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Fair... I don't yell at rivers.So don't yell at drivers. They won't listen, they won't change.
> But by your same logic...
A small digression: that's why I hate "logic". Logic is so 1200s. We have this thing called probability theory and we really can deal with numbers other than 0 and 1.
It's all about cost-benefit analysis. Cars get people killed (random statistics time! It's about Hiroshima + Nagasaki every two months.). Pedestrians not wearing crash-helmets rarely so (I'm not counting idiots who think they can go on a highway on a bike at night without any light or HV clothing; but there it is again, they fail at basic risk/reward calculation and you need to force them somehow to behave). Self-driving cars don't need to be "perfectly, 1000% bug-free", they just have to drive better than humans, which doesn't seem too high a standard and I'm confident it will be reached in few years.
> There is no perfect approach.
Couldn't agree more.
> But I don't think that insurance companies doing this is even on the 'better' spectrum. It doesn't solve people: not turning on their lights, not merging correctly, talking on the phone, keeping their cars in safe operating condition... (...) but if you want real improvements, you have to tackle the source.
Well, I honestly don't know of any better way. Education doesn't work. Most of the drivers I know don't accept the fact that their reckless driving is a part of the problem (I do know exceptions, but sadly, those are mostly exceptions, and they still seem to care about insurance costs more). Social expectations are really hard to manufacture, and the current one worldwide seems to be "driving is a right, drivers are the best, lawmakers and traffic controllers impose bullshit restrictions on speed to make money on us". So forcing people financially to behave seems like the only real option left.
> this encourages hyper-focus in the wrong direction.
I think I get your point - you're afraid that our values (safety) and insurance company's values (profit) are not well-aligned. I agree. But I believe they're aligned enough to push us in the right direction some more in an effective way. But I do believe that at some point those values will fall out of alignment to the point that we might be forced to ditch dependence on insurance for behaviour forming. The question is when.