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"
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that sounds like torture wow
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i could not really imagine what it was like to be that guy
It makes me think of a time recently when I had an inner-ear issue that messed up my sense of balance for a few hours. During that time I could walk straight, etc, but only by "thinking about it". If I stopped paying attention to my surroundings I'd start to walk sideways
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Also reminds me of a person I knew who had face blindness, and described it as "trying to recognize people based on their hands". I.e. you could still see particular features etc and memorize those for each person, you just had to think about it consciously
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