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Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

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Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#141

Post by [deleted] »

Zak wrote: post #89
dymk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that roads need lower speed-limits and to be made safer by their geometry. That's done by reporting on the unsafe conditions of the road. It does no good to play this game of rhetoric, reframing the matter so the driver is at fault (which is not always the case). A driver does not decide to not run over a person because they think a news story will be more accusatory of them.

What I remember reading about the impact of speed limits is that reducing them only affects the slowest quartile or so of drivers while changes to road design such as reducing road width and visibility slow down almost all drivers. Reducing the speed of some drivers and not others increases aggressive driving and probably isn't good for safety. I don't take the position that reducing speed is a good answer for every…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#142

Post by rtlfe »

Zak wrote: post #89
dymk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that roads need lower speed-limits and to be made safer by their geometry. That's done by reporting on the unsafe conditions of the road. It does no good to play this game of rhetoric, reframing the matter so the driver is at fault (which is not always the case). A driver does not decide to not run over a person because they think a news story will be more accusatory of them.

What I remember reading about the impact of speed limits is that reducing them only affects the slowest quartile or so of drivers while changes to road design such as reducing road width and visibility slow down almost all drivers. Reducing the speed of some drivers and not others increases aggressive driving and probably isn't good for safety. I don't take the position that reducing speed is a good answer for every…

> I don't take the position that reducing speed is a good answer for every high-risk road situation

Why not? There's clear evidence showing that crashes at higher speeds are much more deadly. IMO any street that allows pedestrians and bicycles should be designed for 20mph car traffic. If you want to drive faster than that, do it on a limited-access highway.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#143

Post by trytophan »

dymk wrote: post #139
SkeuomorphicBee wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor road design is mainly a political problem. We know how to make good roads, on the technical side it is a "solved problem", but we lack the political will to do it. So setting the proper framing did solve the root problem

Then target leadership. They're the ones responsible for building better roads (which is the whole advertised purpose of this project!). Writing an NLP bot that rewords articles to blame the driver 100% of the time is nothing but an exercise in getting a nice revenge dopamine rush. But drivers aren't the ones building roads.

Leadership (politicians) respond to public sentiment and attitudes held by their constituents. They're not going to build safer streets, despite the benefits and means to do so, without the political will of citizens. Shifting the way the public perceives fatal car crashes would compel more people to bring up the issue with their local leaders and gather the momentum needed for such changes.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#144

Post by speedybird »

burnished wrote: post #136
butwhywhyoh wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear even one anecdote of 'kid believes bikers are unfairly blamed for accidents' -> 'kid decides never to exercise again in any form'

Its more the realization that you aren't safe, and that your safety is not only not a priority but somehow actively repugnant, all due to you being on a bike. If you are a kid driving isn't an option. If you don't feel safe on the roads as a pedestrian or bicyclist then your options are rather limited. This was my own experience, and if I had been less reckless I would have gotten less exercise. As it was, telling so…

Color me unconvinced. Kids know that skateboarding isn't safe but I see plenty of kids skateboarding, many of them without helmets! Generally speaking, I think kids are insensitive to risk and think they're invincible. When weighing the risk of cracked skull against looking uncool with PPE, they often forgo the PPE.

I think perception of physical danger is low on the list of reasons why kids don't get as much exercise as they should. Lower on the list than helicopter parents, "stranger danger" paranoia, and the appeal of video games.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#145

Post by codezero »

beaconstudios wrote: post #135
codezero wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a Cessna crashes into a car, is it safe to blame the Cessna and not the car, rather than treat it as a special case? I'm sure a car could swerve onto a runway mid-landing, but it would be the exception to the rule, right? When operating a car you should be expected to be in a heightened state of awareness and responsibility because of your capacity to cause damage, compared to a pedestrian. The bias in the current…

I think that's a false choice; rather than choosing between anti-VRU bias (as present) and anti-driver bias (as proposed), why not choose to report the specific facts of the incident at hand? Blaming one party all the time is stupid, because one party is not always at fault. Edit: Your cessna example makes no sense, as cars and planes do not generally share space. Should bikes and cars share space? No, but that's par…

I am arguing people and cars don't generally share space either. When a car hits a person, it's rare and I do think it should bias against the large, dangerous hardware, while also examining the facts. We have a century of bias-towards-cars coverage which permeates all society, police officers writing their reports are biased from what they've read and how they are trained, I don't think it's an over correction to default to assuming the larger, more regulated and dangerous side of any collision is by default assumed to be at fault, and for the other side to be the exception to the rule.

I say this as a person who's driven a car for 25 years and never hit any people, and who has been hit by a car by a driver who wasn't paying attention multiple times. What's worse, is drivers are often angry at cyclists for even existing, rather than taking responsibility for being aware of their surroundings.

The cessna example is a little over the top, but not totally out of line as a metaphor.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#146

Post by speedybird »

kazinator wrote: post #23

I don't think that "the cyclist was not wearing a helmet" or "impairment was not an issue" are examples of counterfactuals; the authors should crack open a dictionary look up what that word means in general use, and additionally how it is used in philosophy and science. If you have word from the police that the driver was not found to have any alcohol or if the cyclist wasn't wearing a helmet, those are simply facts…

> I think a reasonable rule should be to cull any probabilistic statements

Isn't that all statements, if we're being honest bayesians?

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#147

Post by smoldesu »

burnished wrote: post #136
butwhywhyoh wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear even one anecdote of 'kid believes bikers are unfairly blamed for accidents' -> 'kid decides never to exercise again in any form'

Its more the realization that you aren't safe, and that your safety is not only not a priority but somehow actively repugnant, all due to you being on a bike. If you are a kid driving isn't an option. If you don't feel safe on the roads as a pedestrian or bicyclist then your options are rather limited. This was my own experience, and if I had been less reckless I would have gotten less exercise. As it was, telling so…

Sounds like you should cycle in safer places then? Airline pilots don't complain because highways aren't a safe place for planes to be, and similarly it can be pretty dangerous to ride a bike in a place where cycling is an afterthought. Shifting the blame back to the drivers doesn't change that, if anything it tarnishes the reputation of cyclists even further. I get a similar feeling when I see people on Hacker News complain about how many DAUs Facebook has: making people feel worse about their online time isn't improving the status-quo, if anything it's making their alternative look more attractive by comparison.

Bad infrastructure is an infrastructure issue. Trying to gussy it up as a social one is going to be a really tough case to make when there are actual human rights violations happening in-media-res.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#148

Post by markstos »

MauranKilom wrote: post #121
markstos wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been employed as a newspaper editor and am familiar with libel laws and the ethics of journalism. What's been advocated for is accurate reporting, not conclusion-jumping. Currently there are headlines like this: "Car hits cyclist" Why is a victim a person but the actor is an inanimate object? They don't say "car hits bike". A more accurate headline would be "Car driver hits cyclist". The other way to improve rep…

> Why is a victim a person but the actor is an inanimate object? They don't say "car hits bike". The car physically touched the bicyclist, hence "car hits cyclist". The driver did not physically touch the bicyclist, hence "driver hits cyclist" is inaccurate. "Car hits bicycle" is accurate but not the most relevant fact to report (unless nobody was riding it at the time?). I'm not sure why this point has not been disc…

> The driver did not physically touch the bicyclist.

A headline would be used even if the car did physically touch the cyclist but hit the bike and knocked the off.

Also, we don't have headlines that say "bullet shoots child", because the person shooting the gun did not physically touch the child. In some of these cases, the car is the lethal weapon, the agency of person driving the car matters.

> but "driver hits cyclist" literally implies to me that one person punched another

"hits" can mean "impacted" or "run into", so it's accurate here even though it's not a punch.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#149

Post by sokoloff »

rtlfe wrote: post #142
Zak wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I remember reading about the impact of speed limits is that reducing them only affects the slowest quartile or so of drivers while changes to road design such as reducing road width and visibility slow down almost all drivers. Reducing the speed of some drivers and not others increases aggressive driving and probably isn't good for safety. I don't take the position that reducing speed is a good answer for every…

> I don't take the position that reducing speed is a good answer for every high-risk road situation Why not? There's clear evidence showing that crashes at higher speeds are much more deadly. IMO any street that allows pedestrians and bicycles should be designed for 20mph car traffic. If you want to drive faster than that, do it on a limited-access highway.

There are multiple solutions to your 20mph car traffic restriction, one of which is “disallow bicycles and pedestrians on this stretch of pavement”.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#150

Post by lolpython »

dgfitz wrote: post #99
lelandbatey wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The duration between when the pedestrian collapses and when the driver runs over the pedestrian is not as relevant as you seem to be implying. If someone is standing in a crosswalk in broad daylight and falls over, even if the pedestrian collapses 0.1 seconds before someone runs them over that doesn't leave the driver blameless. Why, in broad daylight, in the middle of a crosswalk, was a driver 0.1 seconds away from…

I can say with confidence that this effort will not result in roads being re-designed, ripped up, re-poured, and money paid for the effort.

What in the world are you talking about? Many US cities have already created traffic calming programs due to advocacy like this.

https://lmgtfy.app/?q=traffic+calming+site%3A.gov

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