You ever see a dog that’s got its leash tangled the long way round a table leg, and it just cannot grasp what the problem is or how to fix it? It can see all the components laid out in front of it, but it’s never going to make the connection.
Obviously some dog breeds are smarter than others, ditto individual dogs - but you get the concept.
Is there an equivalent for humans? What ridiculously simple concept would have aliens facetentacling as they see us stumble around and utterly fail to reason about it?
Rejecting evidence that is right in front of our eyes because of some kind of religious faith or political beliefs.
Thinking that tailgating the vehicle directly in front of them will make thousands of other vehicles in front of that vehicle magically go faster. And many other reckless car-brain stunts.
Is this the root pathology behind traffic? Like, I never understood traffic, is there someone at the front refusing to go fast enough or is it the result of some distributed error like this that everyone mis-optimizes for that in aggregate results in traffic?
Based on a game* I think that the root issue is that there are multiple bottlenecks, unavoidable for the drivers, like turning or entering/leaving lanes, forcing them to slow down to avoid crashing. Not a biggie if there are only a few cars, as they’ll be distant enough from each other to allow one to slow down a bit without the following needing to do the same; but once the road is close to the carrying capacity, that has a chain effect:
- A slows down because it’ll turn
- B is too close to A, so it slows down to avoid crashing with A
- C is too close to B, so it slows down to avoid crashing with B
- […]
There are solutions for that, such as building some structure to handle those bottlenecks, but they’re often spacious and space is precious in a city. Or alternatively you reduce the amount of cars by discouraging people from using them willy-nilly, with a good mass transport system and making cities not so shitty for pedestrians.
*The game in question is OpenTTD. This is easy to test with trains: create some big transport route with multiple trains per rail, then keep adding trains to that route, while watching the time that they take to go from the start to the end. The time will stay roughly constant up to a certain point (the carrying capacity), then each train makes all the others move slower.
You forgot one solution.
Teaching people how to drive safe and smart. Way too many people focus on the car in front of them instead of the traffic ahead. If you watch for brake lights as far up as you can see and let off the gas when appropriate, not only will you be less likely to be in or cause a wreck, you will also save wear and tear on your brakes and use less gas (even more pronounced with regenerative braking).
In addition to the above. When you are driving a route you know well, get the fuck over from which ever side is more likely to be used to turn off. For most highways this means moving left before you near an onramp. Plan ahead and get over before you need to do so you don’t have to speed up or slow down to let people in.
Laughs in good public transit(rail based is based, but buses are good too), where it can achieve 10~100x the capacity in the same footprint
With rail, as long as you have a good timetable and a robust signaling system, 27tpdph with multiple service patterns is achievable, and >33tpdph if you run just one service pattern, all while having a top speed of 120km/h and an average speed of >50km/h
Railway in general (excluding Line-of-sight based light rail and trams) can move stupendous amounts of people at full speed really quickly due to signaling and mass transit inherently being more efficient in general
It may be helpful to think of it as a stream or a river, and not a collection of individual drivers. We can only control ourselves, not the stream. People working so hard to put themselves and others at risk are maybe shaving a minute or so off of their commute. Just not worth the risk.
Traffic is a numbers game. I’ve often observed that in free flowing traffic where I live (a tiny city with only about 700k people in the entire metro) that if you take two cars that are a safe following distance apart there will be 5 cars in between. If we put in 6 times as many lanes (already a 3-4 lane freeway each way, so we are talk 20 lanes for my tiny city!) traffic wouldn’t go any faster, but they would space out to most maintaining a safe following distance. (if you put in 7 times as many lanes they would get farther apart yet, but still not go faster)
There is research showing that adding lanes only helps for maybe six months. Then people realize that the route is better and change the routes they take, which leads to more congestion again. Fewer lanes can actually decrease congestion.
https://smv.org/learn/blog/how-does-roadway-expansion-cause-more-traffic/
If I’m understanding correctly, your example wouldn’t apply to a highway that is experiencing heavy congestion.
I just drop a mph every couple seconds until they fuck off. Don’t break check, as that’s super dangerous for you and everyone around you; don’t change lanes to accommodate them (unless you’re the source of the bottleneck and camping in the fast lane, in which case GTFO), since transitions are when accidents tend to happen; but you can absolutely slowly annoy a tailgater until they leave your bubble.
If you do this in the left lane and cars are passing you on the right, you in fact are the asshole.
Very strong emphasis on the “unless you’re the source of the bottleneck and camping in the fast lane, in which case GTFO” part of my post!
LOL, I also do the passive-aggressive slowdown thing. 99% of the time it works. But then there’s that rare psycho that refuses to get off your ass just to…uh…prove a point…by slowing themselves down? There was a post on schmeddit several years ago where a guy came to a complete stop in the middle of nowehere with the tailgator just sitting 1" from his bumper.
My favorite are the red light racers who have to pass me while I’m going the speed limit and zoom to the next stop light… Just so they can wait at a red light longer than I do.
You get off the line to get across the intersection so that everyone queued behind you can get across before the light turns red again.
I’m amazed that so many people fail to realise that there is a solid time penalty for dawdling off the line.
Sadly it works out for them overall. It only takes a few times of getting to the next light as it turns yellow and they are way ahead while you are sitting there at a red light. Sure sometimes you get to see them when it doesn’t work out, but when it works out they are long gone.
Timing traffic lights is a hard problem.
This isn’t my experience. Traffic lights are extremely easy to time. Assuming you can see the other lights, watch them. There are a few lights in my city that have a right turn light while the other is red, when the turn light goes yellow that means the red will be green soon. I regularly blow past people sitting at the red while I coasted towards the red and gunned it as it turned green.
They also won’t be going anywhere when they get t-boned by someone else doing the exact same thing or straight running a red. It’s not worth the risk.
Oh and this isn’t a race. The goal is to get to your destination safe and sound without hurting yourself or anyone else. The sooner more people realize that, the safer all of us will be.
Or constantly inching forward at a red light as if you moving the extra 5 feet will make any significant difference in the time it takes for you to get where you’re going.
That actually has purpose, sometimes. Some lights are triggered by a sensor in the road. If I feel like the light has been red longer than it should be I’ll inch up in case my car didn’t trigger the sensor. Same happens in reverse, cars will be stopped too far back to trigger it so everyone sits until either they move up or the programmed cycle kicks in.
The above said. You aren’t wrong. Plenty of people do that where there aren’t sensors, they also stick their nose way too far out, especially in the left turn lane.
We saw on mythbusters that tailgating is really good for fuel economy so we’re all just amateur scientists collecting data.
At highway speeds, tailgating 10 ft behind a 53 ft tractor-trailer will net you about a 39% boost in fuel economy. And further your fuel usage will drop by 100% after the trailer flattens your hood from a sudden stop maneuver!
Scope.
Imagine we both live in the US. I show you an article about an immigrant raping someone, and you say something like “well that’s just one guy.” I show you another, and another, and another. I show you a thousand. I show you ten thousand. Either you eventually admit that immigrants are predominantly rapists, or you look increasingly, ridiculously, obviously, wrong. And stubborn. And irrational.
But you are not wrong. I am wrong.
Because there are 331 million people in the United States, I can find an inexhaustible supply of immigrant-rapist stories.
Now take that inability to grasp large distances, large quantities, long periods of time, and apply it to everything. This is why young earth creationists exist- because a billion years is literally unimaginable. This is why people play the lottery- because you’re saying there’s a chance, right? This is why we don’t react emotionally upon hearing of a genocide, or learning that 70 billion animals are slaughtered each year for meat.
We are not equipped to function at the scale that we are currently working at, as a species. We have been haphazardly constructed by evolutionary pressures to operate in small bands and villages, and we do not have the appropriate intuitions for any scope larger than that.
To be fair, in many cases, the observable behaviour of things is different at scale. A single water molecule has different properties to a cup of water, in much the same way that a high density crowd of people (greater than 4 people per square meter) starts to behave as a fluid.
I study biochemistry and I’ll never stop finding it neat how when you get down to the teensy tiny level, all the rules change. That’s basically what quantum physics is, a different ruleset which is always “true”, so to speak, but it’s only relevant when you’re at the nano scale
I suppose what I’m saying is that I agree with you, that fathoming scope is difficult, but I’m suggesting that this is a property of the world inherently getting being a bit fucky at different scales, rather than a problem with human perception.
Probability. If something has a 50% chance of occuring, that does not mean it will happen every second time, and our brain has a very hard time rationalizing that. For example, we assume its near impossible to flip heads on a coin three times in a row when really, the probability is 12.5% - not that low. Another example would be something with a 95% chance of success - we naturally round up and assume thats basically garenteed success, but theres still a very decent chance of failure, esspecially on repeat attempts. Our brains are just not wired to handle randomness well, which is part of why gambling is so addicting and why games like X-Com have to rig the odds in the players favour to avoid pissing them off.
And that past random events have no influence on future ones.
If a coin landed on one side ten times in a row, it’s still a 50% chance on the next throw. Something a lot of people have trouble with.
No, but you see, the chance you get the same side twice is… (HH, HT, TH, TT) 50%, shit
When we add another toss, you get only two possibilities of always same side, and 6 that are not.
So which is it? The coin itself may always have 50/50, but the universe which tosses in a series doesn’t?
This is my answer as well.
We have developed intuition around things like naive physics - you can catch a thrown frisbee without doing calculus in your head - but it’s really, really hard to think through statistical questions in an intuitive way.
It’s one reason I’m extremely skeptical about the utility of informed consent in medicine. A physician can tell a patient’s family that if they don’t do the procedure then the patient will definitely die, but if they do it there’s a 20% chance of complication A and a 5% chance of complication B. The right thing to do is plan on the complications happening and having a realistic idea of what that will entail. But people, especially under stress, really aren’t able to deal with that kind of thing as easily as they can deal with catching a ball thrown to them.
RPG games like Fortnite use an algorithm which tricks people into believing their skills are improving.
When you hit a pixel, it doesn’t automatically score a hit like Space Invaders, it runs an algorithm based on the time you have been playing the game to determine the amount of damage you cause. The more you play, the more “accurate” you become.
This kind of thing definitly exist, usually part of adaptative difficulty where for exemple you get an invisible buff after dying so you feel like you are improving.
But I fail to see that in fortnite since it’s a multiplayer game, only your skill and luck influence the outcome, not playtime. Fortnite isn’t an RPG either (As far as I know), so I guess you meant an other game ?
That you cannot extract billions of years worth of stored energy from the earth (like oil and coal), release it, and expect there to be no consequences.
Humans aren’t much better than dogs taking a shit on the lawn in our little finite planetary backyard and kicking a few tufts of grass over it. Dumping stuff into the ocean or waterways. Can’t see it! Must be gone, right? Burying toxic chemicals. Can’t see it! Same with CO2.
Shit’s still there. Keep shitting everywhere and there’s no way you’re gonna avoid stepping in it eventually.
