Re: Compulsory daytime dipped headlights?

In news:44299872$0$70309$ed2619ec@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
Clive George said:
<conkersack@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1143575669.108259.172540@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Clive George wrote:

Actually it isn't. Go and read about 'risk compensation'. It's all
the same
thing - it's not conscious efforts to cause problems, it's
un/subconscious
ones.

I've got a degree in psychology, with mainly cognitive focus.
un/subconscious things are freudian concepts, totally alien to actual
real proppa-good scientific cognitive psychology - so nerr!

Very good. So why are you getting it wrong? Risk compensation depends
on the un/subconscious to work - although that may not be in the
strict freudian sense.

(where did you do your degree? I've a mate who's a experimental
psychology lecturer - I wonder if you ever met)

What do you know about seat belts and their effect on road safety?

Erm, I get the feeling you're leading somewhere with this...

I know they saved my brothers life once. What point are you going to
make?

I think you worked it out by the end of the post.
(BTW how did your brother get in the situation where the seatbelt was
required to save his life? Again, no blame implied by this question)

However you having DRL makes the other bloke in the other car miss
the bike.
You're not describing the problem at all. The extra visibility
bikers gain
from using headlamps will be entirely nullified if everybody else
has them.
Eg at a junction. Look right - there's a couple of headlamps, a safe
distance away. Pull out. Oops, there was a biker there too, except
somewhat
closer.

SMIDSY - DWDCA. Sorry dude, it's just bad habits and slackness again.

Not "just" that. Where did those bad habits and slackness come from?
Were they exasperated by the presence of the DRLs? Remember, you
won't be able to engineer out bad habits and slackness.

What advantage does having DRLs give you which couldn't be gained by
not having bad habits and slackness?

Without the headlamps of the other car, the headlamp of the biker
stands out a lot more.

This raises another point which I should have raised earlier, DRL
aren't headlights. They shouldn't be that bright. Maybe this is where
we are missing each others points?

Hmm. The Norwegian implementation is dipped headlamps, which if
you're going to introduce law is what you're going to have to use.

You really need to learn about risk compensation. It's a subtle
point, and
requires intelligent thinking to understand it - completely the
opposite to
what you're saying.

Steady eddy! I did my dissertaition on implicit logic and cognition!

Good. Now use it!

PS - having just looked up risk compensation on that all wonderous
oracle, wikipedia, I can see what you are driving at (no pun
intended), but to be kind, that is full of flaws to the DRL issue,
and all the seatbelt example shows is that when people started to
wear seatbelts compulsorily (is that even a word?!) that they
basically felt safer and thought that would keep them safe from
their own shitty driving and allow them to drive even shittier...
err, DWDCA. The illusion of safety, if you will.

Yes. DRLs will do the same - they'll make cars more visible at the
expense of the visibility of others, but because the majority of
traffic is cars, people will think that they are safer because they
can see the problems, and you know where that will lead. It may be
classifiable as DWDCA, but the mechanism is risk compensation.


A "real world" example came from a female motoring correspondent in one of
the Sunday broadsheets who "test drove" a pre-WW2 open top car, obviously
without a seatbelt. She said she felt much less secure and less safe than in
a modern car.



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