Hacker News Reader

Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

Since it's almost on-topic, anyone know if/how these tools emulate sustained irrational behavior?

Example:

For over a decade, the freeway on-ramp nearest my work had two main ways of getting to it from downtown. One of them involved a stop-sign crossing a road that had the right-of-way (i.e. a two-way stop). The other had timed traffic signals. Every evening around 5pm, the traffic would backup from the stop-sign for multiple blocks. Meanwhile the route with lights was completely smooth.

Eventually the stop-sign was replaced with a signal, but I marveled at how many people persisted in making their daily commute much worse than it needed to be.

View on HN

A very large subset of the population bases their commute and travel path based on best time. If using the stop sign once in 1995 was faster than the stoplight then they will always use the stop sign even if it’s almost always slower. These are the groups of people who always seem to be late.

Other groups of people are incredibly pessimistic and always take the least bad route.

It's unlikely that it was irrational. More likely people don't have perfect information, or it was somehow the result of poor road design.

Of course people don't have perfect information, but this town is on a 1/10th mile grid and the "happy path" was a single block away. Let's just say I didn't have to fire up TomTom on my Palm T5 to figure this out after the first time I got stuck in the backup.

Much "irrational" behavior isn't. People make decisions with incomplete information and the subset of information they have differs between people. People also have different objectives when engaging in similar behavior. Asserting that a choice is rational or not is often making the unwarranted assumption that their objectives are the same as your objectives.

For example, people often have a preference for certain flow patterns in traffic that they prioritize more than the route with the shortest time.

One take away from my behavioral economics course is that its application is pretty narrowly defined, such as default settings for 401k contributions or making visible potential losses from an action.

I regularly have to take my grandmother to doctors' appointments. The path I take to drive there and back is definitely sub-optimal, but it has the advantage of being burned into my brain at this point - and it's simple and avoids many other pain points, such as an un-protected left turn at a busy intersection, etc.

It's unsurprising, customs and habits play a really large role in behaviour of crowds. It's obvious from the point of view of some individuals, but a crowd of people functions less like a cohesive and intelligent system and more like a fluid. I'd be surprised if this wouldn't hold true by crowds of people in traffic and other situations where they have to self-organize.

If they didn't simulate sustained irrational behavior, there wouldn't be people driving cars in cities.

There's a highway interchange in my city that was a 55 10-15 years ago, maybe a half mile turn, used to be 1 lane. It's now built out wider into 2 lanes and is a 70mph zone to keep traffic flowing.

To this day, people still slow down like they used to as if it were a 55.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com