Comment by stephenmac98
7 months ago
How many people drive their car daily or near daily? How many people are good drivers?
The ratio of those two values shows, in my experience, that a lot of people are not very good at things they spend a lot of time doing, and are generally unaware of their own shortcomings
The average American spends 4.2 hours a week in the car. A typical 40 year old american has driven around 50,000 miles. For someone to continue to be bad at driving after that much experience, it must be a fundamental limitation on their capabilities for learning, thinking, or understanding. Drive to work any given day in Denver and you will see that a large number of people suffer from those fundamental limitations.
This article seems to present a world where most people the author interacts with can think critically about a complex topic, and are interested in learning or improving themselves. I wish I lived where the author lives, because I have had multiple jobs across multiple countries and never encountered an average population like the author describes.
My impression driving around Denver is that far more people are choosing to drive dangerously/poorly than are doing so because they're inherently incapable of driving. Much like the author suggests, if you ask most people specific questions about good driving they'd probably get them correct. The fact that people then choose to drive poorly has more to do with lack of care/respect for others on the road, impatience and entitlement.
I don't think I agree with the premise. Sure there are lots of car accidents in absolute terms, but given how many people drive and how error-prone driving inherently is, most people are actually pretty decent drivers
Driving is not error prone, cars rarely break in unexpected ways.
People driving and making decisions are error prone.
A simple test is to watch how people turn. Do they turn early potentially hitting the curb or cutting it too close to pedestrians. Or do they increase their radius by turning late? The latter are better drivers.
Edit: here are more tests,
- do they signal
- do they cutoff others
- do they let those who signal in
- do they drive too slow or too fast for the given road and conditions
- do they have an awareness of all cars around them
- do they block the passing lane
- do they maintain a reasonable distance behind other cars
- do they let emergency vehicles pass
etc.
> and are generally unaware of their own shortcomings
> it must be a fundamental limitation on their capabilities for learning, thinking, or understanding
You said it yourself. Assuming people are doing something without being mindful and purposefully trying to improve then 50k miles on mental autopilot it is not a surprise that someone wouldn't get better at driving. Without a desire to improve and/or being involved in a process that would give feedback then there will be no growth.
Define "better?"
Making decisions that are better for the collective group?
Or making decisions that are better for them individually?
I think most of you assume the former when you should really expect the latter. Viewed through that lens both the set of problems and solutions should be obvious.
I feel like this hinges on the definition of what it means to be "bad" at driving; by definition, I'd argue that the average driver is average at driving, and around half of people are above average at it. If you think most people are bad at driving, I feel like the conclusion is "driving is hard", because there's not any secret set of platonic ideal drivers in real life to compare them to. Trying to measure by an objective metric like how many accidents a driver gets into can be useful, but drawing conclusions from that like "most people are bad at driving" won't be very meaningful for a similar reason to the ones the article dissects; the evidence is measuring something much more specific than the broad principle you're asserting.
(For what it's worth, I'm making this argument as someone who _is_ a bad driver, and that's a large part of why I don't drive anymore!)
> and are generally unaware of their own shortcomings
You don't see your own here? Are you honestly sitting on the side of the road and intentionally evaluating drivers according to some criteria? Or are you just allowing yourself to notice that which inconveniences you?
Do you ever take time to notice how _convenienced_ you are? How cooperative other drivers can be? How often the rules get followed even though there is no one around to enforce them?
> the author interacts with can think critically about a complex topic
People can. They let their emotions get in the way and they simply choose not to. Frustratingly they never seem to notice when this happens. They remember that they _can_ make rational decisions so they assume _all_ their decisions are rational.
> I wish I lived where the author lives
Your experiences would likely not change.
Bad drivers are a poor example. Driving is an inherently social activity. It involves subconsciously predicting other people's behaviors. Each region has its own definition of what is the norm. This includes things like acceptable speeding, lane switching behavior, average distance between cars, etc. When reality differs from expectations, we label them as a bad driver.
But are they a bad driver? Maybe. Or maybe they are driving according to another region's expectations. So any time you see a bad driver from another region, or you are the one in another region, stop and think is it really bad, or just unexpected?
For this reason I ignore all claims of "People from X are terrible drivers." No, they just drive differently.
The driving example is interesting, because I think there are two different groups of people assessing the 'goodness' of their driving and others' driving by two different standards. One group thinks a 'good' driver is one that is skilled at driving a car; the other group thinks that a 'good' driver is the one that does the 'nice' thing in any given situation. The 'skilled' drivers look at the 'nice' drivers and think that the 'nice' drivers are unskilled and display little interest in reaching their destination. The 'nice' drivers think the 'skilled' drivers are dangerous.
I think the 50k miles estimate is probably pretty low given the average miles insurance companies assume most people drive per year is closer to 10k. Conservatively, that would place it closer to 200k miles by age 40.
I've always assumed the reason people don't get better at driving with that much experience is the reason people don't get much better at most of the things they do: they've never pushed themselves to the limit of their capabilities. While this can be dangerous in a car, it can be even more dangerous when you're put in an unexpected circumstance with no ability to respond calmly and correctly.
Is there something here about the role of (and lack of in this case) deliberate and intentional practice?
4.2 hours a week in a car doesn't imply that any of that time is spent doing things that may make one a better driver (by whatever standard we're measuring this), it's just repetion of the minimal amount of driving skill that's enough to get you by.
If it's not possible to increase one's skill in anything without practicing things that are just on the edge of capability then no amount of regular, unsupervisied driving without any critique targeted towards improvement is going to help.
> Is there something here about the role of (and lack of in this case) deliberate and intentional practice?
Something like 50% of college graduates in the US are considered functionally illiterate, despite an enormous number of opportunities for intentional practice; and despite presumably knowing, at least somewhat, of the benefit of attaining more advanced literacy. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna10928755
When I think of poor drivers, I think their incentives to become a good driver are much higher. After all, their own lives and the lives of their loved ones are at risk.
Agreed. A friend of mine used the adage, "practice doesn't make perfect; practice makes permanence"
Unless you are striving to continuously improve, experience per se does not guarantee improvement