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all things considered i think driving is much safer than it ought to be, it is astonishing there are not way more car crashes, and i think it's because humans are slightly magic and we can just tell what the right thing to do is in traffic most of the time

6:07 PM · May 31, 2022Twitter Web App

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QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

May 31

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@QiaochuYuan

i drove 400 miles this weekend for the first time ever and there were a few times on the highway where i knew that a car was or was not in my blind spot and i don't know how i knew it, i just did the right thing and did not crash. mystifying

QC (in Berlin 7/29-???)

@QiaochuYuan

May 31

i had a conversation with a group of rationalists once where someone used driving as an example of something you can do on autopilot and one person said "actually i can't drive or do anything else on autopilot, i have to think about everything i'm doing the whole time"

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very sus use of 'ought'

the rear window ethics on the cover of leviathan

@subjunctivitis_

May 31

Still too stunned to digest the rest of it honestly

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I think about this every time I drive. "How is this working right now???"

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I think there’s a lot to the way the mind integrates tools as though they’re part of the body. When driving, the car is an extension of you, and a lot of the movement and sensing of others is intuitive, like weaving through people while walking down the sidewalk.

Jessica

@jessicamalonso

May 31

This common thing of not remembering the drive makes a lot of sense this way, too… like, if you walked 2 miles across town you might remember things you saw but not 2 miles worth of deliberate physical motion.

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apartheid clyde

@adastroworld

· May 31

Replying to @QiaochuYuan

Those posts about “getting in the car at work and then regaining consciousness at home, somehow not crashing on the way” are probably the best evidence I have for the brain doing garbage collection/data scrubbing to keep things smooth

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Maybe it has since fallen to the replication crisis that gutted psychology, but! At uni a cog neuroscience class showed some pretty convincing imaging data that practiced driving is akin to most physical skills: unconsciously automated by a loop between visual system & spine.

Rat King Crimson

@Alphiloscorp

May 31

Distracted driving, looking ahead yet still mentally scattered or slow, is dangerous precisely because we are not actively attending to our driving moment to moment. We have an easily impaired response time to novel stimulus e.g. a sudden need to brake, *because* we are on auto.