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.
Or rejecting research/statistics/math/science/etc. because of some anecdotal evidence.
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.
Driving safely and smart is essential for other reasons, it does prevent additional bottlenecks (you mentioned one, wreckages), and it reduces the impact of the unavoidable bottlenecks (because the cars won’t waste so much time re-accelerating after them). But if my reasoning is correct, most of the time there isn’t much that drivers can do against traffic besides “don’t use the car”.
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.
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.
A friend of mine calls that “racing to stop”.
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.
I’m not dawdling off the line though. I’m just not going 10 over the speed limit like this guy in the lifted truck wants.
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.
Nah, this is in Toronto. Almost every light has so many cars waiting, it’s not a sensor thing. People are just so eager to get going.
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!
Also, the closer you are to the trailer, the safer you are! Because the speed difference is much smaller, when you touch the trailer!
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.
Emergence is a hell of a thing
Great to know that “fucky” is an officially accepted sciency term.
In some cases that’s probably true. I’m not sure it applies to things like war, time, etc.
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?
Every combination is equally likely we just ascribe special meaning to certain ones due to overactive pattern recognition. Hx6 is just as likely as any seeminly more random result from 6 consecutive throws there are just more options we don’t ascribe special meaning to.
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 ?deleted by creator
I never heard of that since I stopped playing asphalt but that seems like something Gameloft would do. Gameloft really fell off, they used to make good games…
But yeah, it can also be used badly, like making the game really easy after a purchase and then slowly go back to difficult. I don’t think I’ve heard of something like that yet, but it probably exist.
Sounds like the conspiracy BS I read in the call of duty subs on Reddit
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.
Many people, including myself, are too dumb to understand that other people don’t value the same thing in us that we value in others.
You see them try and become what they like, in order to try to appeal to others. “Well I wish I got more attention, so I’m going to give tons and tons of attention to others”. “I wish someone would make a grand romantic gesture to me, so I’m going to do that to someone else”. That kind of thing.
This is sometimes called “fundamental attribution error” although I think that concept covers a bit more ground.
This is not the fundental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error is seeing an action from a person and assuming it is a fundamental attribute of them. Literally in the name. E.g. you seem someone being rude in public so you assume they are a rude person. Meanwhile if you are rude in public you chalk it up to being in a bad mood as a result of something that happened to you, not because you are a rude person.
It’s really similar to the fundamental attribution error, though, as you can see if phrased this way: “I value $foo by a certain amount because I’m a human being, thus other human beings value $foo as much as I do”.
This is the most charitable interpretation of why guys send dick pics
I think it’s exactly why they do it
I’m a guy, I received unannounced boob pics, that EXACTLY what men sending dick pics want.
Humans totally ignore that they are part of nature. Most think that reduced biodiversity won’t include them.
Most of us also ignore that ‘the world’ is a model in our heads that we’ve created with our senses. Some may make better models than others. But what does ‘better’ mean? Stubbing your toe less, getting sick less? Sherlock Holmes?
Also ‘the world’ is very complex and constantly changing. You’re either revising that model or, at some point, you’re living in the past.
In a lot of ways we aren’t though. The vast majority of people spend the vast majority of their time in a built environment of some type.
Even when we’re in the “outdoors”, most of us spend most of our time on manmade tracks or paths.
We engage with nature on our terms in a way that is very unique.
I kind of feel the opposite. Most people I know is wary of “destroying nature”.
I think meh. It is just getting streamlined. We are getting for the next phase of human civilization. We are more like an organism with white blood cells and well separated and controlled compartments of bacteria filled sacks. It is bound to get more homogenous.
Higher civilization means the meaning of biodiversity will change domains.
I had a number of thoughts, and realized that the common factor in my examples is this: Large numbers. Like, really large numbers. I read on Lemmy yesterday that parrots can count to 17, and I’m not convinced that humans can do much better. Maybe close to 1,000 at the far outer limit, but that’s really it.
Lots of humans deny evolution, saying that there’s no way that we evolved from the same ancestors as other primates, but we think that the pharaohs in Egypt ruled a really, really long time ago. So while we can see changes pile up down the generations even in our lifetimes, we have a hard time extrapolating that to such timescales as 12 million years since the last common primate ancestor. Our little primate brains can’t even begin to conceive of it, much less the ~180,000,000 years of the Age of Dinosaurs.
Lots of humans deny climate change and pollution, saying that there’s no way our small consumption can affect a planet so big. We just have no intuitive understanding of how eating a hamburger, or burning a gallon of gasoline to get to work, scales to 8 billion of us.
And let’s not even get into wealth inequality, except to say that surveys regularly find that humans can’t even begin to conceive of the magnitude of the wealth gap.
Well technically we can group things and do maths and we also have scientific notation, so there’s also that
Aye, really makes you appreciate just how important language and writing are to our society. Imagine what the parrots could accomplish with their base-17 number system, if they could write!
Capitalism isn’t purpose and purpose doesn’t exist.
I wouldn’t say they are too dumb to realize this necessarily, people are just misled by endless propaganda or don’t have the time and energy/skills to really contemplate things properly.
Earth is the only planet that we’re adapted to live on. Nowhere else will be as forgiving of our mistakes.
Holy shit, you’re right.
We’re playing permadeath on the easiest level, and failing.
When people want to enter a bus, especially a crowded one, it makes a lot more sense to wait for the people who want to get out of the bus to leave first.
This one is so baffling to me, it’s really changed my view of how stupid some people really are. What do they even expect, that the other passengers magically disappear? It’s really not an abstract problem if the other passengers are trying to leave right in front of you. Trying to enter a bus is also not a rare situation, so you’d expect people to understand this at least after the first few times. Unbelievable.
Same with elevators!
Worst with trains
Or getting baggage from the baggage claim at the airport
This one so much. How can people not realize if everyone stood back in a larger halo around the carousel, it would be so easy for everyone to get their bag when it’s up. I usually stand back at a distance, and if people have it completely blocked standing right next to it I grab right around them getting uncomfortably in their personal space.
The existence of poverty/hunger/homelessness in a post-scarcity world. if we wanted to eliminate those problems we could, but humans are blocked on how it can be done without hurting their own wealth.
Under capitalism, food isn’t produced to eat but to make profits. When it’s not profitable to sell, they will rather dump foods, starving the people rather than to plainly donate. We produce enough foods to feed the entire population. But the sole purpose of food is to not feed the people, but to feed the greed of the producers, the farmers, the corporates. Capitalism created an artificial scarcity of food where we produce too much food for the obese and throw the rest away to rot in front of the poor.
🍇 😡
You gonna eat those
I study a lot of geopolitics and history and I have read of many different aid programs, domestically for citizens or abroad to poverty and war stricken countries.
Unfortunately it’s not as easy as dumping a bunch of money, food or whatever resource into the problem. For example there are cities with tons of homeless shelters but many stay on the streets. There are massive teams of social workers dedicated to helping people in need but many of them refuse their help.
When it comes to countries sometimes this aid is embezzled and only given to those loyal to the government. Sometimes used to fuel armies to continue conflicts, or just disappear into corruption and resold by crooked politicians to make a profit. Additionally it can hurt local, and in turn, the wider economy. The aid distributed for free kills many local businesses and livelihoods because you can compete with free.
Especially when you have some stupid company pulling a publicity stunt to send their own products as aid to struggling countries. One example was this brand of shoes that would donate a pair for every pair sold. This “friendly gesture” killed off all local cobblers, shoe manufacturers, shoe stores and prevented anyone from doing so to make a living, not to mention preventing self sufficiency of the country. That’s just one example, there are a lot of companies and misguided companies that do exactly this and many economists recommend that these poor countries should refuse this aid.
Despite it being parroted by the terminally online, we do not live in a post-scarcity world.
Gambling. Everyone knows the house always wins and the exact probability of winning any specific lottery but people can’t grasp this. I don’t know how people look at these massive luxurious casinos and think they win against this company with an unfathomably profitable business model by taking money from people who think they can win.
I think the logic there is not that they constantly win against the casino, but more that they only need to get lucky once or twice. They just see that some people, sometimes win and there is no reason that they would not be the winners. Not sure I’m being clear about it but I hope you get my point.
It makes it more understandable but I also think of it as “what is going to make ME win versus all of the thousand other poor souls here”
I play the lottery a few times a year for the following reasons:
-Permission to dream about what I would buy if I won for a few days
-Justification for bitching about not winning the lotteryLottery: tax for dreams.
Things that take place over too long a period of time. Like heart disease, injustice, climate change, diabetes, addiction etc. We’re evolved to prioritise short term pleasure over long term benefits, hence that cigarette, drink, line, burger is so difficult to say no to.
I think uncertainty plays a big role here.
You could bump a line and smoke a pack a day and get to 90.
You could do nothing harmful and die at 30.
Even if you make it to 90 avoiding lots of fun, was it worth it or would you rather trade 20 years for more fun?
At the end of the day it is a matter of personal risk tolerance towards an impossible to quantify risk.
As someone who treated their 20s like that, I strongly suggest at least dabbling in restraint along the way. Hell, shibari counts.
Yep, it’s called math.
I was generally surprised at how many people can’t do simple math without a calc, like multiply 7 x 8.
Check mate. Sucker.
Erm…
Meh, close enough.
I haven’t done any long division since highschool, and now that I’d like to, I can’t remember how. 🥺
Good thing search engines exist, eh?
Are you suggesting that I lift a finger to help myself? Why, I never!
Of all the multiplication you had to pick 7 x 8. I hate 7 x 8.
I memorized in 3rd grade or whatever my multiple tables, but I never trust 7 x 8.
7 x 8 = 56
1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 5, 6, 9 ?
No. That’s wrong. After 7 comes 8. After 8 comes 5. No, it goes 5, 6, 7, 8.
If I could visualize it as,
56 = 7 x 8
I’d be fine, but I can’t see it that way.
No I have to take it as 7 x 7 (49) + 7 (1 + 6), to get 56.
Shit. I hope that makes sense to someone.
I memorized in 3rd grade or whatever my multiple tables, but I never trust 7 x 8.
Lol, that’s why I picked it 😂. I hate 7 x 8 as well 😂.
No I have to take it as 7 x 7 (49) + 7 (1 + 6), to get 56.
That’s how I do it as well 😂, 7 x 7 + 7, I never remebered 56 😂. Or 8 x 8 - 8, either way works for me 😂.
