Comment by mattlondon

Some of this I think is misjudged - there is an implication that people know what they are doing or what their actions' consequences are, but do not care about it.

I would argue that for a bunch of things, people just don't think.

It's not that they don't care: they've not even reached that stage of awareness. They just don't ever get to thinking about if what they're doing has any kind of follow-on consequences or implications. It doesn't even enter their minds.

I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but as I've grown older I think I've learnt that not everyone thinks like I do. I guess here on HN and at work we're surrounded by people who are ultimately "knowledge workers" who are paid (and selected for) their ability to think. We're doing mental gymnastics and playing 4D chess against ourselves in our head all day. Meanwhile outside of tech, people aren't and there are IMHO lots of people who just think in a totally different way. It's like they stop at Step 2 or 3 of a linear thought process, but we as tech engineers etc are already on Step 7 of a decision tree with multiple branches etc even if we don't actively realise we're doing it.

Not saying we're any better/smarter, but we're at least implicitly trained and attuned to thinking things through, identifying edge cases, defensively coding to handle inevitable misuse/issues etc etc. Not everyone thinks like that.

Some stuff though is just experience or lack of it. I never knew how much of a pain it can be to push a kids buggy around until a did it and I would see sometimes the difference in others when I was struggling with one: some people (other parents with older kids, grandparents etc) would offer to help or to go out of their way to move out of the way etc, while others were blithely unaware (as I was!) and just don't realise because they have no knowledge or experience of the situation so even with care, they just don't know (which is fine - this is why we have schools and books etc, to teach people things they don't know). That bike lane in the article looks totally fine to me for example - even if I think think a whole range of scenarios in my head, I have no in-depth knowledge or experience or understand what the problem the author of the article is talking about as it looks totally ok to me but I only have very simplistic knowledge of riding a bike.

Tl:Dr - not always malicious or deliberate, just a lack of awareness and experience.