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Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

> Politically very difficult to take people's licences away though, especially when it's permanent, not their fault and it makes their life a lot worse.

It shouldn't be permanent. If they can improve, then why not? Maybe illness causes their poor driving and they find a treatment for that illness.

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> If they can improve, then why not?

I'm talking about removing licences due to cognitive decline. It's not a temporary condition

It's a vague definition though.

All cognitive decline is not equal.

If they're able to drive they should be allowed to

It can be for "3 months" (with a low expectation that after 3 months they improve enough to get the licence again).

Theoretically it can be, though usually not, so the question is what should be the law to cover the general case. It wouldn’t be such a problem if it were easy for them to get around without driving. Either self driving cars, subsidized Ubers, public transit, walkable cities, home delivery, etc.

My opinion is that in the general case people over 70 shouldn’t be driving and I say this as someone who has 4 spritly grandparents in their 90s. I really don’t like how dangerous roads are, a fact that we accept because we did not really have good alternatives, now that we do we should implement them.

Paul Newman won his last race at Lime Rock in Sept. 2007 driving a 900-horsepower Corvette when he was 82.

Is your point that we should be governed by the exceptions? I think that would be a bad idea. Does he even need a license for a racetrack? I’m sure he could easily afford Uber rides, and just maybe he would like to lower his odds of getting T-boned at an intersection by a geriatric.

We should be governed by capabilities, not arbitrary numbers.

The numbers are not arbitrary if they’re based on data, and generalizations are done for the sake of expediency and practicality. If such things are wholly unimportant then sure, capability test all the things.

They are arbitrary. You don't want to bake these things into law. What if people start living to be 150 as of next week because of some miracle drug. It'd be retarded if people lost their license at 70. Don't do things wrong just because you can. This is why software is full of so many bugs. Do shit right the first time, so that we never have to think about this again. jfc

You are wrong on the definition of arbitrary.

I’m pretty sure laws can be changed easier than lifespans can doubled. You can’t always do things right the first time because knowledge unfolds with time, you’ll always know more later. You are proposing a waterfall design versus an iterative design. It would be easy enough to run an experiment for a few years to see if the lives saved are worth it.

> It's not a temporary condition

You have no way of knowing that. There's no reason it should be written into law. If they can pass the test, then they can drive. Testing already takes care of what you want. If it truly isn't a temporary condition, then you have nothing to worry about.

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