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
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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
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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"
i could not really imagine what it was like to be that guy
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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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Brain: I see we’ve done this drive about a dozen times. How about, instead of retaining each unique experience, instead I give you a general vibe and feeling about what it’s like to drive home. This is what you’ll use to navigate back
Me: oh cool
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i think its much much likelier that the person just doesnt perceive when theyre on autopilot. surely they dont breathe manually 24/7
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Now they are since you reminded them about it. Thanks.
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did they say this to you while walking down the sidewalk? Did they collapse? Were they hurt?
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Idk why everyone is discounting so heavily that this person might be a neurodivergent outlier. Maybe if a rando told this story. But knowing that it’s you and that you’re talking to a specific kind of person…
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this is me to a certain extent. it's not that I'm not on autopilot, but I need to be actively engaged in something (usually singing) so that I don't get lost in my thoughts and collapse my attention to the point that autopilot turns off
curious to know if they have adhd
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I am like this more or less but I always thought of it as a superior ability to focus on the road and not get bored
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