Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

In Southern Europe, and countries with similar cultures, we don't obey rules because someone says so, we obey them when we see that is actually reasonable to do so, hence my remark regarding culture as I also experienced living in countries where everyone mostly blindly follow the rules, even if they happen to be nonsense.

Naturally I am talking about cultures where that decision has not been taken away from their citizens.

View on HN

> I also experienced living in countries where everyone mostly blindly follow the rules, even if they happen to be nonsense.

The problem with that is that most people are not educated enough to judge what makes sense and what doesn’t, and the less educated you are, the more likely you are to believe you know what makes sense when you’re actually wrong. These are exactly the people that should be following the rules blindly, until they actually put in the effort to learn why those rules exist.

> the less educated you are, the more likely you are to believe you know what makes sense

It actually frightens me how true this statement is.

To reinforce my initial position about how important the rules are for setting expectations, I usually use cyclists as an example. Many follow the proposed rules, understanding they are traffic, and right of way is not automagically granted based on the choice of vehicle, having more to do with direction and the flow of said traffic.

But there's always a bad apple, a cyclist who assumes themselves to be exempt from the rules and rides against the flow of traffic, then wonders why they got clipped because a right-turning driver wasn't expecting a vehicle to be coming from the direction traffic is not supposed to come from.

In the end, it's not really about what we drive or how we get around, but whether we are self-aware enough to understand that the rules apply to us, and collectively so. Setting the expectation of what each of our behaviors will be is precisely what creates the safety that comes with following them, and only the dummies seem to be the ones who think they are exempt.

I believe there is a difference between education and critical thinking. One may not have a certain level of education, but could exercise a great degree of critical thinking. I think that education can help you understand the context of the problem better. But there are also plenty of people who are not asking the right questions or not asking questions - period - who have lots of education behind them. Ironically, sometimes education is the path that leads to blind trust and lack of challenging the status quo.

As a French, being passed by the right by Italian drivers on the highway really makes me feel the superiority of Southern Europeans judgment over my puny habit of blindly following rules. Or does it?

But yes, I do the same. I just do not come here to pretend this is virtue.

Not sure if it is a virtue, but standing as a pedestrians in an empty street at 3 AM waiting for a traffic light to turn green doesn't make much sense either, it isn't as if a ghost car is coming out of nowhere.

It should be a matter of judgement and not following rules just because.

It makes sense as it allows to walk city streets safely on autopilot while thinking about other things.

I kind of agree. The rules for safety should be simple, straightforward, and protect you in the "edge cases", i.e. following while not paying 100% of attention, protect you with a malicious actor in mind aka reckless driver, etc. Ideally, in a system like that it should be a difficult and intentional behavior if one wanted to break the rules rather than to follow them.

One should not pass any street on “auto-pilot”, no matter if there’s a green light for pedestrians.

I agree. I mostly mean that it is good to strive towards a system of rules that will be easy to follow and difficult to break by default. That is an ideal case. In reality, it is never that simple.

The rules in France are probably different but passing on the right is legal on Italian highways, in one circumstance: if one keeps driving on the lane on the right and somebody slower happens to be driving on the lane on the left. The rationale is that it normally happens when traffic is packed, so it's ok even if there is little traffic. Everybody keep driving straight and there is no danger.

It's not legal if somebody is following the slower car on the left and steers to the right to pass. However some drivers stick to the left at a speed slower than the limit and if they don't yield what happens is that eventually they get passed on the right.

The two cases have different names. The normal pass is "sorpasso", the other one (passing by not steering) is "superamento", which is odd but they had to find a word for it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com