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Comment by jefftk | Hacker News Reader

There are huge numbers of opportunities to trade off inconvenience against reduced death. For example, we could prohibit radios in cars because the music and adjustment can be distracting and lead to collisions. Or ban cars entirely since they're much more dangerous than walking and public transport. We could require everyone to wear an N95 all winter. Ban phones for the entirety of the flight, and prohibit books as well. Happy to give more examples of similarly bad tradeoffs!

If you make policy with a principle of being unwilling to trade off deaths against inconvenience in any circumstance you'll have somewhat fewer deaths and unbearable levels of inconvenience.

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In this case, however, the impact is knowable:

https://etsc.eu/increasing-the-survival-rate-in-aircraft-acc...

Furthermore, distracted or unprepared passengers impact the evacuation of others trapped behind them. I’ve participated in evacuation training for flight attendants and have personally witnessed how a bungled jump down evacuation slide led to a 5-10 second delay. This was equated with ~20 fatalities due to smoke inhalation in the simulation.

My objection isn't that the impact of banning electronics during takeoff and landing is unknowable; that's not the main issue with banning car radios, cars, or bare faces either. Instead it's that the impact is too small to be worth the cost.

I think its fair to say I misread the thrust of your argument. I still come down on the other side; I am comfortable enforcing a widespread deprivation of a convenience in order to further reduce the risk of a rare but catastrophic outcome.

Realize that if you make commercial air travel sufficiently (further) unpleasant, many of those people will choose to drive to their destinations instead.

This will cause a net increase in deaths because, mile-for-mile, driving is orders of magnitude more deadly than flying commercial.

Banning car stereos would be a good idea. Besides distracting drivers, listening to music also helps people push past their normal fatigue limit and drive for much longer than they should. Driving tired is about as dangerous as driving drunk.

I'm curious what the relevant part of that article is? As far as I can tell the only pertinent reference to passenger behaviour is the listing of "Passengers' knowledge of safety procedures and their motivation to get acquainted with them" as a factor in evacuation, which...does not really have anything to do with whether the passenger is "distracted" at the moment of an incident occurring.

I feel like people are equating "not paying attention" (which, what does that even mean for a passenger in a jetliner? not paying attention to what?) with "unpreparedness" when that doesn't really make any sense.

The inconvenience vs risk threshold here is similar to bucking a seatbelt which is hard to argue is a poor investment.

Aircraft may be very safe on a per mile basis, but those risks are extremely concentrated around takeoff and landing. Which are fast events, so the risk per second is relatively high even though flying is generally much safer than driving.

I agree that the case for banning electronics during takeoff and landing is much stronger than the case for banning them for the whole flight, but I'm primarily objecting to FrustratedMonky claiming that we shouldn't ever chose policies that would lead to additional deaths, regardless of the level of inconvenience that this would impose.

If you wanted to give a fermi calculation for the fraction of aircraft traveler deaths that this proposal would prevent I'd be happy to think more about this, and you might convince me. My sense that the tradeoff is not worth it is based on thinking that (a) there aren't that many deaths to be prevented and (b) banning the devices wouldn't increase the chance of survival during an evacuation by very much.

See, thing is, ypur oinion doesn't really matter when it comes to banning electronics during take of and landing, mine doesn't neither. Airlines and regulators decided that, for safety reasons, electronics are banned for passengers. Same as with red traffic lights and speed limits, it stops there.

For what it 's worth so, I don't consider people having 20 minutes less screen time to be considered a prize to be paid, let alone one big enough to change reugulations over.

> Airlines and regulators decided that, for safety reasons, electronics are banned for passengers.

Huh? Electronics are allowed on flights in most countries, including in Japan, and including on the specific flight we're talking about. We're discussing whether it would be good for regulators to ban devices and anything else distracting during takeoff and landing.

Me too, I thought that was clear from context...

Not sure that is exactly my point.

I fly a lot. I see people using electronics for scrolling through photos, playing candy crush, browsing reddit, etc...

The point is, that allowing these activities for a few more minutes during takeoff/landing, is not providing any benefit that would justify killing even 1 person, let alone hundreds.

It isn't like someone is going to use that extra 5-10 minutes of using their device to cure cancer.

My guess is the number of lives saved by your proposal ("forcing people to not have any distractions during take-offs and landings") would be well under one annually, certainly below "hundreds". The total number of plane deaths is already low, and the fraction where a slightly more efficient evacuation would have made a difference is even lower.

I think we may also disagree about how much it matters to subject ~4.5B people annually (the total number of passengers) to an additional ten minutes of boredom? That's something like 1,000 lifetimes each year.

I'm not against that type of argument.

But do think that when a 1000 lifetimes are sliced into 5 minute chunks, those 5 minutes become less useful. It is false to equate this to loosing a 1000 lifetimes of productive effort. Like if this time is added up, it equates to killing a 1000 people.

Think because airline safety is so good, that it is easy to come up with these types of large number arguments.

Fallacy of Large Numbers

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/R8DBQD72tajt4mDhv/the-fallac....

I don't think that LW post says what you think it's saying? It's coining the term "fallacy of large numbers" to apply to the situation where someone is incorrectly asserting their situation has sufficiently large numbers to apply "law of large numbers" style reasoning.

I agree that 5 minutes to each of 1000 people, especially 5min on your phone on a plane, are less valuable than 5k minutes to one person. But I don't think they're so massively less valuable that we can ignore them as trivial!

Maybe I'm mistaking that with "Law of truly large numbers"

With a huge number, it is possible to make something look reasonable or un-reasonable. Wasting billions of hours of peoples time. Sounds bad, we should get rid of that.

But that is also the time when people should be watching the safety video. Which can impact a few lives. Like remembering where the safety doors are.

Maybe this is more along those lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_truly_large_numbers The law of truly large numbers (a statistical adage), attributed to Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller, states that with a large enough number of independent samples, any highly implausible (i.e. unlikely in any single sample, but with constant probability strictly greater than 0 in any sample) result is likely to be observed.[1] Because we never find it notable when likely events occur, we highlight unlikely events and notice them more.

The law is meant to make a statement about probabilities and statistical significance: in large enough masses of statistical data, even minuscule fluctuations attain statistical significance. Thus in truly large numbers of observations, it is paradoxically easy to find significant correlations, in large numbers, which still do not lead to causal theories (see: spurious correlation), and which by their collective number,[4] might lead to obfuscation as well

> that is also the time when people should be watching the safety video

I thought we were talking about the most dangerous parts of a flight, takeoff and landing, which are not when the safety video (or presentation) happens?

> With a huge number, it is possible to make something look reasonable or un-reasonable. Wasting billions of hours of peoples time. Sounds bad, we should get rid of that.

I agree that we're not good at thinking about this kind of scale. I think a better way to make this at a scale that works well is to look at everything on a per-person basis. So if it saves one life per year (which I suspect is high) then we're balancing 10min of boredom against 0.0002 micromorts [1], in the same range as traveling 270ft by car. Someone who would rather ride 100mi in a car with their phone than 101mi in a car without their phone is already ok with this kind of risk. [2]

[1] 1 in 4.5B chance of death

[2] 230mi per micromort, so 100mi is 0.435 micromorts and 101mi is 0.439 for a difference of 0.004 micromorts. If the journey is 1.5hr then this is 9 rounds of trading off 10min of boredom for 0.0004 micromorts. Which is twice the risk of death we're positing in the airplane example.

Yes, take off and landing.

Typically the phones have to be off by the time the safety video is happening. I think they do this on purpose so you are paying attention. Seems like they occur very close together.

I might be assuming too much overlap, like if there is longer delay waiting on tarmac. There probably is a lot of variance in this, so maybe it isn't really good point.

Society came to a point were nobody can be bothered with the smallest inconvenience anymore for something greater then oneself.

Pretty sad actually.

I'm completely on board with making sacrifices for something greater than oneself, but since there are so many opportunities to make such sacrifices if we don't prioritize we'll spend all our efforts in places where the effects are minimal.

> The inconvenience vs risk threshold here is similar to bucking a seatbelt which is hard to argue is a poor investment.

It really, really is not. Seatbelts actively prevent injuries from sudden violent phenomena. "Paying attention" does absolutely nothing to reduce the forces you are subject to in the event of, say, a collision with a Dash 8 that was on your runway at landing. It helps post-incident at best.

And I have "paying attention" in quotes because I feel like people are ignoring how attention actually works when they propose things like this. Human brains actively reroute focus in response to stimuli - like, say, a collision with a Dash 8 that was on your runway at landing. That's the whole concept of "a distraction". Hell, just a car braking particularly hard is stimulus enough to capture its passengers' attention, to talk of a plane landing going wrong in such a catastrophic manner. By the time the cabin crew is even ready to begin an evacuation, whether or not a person was fiddling with their phone (or just staring into space) some seconds before the incident seems highly irrelevant.

Fast isn’t instant. At 30,000 feet there’s plenty of time, at ground level things can go very badly extremely quickly and rapid task switching increases panic.

There’s several ways paying attention directly increases safety. First many evacuations aren’t fast enough for everyone to escape so even fractions of a second directly correlate to lives. Taking the crash position promptly reduces the risk of injury most importantly disabling injuries which may slow people exiting the aircraft. Safety briefings give relevant information in the event of an emergency which means people act more appropriately.

For one thing, an evacuation is not something you begin to do the instant an accident occurs; it takes time to reach a physical state where evacuation is even possible at all. For instance, there is video footage from the inside of the A350 (taken by a passenger who was...you know...using their phone, and all 379 people on the board still exited in a timely manner). It took well over 10 seconds for the plane to even finish its landing roll-out post-collision and come to a stop. Handwringing over the fractions of a second that it took a passenger that was "paying attention" and someone that was looking at their phone or reading a book to realise that the plane had had an accident makes no sense. There is nothing either of them can do or should do until the situation has stabilised somewhat.

For another, taking the brace position is something you do with forewarning and instruction from the crew, and the circumstances that lead to that forewarning are very capable of capturing attention. Additionally, safety briefings are given when the plane is very firmly planted on the ground pre-flight (cabin crew may repeat/re-explain instructions like how to put on a life vest or how to properly take a brace position during an emergency if circumstances permit). And that's really the crux of it: the time for a passenger to pay attention is while they are being briefed or otherwise addressed by the crew, and while they can properly review their specific plane's safety information and setup. After that, there is literally nothing for the passenger to actively pay attention to.

Staring very hard at the seat in front of you or out of the window "in case something happens" is not paying attention to anything but your own anxiety. You can be prepared and be ready for alerts without literally sitting and doing nothing; the human brain may not be capable of a lot of things, but it is very capable of that much.

First electronic devices + headphones provide significant isolation from what’s going on. I’ve seen people miss fire alarms in an office environment. So it’s possible for someone to actually miss an evacuation not just fail to respond for fractions of a second.

> It took well over 10 seconds for the plane to even finish its landing roll-out post-collision and come to a stop.

Panic and confusion can last considerably longer than 10 seconds. Having even a little head start to process the situation is meaningful well past the initial event.

> taking the brace position is something you do with forewarning and instruction from the crew, and the circumstances that lead to that forewarning are very capable of capturing attention.

Most emergencies aren’t preceded by anything particularly attention grabbing. Someone engrossed with a device can easily miss what’s going on long enough to cause issues.

> Staring very hard at the seat in front of you or out of the window "in case something happens" is not paying attention to anything but your own anxiety. You can be prepared and be ready for alerts without literally sitting and doing nothing; the human brain may not be capable of a lot of things, but it is very capable of that much.

Not all tasks are equally distracting. A kid eating a candy bar is more capable of processing what’s going on than that same kid engrossed in a game trying to ignore all outside stimuli while aiming for a high score.

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