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Comment by lhorie | Hacker News Reader

> shouldn't we be discussing instead how to completely remove them from the political sphere?

I don't think so. The analogy that comes to mind is the idea of letting kids play outside. People try to justify today's overprotective culture by bringing up things like cars (they existed back in the 70s too) or candy-wielding abductors (really?) or whatever, but the overall theme is this pervasive idea that we can't handle scary things (be it the outdoors or media megacorps) and therefore we should be artificially shielded from them.

Instead, wouldn't it be better to teach critical thinking in school such that when you're faced with the realities of the world, you have at least some preparation? The idea of imparting civic responsibility principles from a young age seems to work well for example with classroom cleaning duties in Japan.

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I think there are many more cars on the road today, and I suspect they are more dangerous to pedestrians (new cars are generally more powerful, so tend to accelerate to dangerous speeds on small streets. Not to even start on smartphones).

At least in the US, the danger from newer cars isn't more powerful engines, it's that cars are bigger and tend to weigh more than they did 50 years ago. Some of it is quality-of-life changes (AC compressors are heavy), some of it is a trade-off made for safety or crashworthiness, but a big chunk of it is because Americans have largely opted for big cars -- SUVs, pickup trucks, minivans -- to the point that the 3 major American auto manufacturers basically don't sell anything smaller than a family-size sedan[0].

[0] As someone who loves smaller hatchbacks, this really grinds my gears.

I really doubt the difference between a 1700 lb (1980 honda civic) and a 5600 lb (2020 escalade) vehicle matters that much in a collision with a pedestrian. from a conservation of momentum standpoint, the 1700 lb car already weighs so much more than a person that the additional weight from a modern SUV has little effect. either way, the vehicle plows straight through with minimal loss of velocity. the bigger issue with SUVs is the clearance; a pedestrian is much more likely to be run over by and SUV, rather than thrown over the hood of a small car.

That represents a greater danger in vehicle-vehicle collisions, but I doubt it's anywhere near as a large an effect for vehicle-pedestrian collisions.

It's possible, though, that the larger vehicles represent a greater danger due to poorer visibility. I don't have enough experience driving a contemporary truck or SUV to know the driver's experience, but I do know that, when parked along the street, they present a serious visibility problem for pedestrians compared to coupes and sedans.

Some numbers:

since the 1970s, the number of cars per person in the USA has increased by ~50%, the number of people has increased by ~60%, and, vehicle miles traveled per capita had (previous to 2020) nearly doubled.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-962-january-30-201...

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=lls

> new cars are generally more powerful, so tend to accelerate to dangerous speeds on small streets.

Yes and no and but...

Yes - Broadly speaking most new cars are more powerful than they were in the late 70s and early 80s

No - Before the gas crisis we has a much larger lust for big powerful engines.

But - In the last 20 years especially there has been a mandated (i.e. NHSTA/etc) effort to make vehicles 'less harmful' to pedestrians in case of an impact. You can see some of this in the changes to front fascias/bumpers.

>No - Before the gas crisis we has a much larger lust for big powerful engines. >But - In the last 20 years especially there has been a mandated (i.e. NHSTA/etc) effort to make vehicles 'less harmful' to pedestrians in case of an impact. You can see some of this in the changes to front fascias/bumpers.

You hit on some of the complexity here. Cars are actually much quicker now. In the 1950s, a V8 police car made 85-150 horsepower. So, the bigger engines prior to the 70s were quite slow compared to cars today. As you note, the speed gains must be partially offset (fully?) by the advances in safety: tires, anti-lock brakes, pedestrian-friendly bumpers, and more.

in the 1950s, yes, but much quicker cars were available in the 60s. there were chevy caprice four-door sedans that made 425 hp and did 0-60 in around six seconds. that's not far off modern hot hatches (although I suspect the ones with 425 hp were probably less affordable at the time). it was possible to make plenty of power back then; it was mainly the weight that held those vehicles back. the specific model I'm looking at weighed 4100 lbs!

Wow, I didn't realize the Caprice was so quick in the 60s. Thanks for letting me know.

There are definitely more distracted drivers.

Your analogy is strange because our society has opted to punish parents for letting kids play outside unsupervised the way they themselves did, while in the case of social platforms, it has opted for individual responsibility and no sanctions. Unless you’re saying we went wrong with the kids and now we should not do the same for adults. In which case I would say that letting kids play unsupervised is an individual risk but speech and organizations have large and exponentially spreading emergent effects, so if you have the profit motive you’re going to end up with certain, shall we say, exacerbated divisions in this country.

> you’re saying we went wrong with the kids and now we should not do the same for adults

Well, I'm not defending that position so much as I am parroting that crowd's idea that unsupervised childhoods were better.

I think in both cases there's an element of prescribing the loss of options in favor of some notion of greater good. Whether it is a warranted trade-off or not, I don't know, but the Benjamin Franklin quote comes to mind: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety"

Critical thinking is taught in schools. When I think back far enough to my daughter's elementary school education, teachers were trying to develop it by at least 4th grade (9-10yo). Starting the next year, she had classes in civics that continued through to high school (14-18yo) where she is now. As I write this comment, her world history class is discussing yesterday's events in DC in a point/counter-point fashion.

Despite the effort to develop critical thinking skills, a small but not insignificant number of students parrot what they watch on questionable news outlets.

sort of a tangent, but I wonder if the emphasis on proper scholarly citations gets in the way of the actual critical thinking part. when I was in middle/high school, most of the teachers seemed to care more about us following the APA/MLA format perfectly and using proper "authoritative" sources than whether our arguments actually made sense. I was never very efficient at making bibliographies or sifting through academic papers, so I felt a perverse incentive to cite as few sources as possible.

the one exception was my teacher for a public policy elective. he considered any reasonable newspaper to be an acceptable source, and accepted a simple footnote with a link as a citation. the catch was that he would actually follow the links and dock points if we had misinterpreted the source or failed to address the source's bias. I recall that students actually wrote some good papers in that class...

Good point.

Her teachers tend more toward the exception you described. They have conversations about the quality of sources. Teachers definitely follow some links to make sure students aren't bullshitting. She was definitely introduced to the mechanics of putting a bibliography together. But I think the emphasis is on looking at issues from different sides. I remember thinking that it sounded like my friend's recollection of law school where he had to make arguments from different points of view.

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