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arijun | 6 days ago

But how many of those crashes not caused by inattention could have been avoided with less idiocy and more defensive driving? I mean, yes, we can’t see as well in fog, but that’s why you should slow down

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kube-system|6 days ago

Again, I'm still not saying that humans don't make bad decisions. I'm saying that, unequivocally, they also get into accidents while paying attention and being careful, as a result of misinterpretation or failure of their senses. These accidents are also common, for example:

* someone parking carefully, misjudges depth perception, bumps an object

* person driving at night, their eyes failed to perceive a poorly lit feature of the road/markings/obstacles

* person driving and suddenly blinded by bright object (the sun, bright lights at night)

* person pulling out in traffic who misinterprets their depth perception and therefore misjudges the speed of approaching traffic

* people can only focus their eyes at one distance at a time, and it takes time to focus at a different distance. It is neither unsafe nor unexpected for humans to check their instruments while driving -- but it can take the human eye hundreds of milliseconds to focus under normal circumstances -- If you look down, focus, look back up, and focus, as quick as you can at highway speeds, you will have travelled quite a long distance.

These type of failures can happen not as a result of poor decision making, but of poor perception.

throw10920|6 days ago

> But how many of those crashes not caused by inattention could have been avoided with less idiocy and more defensive driving?

Most of them.

We can lump together "inattention" and "idiocy" for the purposes of this conversation, because both could be massively alleviated by a good self-driving car without lidar.

If you look at the parallel comments, you'll see that the majority of accidents and fatalities indeed come from these two factors combined (two-thirds coming from distraction, speeding, and impaired driving), and that kube-system is having to resort to ridiculous fallacies to try to dispute the empirical data that is available.

kube-system|6 days ago

I didn’t claim vision was responsible for the majority of accidents anywhere in this thread.