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Using your phone is demonstrably less safe than not. What I find most interesting is how skewed human psychology can be to risk. People have phobias about all
by jmyeet 3y ago
Using your phone is demonstrably less safe than not. What I find most interesting is how skewed human psychology can be to risk.
People have phobias about all sorts of things eg flying. Flying on a commercial airplane is demonstrably safer than driving. So why isn't there a more prevalent fear of driving? Some will point to the illusion of control. I can buy that to some degree.
Phone use by driving should make people more fearful of driving. Even if you personally don't use your phone while driving, other people do. And that increases your own risk. Yet that doesn't seem to be the case.
What makes this worse is that everything from marketing to public relations to politics is built around stoking irrational fears that aren't based in fact. A classic example is child abduction even though in reality in the United States ~8 children are actually abducted every year. Figures like "800,000 per year" are heavily inflated with custody disputes.
- pcthrowaway 3y ago> Flying on a commercial airplane is demonstrably safer than driving Can you give me some stats on this? I was under the impression that it's maybe a little bit safer in terms of distance traveled. But the people who think their driving is 50% safer than the average person's don't care about this. And this is probably near 100% of people who drive.
- alamortsubite 3y agoNumber of deaths per passenger-mile is 750x higher for driving than flying in the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
- kjkjadksj 3y agoPeople have no sense of actual risk and how it affects them. They fixate on emotional rather than rational assessments that perverts their understanding of risk and above all believe they are personally invincible.