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Comment by maxaf | Hacker News Reader

I didn’t miss the point of the article; I simply strongly disagree with it. I oppose the constant drive to diminish the need to act responsibly. The idea of “baseline distraction” is used to provide an excuse for killing and maiming other humans. If your loved one were killed by a “baseline distracted” driver who blamed the collision on vehicle and road design, would you consider it fair? Would you willingly lay your child, spouse, or parent on the sacrificial pyre signaling the need for better cars or roads?

Life isn’t some kind of A/B experiment. Stop treating it like one, and stop moving blame from yourself to others.

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>>stop moving blame from yourself to others.

I don't drive though.

This article argues for preventing deaths, not litigating them. What's the use of assigning blame after the fact?

You cannot force people to be more perfect than they are (or want to be). You can "nudge" the right outcome by shaping the environment.

If you google "chicanes in London", you'll see how people's behaviour can be shaped, regardless of their personality. _That_ is what you want, to ensure people's safety.

If people can be nudged by street design or transparent B-pillars, they can also be nudged by heavy penalties that are commensurate with the deed.

Which is why there are no murders in states with a death penalty.

It seems like you're effectively saying MADD didn't work. Drunk driving never became less than it was in the late 1970s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mothers_Against_Drunk_Driving

The claim they lowered drunk driving deaths by 1/2. I have no easy way to verify that but if true it certainly suggests people's behavior can be changed

I don't know about your area, but where I live the police set up checkpoints along common routes home from popular bars/restaurants to catch drunk drivers. Drunk drivers get caught extremely often and many of them lose their licence for long periods of time.

This does not discourage drunk driving as much as you would think. It does remove a lot of the drunk drivers from the road by force, however.

MADD only worked in the sense that it made some mothers feel somewhat absolved of whatever guilt they felt for losing a child. Their statistical claims are quite ridiculous, though.

Edit: Claiming credit moreso than flawed statistics, although both are highly questionable.

Enforcement works in societies which actually enforce their laws. Try finding weed in Singapore for example.

Do NOT try to get weed there.

You probably could, however, find hordes of repressed maniacs and neurotics discouraged enough by it to hesitate a bit. At least if you could keep them out of motor vehicles ;)

This would only work if the penalties were enforced a very large percentage of the time someone did something unsafe, regardless of the outcome. Humans respond to light punishments consistently applied far better than harsh punishments rarely applied.

It would be far more effective if you applied a $5 fine every time a person looked at their phone screen while driving than if you instituted the death penalty which applied only when a distracted driver kills a pedestrian.

So you really think not enough punishment explains away the fact that US has double the accidents then Europe? If you don’t, then you did miss the point

People are not as rational as you think, making them more scared of the law don’t help much, otherwise death penalty would work very well to reduce crimes, but it doesn’t

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