How I learned to live again, after running a man over | Hacker News Reader

How I learned to live again, after running a man over

theguardian.com

72 pointsMimino12344 comments

“PTSD continues in unexpected ways. I’m still hypersensitive to noise, anxious in crowds. I cry at the tiniest prompting, often at kindness and evidence of a shared humanity.“

I would never associate ptsd with these symptoms. My daughter was diagnosed with Leukemia in May ‘17 (she’s responded well to treatment so far) and I’m susceptible to all of these - but I would never have labelled it as ptsd.

If you're seeing a mental health professional it's an interesting conversation to talk about labels for illness, and how people ideate around them. If this label doesn't work for you, you don't have to wear it.

If you aren't seeing a mental health professional, given the stresses in your life, it's worth at least thinking about. I value time spent talking to somebody dispassionate, but interested in my mental welfare for a number of reasons. It only has upsides, as far as I am concerned.

A fever, muscle pain, and cough are symptoms of a lot of different diseases, right? Same here, although minus the disease. Grieving, acute stress, homesickness, depression and anxiety and a lot more share the common symptoms described. PTSD does too, but that’s not all that defines it. Intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, hyper vigilance, emotional outbursts, vivid and disturbing dreams, and all of this over a period of months is suggestive of PTSD. If you check out some of the diagnostic manuals, you’ll find a common theme is a list of symptoms, and instruction that a certain number need to be present over a given time frame.

So a cough for a few days suggests a cold, while a cough and high fever for a week suggest something else, and coughing up blood suggests something dire. See what I mean?

The number of comments on that article along the lines of "this happened to me / my family member" is illuminating.

I think as individuals we don't have a good understanding of just how harmful motor vehicles are. This is even though most people know of someone that was killed or maimed before adulthood. Like suicide, I think the consequences of motor vehicle crashes are mostly hidden. This doesn't only apply to the fatal crashes. I'm sure people that are maimed tend to venture into the public domain less often than the able-bodied. If they were more visible, we might be more aware of the carnage that happens on our roadways.

I think there will come a time when the idea of guiding a couple of tonnes of metal at speeds of up to 70km/h within a metre or two of pedestrians will seem absurd.

It is already absurd. I'm not sure why we, as a society, allowed cars to take over our "pedestrianways". I suppose it was gradual — only a few cars at first, traveling relatively slowly back then.

You may be interested in the following article, 'The forgotten history of how automakers invented the crime of "jaywalking"': https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history

Interesting read, I didn’t realize the jay in jay walking was a slight.

It probably doesn't help that the auto industry employs a tremendous amount of Americans, from assembly to distribution and maintenance, and is a major source of advertisement funding for other industries that rely on such.

I think it was both was graduate and deliberate, in different ways. San Francisco has actually allowed a remarkable takeover of pedestrian space through curb cuts and a lax attitude toward paving front yards and and sidewalk parking.

http://www.spur.org/publications/urbanist-article/2008-06-01...

I grew up in SF, and it wasn't really until I read this article that I realized why I found the urban streets in NY and Paris more relaxing than SF. I really mean it, relaxing. Once you allow cars to cross back and forth over the sidewalk to get to driveways, the pedestrian areas become hazardous. This became especially apparent to me when I had small children. I found I really had to grip my kid's hands when out on walks when were were on the sidewalk.

There actually were a few close calls - I let my kids run ahead on a street with relatively few curb cuts, and they crossed the driveway section just as a car was turning in - and being small, of course they couldn't be seen above the other cars. It actually wasn't that close a call, because the other driver was very aware and paying attention.

But go through this a few times, and I gotta tell you, no driveways and curb cuts is actually a very, very desirable aspect to an urban neighborhood. The sad thing for SF is that it was originally build without the curb cuts - many of the curb cuts and garages were added to the older houses. And SF did go through that very foolish period of time where new houses were required to add parking.

And apparently, because the curb cuts break up the sidewalk, they don't add much net parking - supposedly every curb cut removes about 2/3 of a parking space.

We really did let cars run all over us, and it's very ingrained now. hard to change.

For any who don't want to read the article but are confused by "curb cuts", the idea is that San Francisco has driveways instead of curb parking, and there isn't enough curb room for a car between the driveways, so you end up with less total parking and lots of cars crossing the sidewalk.

Reminds me of the video "A Trip Down Market Street" (in San Francisco, 1906, right before the earthquake) [1]. This comment on the video says it all: "The good old days when kids use to play in traffic lol". All the jaywalking. Look how relaxed people are. No smartphones.

Its distasteful however how some people seem to break traffic laws. Especially speeding. A road at an elementary school nearby which I regularly pass enforces 30 km/h. People drive at least 55 if not 60 (the default is 50). The gains from such behaviour are minuscule, if any. Even the gains of driving 150 instead of 130 for 2 hrs are minor.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Q5Nur642BU

Stuff like this makes me wish for self driving cars the most. I am fine with killing myself with my driving but it would be very hard to deal with killing another person. I think most of us pretty much every day sometimes don't pay attention and could potentially cause an accident. It's just pure luck getting away with these mistakes.

> I am fine with killing myself with my driving but it would be very hard to deal with killing another person.

This makes me wonder (without judgement) how the engineers at Tesla and Uber are mentally handling the recent events.

You have that problem in every industry where your products can kill people. If you produce cars, medical devices, Space Shuttles or drugs there is a good chance that a mistake will kill people. There is no way around it and people have to deal with it. You only hope that you can be confident that you have done your best with the knowledge you had at the time.

I know how I would handle it -

We are doing work that will save lives. It will be a long, difficult road, and we will make mistakes; But when we finish this work we will be responsible for saving lives every year. This is the right thing to do, even if getting there means the loss of innocent people.

You just have to make sure that you can prove you weren't reckless doing so and did your best to minimize risk.

In almost all realms of human progress, lives have been lost along the way. People died when ships sank, so we made ships safer. People died when rockets malfunctioned, so we made those safer too, and when bridges collapsed, when trains crashed... just about everywhere we have brought in technology to improve our lives. It can't be denied that we are remarkably complacent and usually need people to die to prompt these actions, but in almost every example, those deaths aren't in vain. Something is learned from it. Those who do, make the future safer. It doesn't explain away people dying, but maybe some can be comforted that at least they did not die for nothing.

It makes me wonder how folks that work on weapon systems that are used to kill innocents in poor countries like yemen feel..probably much worse than Tesla engineers?

Plenty of them sleep like babies.

Why would you chose to work on a weapon system if you are unable to handle the fact that weapons are used to kill people? It's literally the job description.

That is the difference between them and Tesla engineers - people killing is a bug in self-driving cars, not a feature.

That's true.

> probably much worse than Tesla engineers?

I doubt it. Such people take the job knowing that the products of their endeavours will be used as weapons. Those who dislike this will either not apply for the job or will leave it relatively soon. On the other hand engineers going into the car business go into it with the knowledge that their products kill and injure fewer and fewer people per kilometre travelled every year so each actual death looms larger.

yeah i guess they have a pessimistic view of security or just do not care if the weapons kill innocents. ?

I'm going to guess it's the potential the technology has. In the US in 2016 almost 40,000 people died in car accidents and millions were injured [1]. Also the average commute round trip in the US is almost an hour [2].

Self-driving cars have the potential to eliminate a great deal of human suffering AND unlock a ton of productive time that has been held up in commuting (back of the napkin calculations suggest tens of millions of hours). If we consider what could be done with all of that lost human potential, the value of self-driving cars is staggering.

Disclaimer: That doesn't mean that self-driving cars shouldn't be made and developed in safe and properly regulated ways. But the promise of the technology likely makes the engineers working on them feel a bit better.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

[2] - https://project.wnyc.org/commute-times-us/embed.html#5.00/42...

I'd feel even worse knowing that I let a bunch of beta grade software under my control and direction kill someone.

You'd be more responsible, not less, you didn't even try to avoid the accident.

As a petrolhead and passionate driver, it makes me cringe whenever people push for self-driving cars, because I know that enough voices lobbying would wind up making it illegal to have a mass of meat behind the wheel.

Don't get me wrong, this is not a criticism, and it's not directed at anyone in particular. I know human drivers make mistakes. We have limits. We miss cues, underestimate distances, are regularly overconfident in our abilities, and innocent people like Mike Rawson die because of it. And yes, it is a supreme tragedy when a life is ended in an entirely preventable way.

The author's pain is very evident, almost wanting to be held to blame for the accident. Because it has been deemed an accident - he was not at fault, there were no circumstances that lay the blame entirely at his feet. It was a simple, freak accident, with a completely non-simple fatal outcome. I guess I am lucky (and I know it is luck, nothing more) that I do not have family or friends I have lost in a car crash.

But like the author, I love to drive. I love to be in control of a fast-moving machine, but only because I trust myself to drive without significant risk to myself, my passengers or pedestrians. I enjoy the challenge of reading the road ahead in search of hazards, I am always careful to use appropriate speed where there may be people on foot. It will be my greatest achievement if my entire time behind the wheel, I never come close to harming anyone else.

I won't go into huge detail about the Uber accident - yes, the technology failed just like the human in this situation, and the conclusion is yet to be reached, but I am willing to accept that autonomous vehicles will achieve their goals of being safer than a human driver. As I mentioned earlier, humans are very fallible. We build machines to compensate for our weaknesses. We built the car to compensate for our lack of speed and stamina. We built computers to compensate for our lack of logical reasoning and swift decision-making. It's only logical the two would go together, but as the accident proved, technology isn't perfect, because it's built by imperfect hands. I have no doubt autonomous cars will be safer than humans, but I think they will never reach a 100% perfect record. They're built by humans, and to be human is to make mistakes. Frequently avoidably, regularly through ignorance, seldom through malice, but nonetheless mistakes are made.

I just hope that as the technology spreads wider it doesn't force those of us who drive for the pleasure of it off the road. Car crashes are a huge statistical cause of unnecessary death, that cannot be denied, but let's not forget - there's a lot of humans on this planet, and there's a lot of different (and often quite creative) ways of mistakenly causing avoidable deaths. Because wherever humans are involved, accidents will inevitably follow.

And sometimes, just like this, there's really no-one to blame except homo sapiens.

> I turned left on to the main road, and began to move up through the gears. That’s when a car coming towards me flashed its lights. This used to happen to me a lot in the Mini. So much that a couple of years earlier I’d taken it back to BMW to get it checked; yes, my headlights were wrongly adjusted and I had inadvertently been annoying other drivers. So when this driver flashed, I instinctively flashed back: “No, those aren’t my main beams – these are, see?” > The time between my flash and the impact was infinitesimal.

I’m having a hard time understanding the crash as there is so much information absent from the article.

What kind of main road was this? Was it in a town or a A road between two towns? Was it designed for pedestrian usage (there are lots of A roads in the U.K which are not designed for pedestrian usage. These roads are often known as BYPASS roads and are designed to keep motor vehicles out of town centres). Was it street lit? Given the fact that the other driver flashed him I would think not? What was the speed limit? Was it appropriate for the road?

Here's the spot where I believe he got on A148 based on the description (heading east out of Holt, turned right around the bend where the road joins A148) https://www.google.com/maps/search/holt/@52.9119877,1.114502...

I used streetview to follow along the road, it is a 2-lane that has sporadic houses and somewhat wooded, there is a sidewalk on the left side or the road. Speed limit signs say 30 km/h (so just under 20 Mph). After the residential area (1.3 km), it opens up to mostly farm field for another 1.5 km, then it hits another residential spot. So the description of "just winding through the gears" would put it probably at the end of the first group of houses, where it makes sense that residents would be walking (there is a payphone and a bus shelter in the middle of that stretch of road).

It says the victim, Rawson, had just exited a bus, and the driver was ramping up in gears - shortly after the left turn off the A148, as a bend begins to straighten out, there is a hidden bus stop on the left side of the road: https://www.google.com/maps/@52.9118915,1.1132237,3a,75y,231...

There doesn't appear to be any obvious lighting in the area; it may be the oncoming driver flashed because they could see Rawson was in the road and realised the oncoming driver wouldn't have seen him, having just come around the bend.

UK speed limits are in Mph, not km/h, so it is a 30 Mph road.

It's my wish that someday speed limit is strictly enforced. Instead here, the norm is for people to go 10 to 15 mph over speed limit. If you don't speed, you will receive harassment from the vehicle behind -- flashing of lights, honking, or tail-gating.

Please don't call it an "accident". The Associated Press recommends using the term "crash" instead.

https://www.transalt.org/news/releases/9545

>avoid the word “accident” in stories about traffic crashes, saying the word “can be read as exonerating the person responsible

TFA indicates that the person has indeed been exonerated.

So are you suggesting that it was intentional? Unless it was intentional, it was an accident. Even if someone screwed up, it was all an accident.

If the cause were incompetence (unintentional), is that an accident? I don't think so.

The word "accident" to me and many people seems to imply little or nothing could have been done to prevent the tragedy, not whether it was unintentional.

(Note that I'm not writing about the incident in the link here, just making a general statement.)

To me, accident implies intent.

What kind of intent?

That is the exact opposite definition of accident. An accident implies the incident was unintentional.

My apology, I misspoke.

Accident is basically the opposite of intentional. Accident doesn't imply anything about it being avoidable. An accident can happen due to negligence. An accident just means the incident was unintentiona, not unavoidable.

The dictionary I checked doesn't agree, but I accept others use this definition.

The AP recommends this so a reporter can describe the event without casting judgement on the cause of the event.

This is similar to the reason why reporters say things like the “alleged” robber when there were perhaps many witnesses and maybe the individual in the report even confessed to the theft. It keeps the reporter in the position of fact rather than judgement.

This is important distinction for a reporter of an event. Non-reporters are not under the same requirement to maintain a position on non-judgement.

You're publishing your editorial content to a large number of strangers here, it is not that different from the situation of reporters. While it is true that no such requirement exists, the reasons to choose the alternate wording are still the same.

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