Comment by tialaramex

9 hours ago

Yeah, people are bad at guessing and the usual "Plan continuation bias" kicks in.

I was travelling in a group to eat lunch with friends once, after heavy rains. We reached a site where the road needs to fit under a bridge and is known to flood, there's standing water, and the driver figured it's probably not too high, he drives in and nope, water over the air intake, bye bye engine and we walked the rest of the way to lunch

I absolutely should have said "No, don't" but the plan says we have to drive under that bridge, there is no plan B. Of course plan A being "Wreck car" is a stupid plan, but the bias meant I didn't say "No" and I should have.

You wouldn't die there, just trash the car, the flooding is localised - but there are definitely other sites around here where in flood conditions you could die if you drove into water that's deeper than you realised.

4 comments

tialaramex

Reply
mindslight  3 hours ago

I love the irony of how you wrote this comment. You say bye bye engine, and then the very next action is to walk to lunch. No mention of what happened to the car, or whether the driver had to stay and deal with it. Nope, the most significant effect on you was that you had to continue on without the car in the picture. Hunger is the real plan continuation bias.

  • lukan  2 hours ago

    "Hunger is the real plan continuation bias."

    Oh man, that brings a memory of a old roadtrip. We were guests at a house of a old british lady in a olive farm in southern france - and dinner was ready.

    It was also unusual cold, so the fire in the chimney was burning very hot. And apparently it was not build for that, as the isolation and already some wood outside the chimney on the roof was suddenly starting to slowly glow and burn. In other words, the roof was literally starting to be on fire. But they were already sitting at the table and seriously wanted to eat first and care about the problem that the house was burning later. Well and so they did. So we put out the fire and ate later.