471–474 of 474 posts
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I always just count the seconds. When I was a kid in NZ we had a great public service campaign by an Australian racing legend, who told us "Arnly a fewel braiks the tew second rewel"
I think it's important to note poor planning, unawareness, and frankly stupid, naive, or ignorant decisions can make nearly any environment or activity dangerous. As an example I once got in a car with people I'd just met. After driving a few blocks one of them held a gun to my head. The driver then drove us out to the middle of nowhere... I was convinced I was going to be killed. I couldn't say how long the drive wa…
I've always found the way the term "victim blaming" is usually used to be unhelpful. For example when you recommend someone lock their doors, someone might object and accuse you of victim blaming - because you have the right to leave your door unlocked and not be victimized. You may have that right in a perfectly just world, but in this world people don't respect that right, so it's good to protect yourself.
And I think the victim blaming thing is less "you didn't follow common sense" and more "this happened to you because you asked for it". It basically boils down to: yes, people should follow common sense, but it's not their fault that bad people are out there - it's all of our faults in society, and we should get better at figuring out how to prevent these things happening at all.
Ie rather than just dismissing an area as a "bad place to go at night", we should probably try to address why it is so, and fix it.
This reminds me of a time when I went to the grand canyon with some buddies. We stayed there for a few days. Then made the drive back to the airport to fly home Along the way to the airport some asshat setup traps along the highway. These were boulders the size of soccer balls scattered along the highway. We don't see these coming as there's a car in front of us Next thing you know that car in front is veering out of…
Was there no chance that the rocks were due to a rock slide, or was it out in the middle of nowhere such that it could only have either been put there or fallen off a truck?
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I think other people have sort of answered it, but a more general version might be: If you observe an extremely unlikely event, you should update your Bayesian prior about how likely that event is.
Makes sense. I was stuck with the idea that "seeing a car on the side of the road" is closer to seeing a tree that had been struck. Actually seeing it get struck would be like seeing the car actively crash. Close in thought to each other, but still different things. Granted, I think your point still fully holds. There is a decay function for the likelihood of repeating events. And if you don't have evidence that what…
Lightning will not strike a TREE again because usually it destroys the tree in some way, changing it's height. But for many other things (buildings, mountains, etc), lightning will happily strike it over and over again.
Is the car in a ditch for a truly unlikely reason, or there a hidden lightning rod there? Perhaps you shouldn't assume a seemingly unlikely event won't happen again.