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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid I find this somewhere between creepy and ridiculous.

On the ridiculous side: the idea that calling a car accident an "accident" is somehow wrong - as if, because I understand that what happened was an accident, I am somehow incapable of thinking "hey, maybe we need better road safety legislation".

On the creepy side: the general approach which is, instead of making public arguments about why cars are bad, to manipulate language so as to push people to your side, using results from behavioural science.

Of course, if you think the author is on the side of the angels, then this is great! But the techniques can be used by equally self-righteous people, with whom you may disagree.

Treating people like sheep is gross. Don't do it.

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The problem with using "accident" as the default term is that it preempts any evidence-finding, implying that it was nobody's fault. If someone shoots their gun randomly and someone gets hurt by just being there, nobody will call it an "accident", but somehow if the weapon is a car, the driver gets the benefit of the doubt regardless of the facts.

Of course if there is evidence that the driver deliberately tried to kill someone, nobody will call it an accident. I would imagine that the vast majority of car deaths are indeed accidental, not murders. This seems to contrast with the situation of gun deaths. No?

There's a few really busy streets in my neighborhood where people regularly go 10-20 MPH over the speed limit.

Not surprisingly, there are quite a few hit-and-runs on those streets.

While it's probably the case that the folks who are speeding are just being selfish ("I want to minimize my time on the road") but they are doing so at the cost of safety. The equivalent w/r/t guns might be that someone was firing their gun willy-nilly, with little regard to their surroundings. If someone died in such a scenario, yes, it would have been an "accident" but we would also assign fault to the shooter (gross negligence, manslaughter, I am not a lawyer so I don't know the exact terminology).

The reality is that cars are EXTREMELY dangerous and yet Americans don't tend to think of them that way, and we definitely don't drive them (as a society) with that mindset.

Speeding is bad, but it is obviously much less dangerous than firing a gun at random in public.

There are degrees of intention (Fonseca, 2020). Most people are quite deliberate about the speed they choose to drive, or the level of care they put into the act of operating a vehicle.

City planners and engineers are intentional about what they choose to build or not build.

This is a shaky foundation of an argument IMO.

https://laist.com/news/car-crash-accident-traffic-violence-l...

The main point is that "accident" implicitly absolves the driver of fault, before any evidence is examined. If you're driving 100MPH in a local street, you may not be intentionally trying to harm anyone, but if you do, the result can hardly be called an accident.

I'm not sure. I read a lot of gun violence reporting like "person a was struck by a bullet and later died due to complications" vs "gunman shot and killed person a". It's kinda the same thing.

I would make no assumptions about if car accidents are accidental (which for some reason seems to be the default) or not - and that's more or less the point of the article.

The fact that even making a similar argument to mine, you still say "if car accidents are accidental" is very telling of how ingrained this phrase has become. (Not to pick on you, I just find it amusing.)

I don't think this is coincidental: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28841388

I was trying to amusingly challenge the reader to separate the two meanings of accident (car crash and something that happened unintentionally) just like most writing about crashes tries to get the reader to conflate them. :)

The issue is that the term accident implies a lack of intension, while in most crash reporting we actually have no idea if the collision was intentional, negligent, or whatever. Using a term like crash or collision is actually much closer to the bare facts.

As I have stated in another comment, according to Merriam-Webster, a (car) accident is "an unfortunate event resulting in particular from negligence or ignorance". It doesn't imply intention (in which case it would become a homicide, in the case the victim is deceased), but certainly implies responsibility from the driver.

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