Always worth mentioning: the fact that most people think of themselves as above-average drivers is not a delusion; it happens to be true given quite reasonable assumptions as to what constitutes "being a good driver" that most people are above average drivers. The average number of legs per person is slightly less than two, so if you have two legs, you have an above-average number of legs. Thus, nearly everybody in t…
But see, these aren't even reasonable measures. In the case of legs, there is a hard upper bound which changes the useful definition of average away from the mean. This is a fairly intuitive thing. Similarly with driving, a terrible measure is number of accidents per year/number of drivers that year. It just makes no sense, because it doesn't take into account the person's entire driving record. An intuitive measure…
Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome
#31Whether or not you take into account the entire driving record (which you arguably should not since people's driving ability changes over time), another relevant fact is that some people are unusually bad drivers - causing lots and lots of accidents or near-accidents all the time. The few drivers who are actively a menace to everyone else make the rest of us look good by comparison. There's an upper limit on how good a driver you can be and most drivers aren't terribly far from that limit - they know their abilities and drive within them most of the time. But there's no strong lower limit on how bad a driver you can be. So we all grok intuitively that a few people who are drunk, high, angry, near-blind, aggressive or just terribly lacking in judgement are way over there on the other side of the driving-well scale from us; that makes us "above average drivers".