attitudes both from the general population and the government, which couldn't be farther from the truth. The reality is you've just gotten used to the burdens we've taken on to make our activities livable with respect to cars. Go watch the "Not Just Bikes" YouTube channel and you'll see just how much of your life is actually completely governed around accommodating cars (and a big part of that is in making their presence safer). > the “hospitals filling up” narrative is mediopolitically-motivated justification, not grounded in deductive reasoning nor meant to drive effective mitigative policy. Source?
- clairity 5y ago
  > "The reason it seems like there's no hysteria around cars is because we've already gone through that phase and implemented the best safeguards we could come up with..." no, we've just collectively decided that we're willing to put up with the small risk. it's nowehere near all that we could come up with. we could be much more stringent (stricter licensing & testing, tougher and more diverse training, more danger-apparent roads, better segregating roads from streets, fewer in-car and out-of-car distractions, more rigorous enforcement, higher carbon/fuel taxes, congestion pricing, stricter pollution standards, dense mixed-use neighborhoods, greater transit investment, etc.) and further reduce that risk, but we've collectively decided that the imposition and cost are not worth it (though i personally disagree). cars are a visible and imminent threat every day, in much the same way that covid is perceived to be, as a new member of the constellation of endemic infectious diseases we now live with. as for the rest, torturing analogies that way merely to coerce them into fitting a desired explication is cruel and unusual punishment imho. i can't partake in good conscience.