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Comment by stinos | Hacker News Reader

> You can't and the correct response is a total lack of trust by default because that's the easiest way to protect yourself.

Rather off-topic, but it's funny how this principle applies in the exact same way when it comes to traffic for instance. It is unfortunate it has to be like that, but not trusting any other traffic and assuming they can at any point do the thing you'd least expect them to do is just safer. Especially when e.g. cycling this saved my from injuries or worse more than just a couple of times. And that's even in a country with relatively high numbers of cyclists.

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On the other hand you can at least expect that if someone causes an accident they will suffer consequences. Courts and insurance exist as mechanisms to transfer liability including for medical bills, and the criminal system (in many countries) can and does punish people for reckless driving.

Sure, you still need to look after yourself in the moment - but there are incentives in place to discourage drivers from misbehaving and those incentives do help reduce the likelihood that you will be a victim of an accident. They’re not great! Bad drivers get away with a lot, and cyclists are not adequately considered in many mechanisms, but they are better than nothing.

Yet ‘nothing’ is what we have with respect to online fraud, where the situation is more akin to one where driving laws don’t exist or aren’t enforced, nobody drives cars with license plates, you can’t get insurance, and if you are run off the road the police’s reaction is to tell you that roads are inherently dangerous places. Bad drivers will never be caught, and if they drive over you they get to steal your bike and sell it. Entire businesses are set up around forcing cyclists into streets where they can be mowed down with steamrollers, and the police claim to be powerless to stop them.

There are numerous mechanisms that exist that make it possible for us to share roads without inherent trust. And even those are inadequate. Fraudulent behavior online has none of the societal mechanisms that we have created to constrain driving.

There are plenty of countries where driving laws aren't enforced. Using the Internet anywhere is sort of like driving in a corrupt developing country. This creates a certain amount of cognitive dissonance in people who have spent their whole lives in functional developed countries where obeying the law is the default behavior.

Right. The internet is more like driving in the kind of country where people give you advice like ‘if you come across roadworks and a guy dressed as a cop tries to wave you over, you need to hit reverse and pull a J-turn out of there or you will die’.

Try navigating the streets of Asia.

I am a firm believer that commuters and pedestrians Urban Asia are suffering from PTSD just by going from point A to point B.

I failed my driving test in the US twice because I kept stopping at green lights. Back home, if you don't do that, you'll die or kill someone.

There's nothing unfortunate about it, because you don't have perfect information. There's plenty of ways for traffic to behave unexpectedly for reasons that are out of their control (deer running into road, tire blows out, etc).

This is why driving schools teach defensive driving. You can't control anyone else but yourself.

This way of thinking is heavily ingrained into the Swedish traffic laws, where a key point is that there exist no rights in traffic, only obligations. If there is an accident there is generally two parties at fault. One party can be at more fault (which courts/insurance companies cares about a lot), but every driver, cyclist, and even pedestrian are directly responsible to prevent accidents. This also apply to boat captains. People have gotten in legal trouble for strictly following the rules in places where common sense implied that doing so unnecessary caused an accident.

This mind set means that anyone on the roads or on the sea should never assume or trust any other participants, and thus to the best of a person ability communicate intend, verify that everyone is behaving correctly, and apply a defensive posture in order to create margins against unwanted outcomes.

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