Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

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It certainly isn't just America, though we're probably certainly the most infamous example.

I was in France for business once in the countryside (southern France), and the host took everyone (me, their employees, etc.) out to lunch. Far as I could tell it was just an everyday thing. Anyway, we drove about an hour to a nearby village and practically partied for a few hours. Wine flowed like a river. Then we drove back and we all got back to our work. So not only were we drunk driving, we were drunk working. Even Americans usually don't drink that hard; the French earned my respect that day, they know how to have a good time.

Also many times in Japan, I would invite a business client/supplier or a friend over for dinner at a sushi bar. It's not unusual for some to drive rather than take the train, and then of course go back home driving after having had lots of beer and sake.

Whether any of us like it or not, drunk driving is an oil that lubricates society.

> Even Americans usually don't drink that hard; the French earned my respect that day.

Is drinking hard something so deserving of respect? Is working while impaired?

To me this reads as "I like to fuck off and be irresponsible and man did these French guys show me how it's done!"

Except they weren't irresponsible. We all drove back just fine, and we all went back to work just as competently as before like nothing happened.

It takes skill and maturity to have a good time but not so much that it would impair subsequent duties. The French demonstrated to me they have that down to a much finer degree than most of us have in America, so they have my respect.

This isn't to say Americans are immature, mind you. For every drunk driving incident you hear on the news, hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans drive home drunk without harming anyone for their entire lives. What I will admit is Americans would still refrain from drinking so much during lunch when we still have a work day left ahead of us, that's something we can take lessons from the French on.

Life is short, so those who can have more happy hours without compromising their duties are the real winners.

As someone who knows people who died in a crash with another drunk driver, it is hard for me to accept your view. Certainly, at a bare minimum, the penalties for drunk driving that results in fatality should be much harsher than they are now -- at that point there is hard empirical evidence that you cannot be trusted to have the "skill and maturity" necessary for driving -- but we can't even bring ourselves to do that, not even for repeat offenders.

Eventually I am optimistic that autonomous driving will solve the problem entirely, at least for those who are responsible drivers. In an era of widely available self-driving cars, if you choose to drive drunk, then that is an active choice, and no amount of "social lubrication" can excuse such degenerate behavior.

I am very sorry about your friend.

I think the real problem is that people are really poor at assessing risk. And I think we can make some headway there, educationally, and it might actually affect how people reason around drunk driving (or their friends, assuming they still have their faculties).

Let's take the example of driving home drunk without hurting anyone or having an accident. Suppose that (being optimistic) there's a 1% chance of an accident and a 0.1% chance of causing a fatality (including to self). Seems like an easy risk to take, right? But observe what happens if you drive home drunk 40 times:

99% chance of causing no accident each time, to the 40th power = 0.99^40 is roughly 67% chance that none of those 40 times results in an accident. 80 times? 45% chance of no accident. Now you're talking about flipping a coin to determine whether you cause an accident (potentially a fatal one, we'll get to that) at all over 80 attempts. (I feel like that is optimistic.)

If I have a 99.9% chance of not killing someone when drunk-driving one time, after 80 times I have a 92% chance of not killing someone (that is, an 8% chance of killing someone). Again, this seems optimistic.

Try tweaking the numbers to a 2% chance of an accident and a 1.2% chance of causing a fatality.

Anyway, my point is that people are really terrible at evaluating the whole "re-rolling the dice multiple times" angle, since a single hit is a HUGE, potentially life-changing loss.

(People are just as bad at evaluating success risk, as well, for similar reasons- a single large success is a potentially life-changing event)

I'm certainly not trying to understate the very real and very serious suffering that irresponsible drunk drivers can and do cause. If any of this came off like that then that was never my intention.

When it comes to understanding drunk driving and especially why it is de facto tolerated by society despite its significant problems, it's necessary to consider the motivators and both positive and negative results. Simply saying "they are all irresponsible and should stop" and such with a handwave isn't productive. After all, society wouldn't tolerate a significant problem if there wasn't a significant benefit to doing so.

One of the well known effects of alcohol is impaired judgment. You're expecting people with some level of impaired judgment to make correct judgment calls. Skill and maturity can help, but are not a solution to that fundamental problem.

Would you be okay with a surgeon operating on you in the afternoon drinking at lunch and working on you later while impaired? Is it okay for every person and job to be impaired, regardless of the responsibility of their situation? If not, why is operating a few thousand pound vehicle in public that can easily kill multiple people when used incorrectly okay?

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