Re: Working through pain

On Tue, 7 Feb 2006 22:39:55 -0600, Ric Locke <warlocke@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 7 Feb 2006 18:28:21 -0600, Suzanne A Blom wrote:

I am also not sure that the number of miles driven has much to do with the
number of accidents one is in. My dad spent most of his working life
driving on average maybe a thousand miles a week & was never in an accident.

Professional driver? Big truck?

Other people who drive far less have been in several. I think training,
awareness of where all potential hazards are at all times & so on are much
better indicators.

If she had said 'the number of accidents one causes' rather than 'accidents
one is in'.... But isn't one issue here, that your driver, however perfect,
is still in danger from other, less perfect ,drivers?

/snip/
Insurance companies and the like use miles driven because that's a useful
metric. It does /not/ measure all the factors, and not all miles driven are
equivalent.

As I've said, road and traffic conditions matter; I supposed this was one
reason the insurance companies charge more depending on where the car is
'principally garaged' and whether it is used for business/commuting (which
would likely put it on the road during bad traffic times, and with a
deadline). And they factor in the driver's age and gender and driving
record. Didn't they also use to factor in the color of the car? :-) Make
and model anyway, as some sort of indication of the attitude of the driver?

I wouldn't be surprised to see cell phone usage turn up among their
questions, but haven't seen it yet. The fact that it hasn't, and they
aren't even including little flyers about it with the bill, makes me wonder
if maybe they know something that hasn't been publicized. (The dog did
nothing in the nighttime, so the Emperor might be wearing a blue hat.) The
insurance companies have certainly got motive, means, and opportunity to
find out just how cell usage does relate to claims.


A person who is talking on the phone is /not/ paying attention to driving
(again in my experience and opinion). The few times I've used the cell
phone while driving I have come close to having real problems, because my
attention was on the conversation and not on the driving task. I don't do
it any more.

I don't do social calls either, tho for me it's the other way around; my
attention stays on the driving and I marginalize the caller.


A phone conversation requires attention for many of the same reasons we
sometimes have trouble with subtlety, especially subtle humor, here. The
side-cues -- body language, tone, pacing -- are absent in text, so
statements that might be considered ironic or even funny in person are
taken as bald-faced, and therefore insulting or derogatory. In a telephone
conversation we are trying to operate in the absence of all the visual
cues, and many of the aural ones are missing as well. Phones are a wonder
in many ways, not least the quality of the sound over such narrow
bandwidth, but they're still ten pounds stuffed in a five-pound bag
(two-pound bag, for handys). So our input-processors are trying to
interpolate and infer, from the limited data available, what the other
person is trying to say. It's an nP-complete problem and takes a lot of
processing -- dendrite-cycles which are not available for noting the
trajectory of the Buick in the adjacent lane.

Two-way radios don't exhibit the same effect because of two things: they
aren't, normally, a conversation, and the content of the exchange is most
often related to the driving task. The ambulance driver or cabbie notifies
dispatch of current status, and dispatch acknowledges; the actual content
of the "conversation" is so minimal that in the days when radio links were
unreliable it was replaced by brief codes ("ten-ten" = "out of service for
a short time"; no need to explain the need for a bathroom break). Even the
truckers chatting on CB continually refer back to road conditions and
things seen in passing. A phone conversation is about something completely
/other/ than the task of driving, taking attention away.

The sort of short, informational, mile-saving calls I'm thinking about are
certainly not the heavily social kind. The cell company's "411" service
(live operator giving directions or looking things up). A person at a local
business quickly telling me what time they close and perhaps talking me
through finding their store. A quick "I've got the kids, but can you go by
Comp USA and call me from there?" -- None of this needs a lot of social
subtlety. :-) These people are busy; they know I'm busy.

It's not quite as ... professional team intimate ... as the local tow truck
driver and dispatcher talking back and forth, but it's definitely terse and
pratical-oriented.


So yeah, there's probably some realistic tradeoff, in that if X minutes on
the phone saves Y miles/kilometers of driving it's worth it. My hunch is
that Y is a very large number (some hundreds at minimum), and X is a small
one, because the metric isn't total miles, it's /miles spent paying/
/attention/ versus /miles spent with attention elsewhere/.

Well, that sounds like a worst case: X social subtlety calls vs Y average
condition driving. Try something closer to X brisk professional help vs Y
bad traffic and bad weather and no place to pull off.


[....]
--
RL at houseboatonstyx com (insert one 'the')
.

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