Random thoughts 1: Just Sayin'

[Synobun]

Synsensa not having an avatar like some barbarian is even more off putting.

Hey! I'm not Greek! You take that back!

 

[Takhisis]

My condolences, Synsensa.

Any kind of ground up fish meat is usually really gross.

Nippon demand-u aporogise immediatery.

 

[EgonSpengler]

"WWE Monday Night Raw" is the longest-running scripted show on American television. 25 years.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Spoiler :

I'm pretty sure this isn't supposed to happen.

 

[cardgame]

So this is a bit late, but a random thought: pre-tipping completely and utterly defeats the entire cultural institution of tipped service.

 

[Takhisis]

Which is why you should always pre-tip, right?

 

[Hygro]

So this is a bit late, but a random thought: pre-tipping completely and utterly defeats the entire cultural institution of tipped service.

Yeah. But has its own power.

 

[Ryika]

Identity is such an interesting topic.

Not long ago, some form of the following sentence was uttered: "You were born with a penis so I don't consider you a woman. But I will comply with your wish to use your preferred pronoun, so from now on call you a she." Needless to say, neither the individual in question nor the people surrounding her were happy. "How can you say this to her? She is a woman and you have no right to say that she's not." was the response one of the people surrounding her gave. And to that, the person who called her a man said: "She has no right to tell me that she is not a man."

That seems like a preposterous remark to me at first, but it does have some logic to it. Imagine instead of your gender the discussion was about a different part of your identity. Imagine it was about whether you're a good person or not. Imagine somebody said: "The way you behave, I don't consider you a good person.", would any reasonable person counter with "You have no right to tell her that she's not a good person, that's for her to decide!"? Probably not. It might be understood to be a rude statement, but people would understand that it is not on the person being "judged" to decide how she is received by other people.

Our "Identity" is not something that lives within an empirical system, it is entirely personal, and other people can perceive us as very differently from how we would like to be perceived. This also leads to the interesting conclusion that sometimes the civil and kind reaction is to lie into a person's face.

 

[Borachio]

"I'm Scottish".
"No, you're not."
"Am too."
"OK. That's nothing to be ashamed of."
"I'm very proud to be Scottish, actually."
"Why? What did you do to achieve it?"
"I put up with the climate, for one thing."
"Ah. You've got me there."

 

[hobbsyoyo]

So this is a bit late, but a random thought: pre-tipping completely and utterly defeats the entire cultural institution of tipped service.

I do it for convenience. It can be tricky answering the door, doing the hand-off and filling in the tip when I have a dog going nuts behind me.

 

[Lexicus]

I give consistent $5 pre-tips and as a result delivery drivers love me, occasionally give me extra stuff, and apparently always make an effort to get to my house promptly.

 

[morgenstern1]

I'm going to throw this out there: the notion of self-driving cars is ludicrously dangerous and self-defeating.

If you have to be "engaged as a driver" when occupying the driver's seat in an operating self-driving car, then it's not really self-driving, which defeats purpose of a "self-driving" car, at least in a psychological sense.

It is psychologically dangerous, because users will treat a vehicle's self-driving capabilities as infallible -- even though the efficacy/safety is far from perfected -- a driver will be lulled into a sense that they can take their attention away from one situational condition in order to deal with another -- answering their cell phones or playing games while they're "driving". Essentially, it could be anything that distracts an user from road conditions/situations that are constantly subject to sudden change.

It is basically going to exacerbate an existing problem (i.e. drivers' attention not being 100% engaged in *driving* when they're operating a motor vehicle), and until the technology is much farther along (and can somehow deal with the myriad situations in any given driving experience), it's going to create more problems than it solves.

 

[Borachio]

Well, I don't know.

I think driver assistance is a good thing when it comes to monitoring a driver's fatigue level, keeping within lanes, and keeping distance from a vehicle ahead, on a motorway.

It's also a good idea when it comes to parallel parking.

Entirely self-driving cars could be a good idea, and would probably prove less fallible than human driven ones. Although the technology is probably not quite with us and there would certainly be a considerable time before they became acceptable.

 

[CurtSibling]

About tips:
I have a tip...Get a better paying job.

 

[Ryika]

I'm going to throw this out there: the notion of self-driving cars is ludicrously dangerous and self-defeating.

If you have to be "engaged as a driver" when occupying the driver's seat in an operating self-driving car, then it's not really self-driving, which defeats purpose of a "self-driving" car, at least in a psychological sense.

It is psychologically dangerous, because users will treat a vehicle's self-driving capabilities as infallible -- even though the efficacy/safety is far from perfected -- a driver will be lulled into a sense that they can take their attention away from one situational condition in order to deal with another -- answering their cell phones or playing games while they're "driving". Essentially, it could be anything that distracts an user from road conditions/situations that are constantly subject to sudden change.

It is basically going to exacerbate an existing problem (i.e. drivers' attention not being 100% engaged in *driving* when they're operating a motor vehicle), and until the technology is much farther along (and can somehow deal with the myriad situations in any given driving experience), it's going to create more problems than it solves.

Do you have any sources that show that self-driving cars are currently at a level where they show worse results than cars controlled by humans?

Because as far as I know, even today the software of self-driving cars are already on a level where they're safer than cars driven manually, because while theoretically humans have an ability to react to unforeseeable situations with a precision that a machine cannot, the decisions we make in split-seconds on what little information we have are usually terrible. That's especially true in situations like... well, driving a car, that we're just not made for. The positioning of our sensory organs, and their tendency to focus on one point instead of being able to give us a panorama view, limit the information that we have access to while driving so drastically, that we often cannot even process what exactly is happening. A self-driving car can literally take in information from every angle of the car at the same time.

That doesn't make them perfect, but they're certainly closer to perfection than current human drivers, who make errors all the time.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

american women are small on average

Not if you include width.

 

[Lexicus]

I'm going to throw this out there: the notion of self-driving cars is ludicrously dangerous and self-defeating.

If you have to be "engaged as a driver" when occupying the driver's seat in an operating self-driving car, then it's not really self-driving, which defeats purpose of a "self-driving" car, at least in a psychological sense.

It is psychologically dangerous, because users will treat a vehicle's self-driving capabilities as infallible -- even though the efficacy/safety is far from perfected -- a driver will be lulled into a sense that they can take their attention away from one situational condition in order to deal with another -- answering their cell phones or playing games while they're "driving". Essentially, it could be anything that distracts an user from road conditions/situations that are constantly subject to sudden change.

It is basically going to exacerbate an existing problem (i.e. drivers' attention not being 100% engaged in *driving* when they're operating a motor vehicle), and until the technology is much farther along (and can somehow deal with the myriad situations in any given driving experience), it's going to create more problems than it solves.

The problem with this line of thought is that humans like to drive dangerously. Self-driving cars don't. They are going to be so much safer than flesh-and-blood drivers that insurance will rapidly make driving your own car prohibitively expensive. There was a thread on this a while back and I said then that driving your own car will eventually end up like horse riding, something that affluent people do for fun, but not what most people do to get around normally.

 

[morgenstern1]

Do you have any sources that show that self-driving cars are currently at a level where they show worse results than cars controlled by humans?

No. I don't have any data to back up my assertion, it's based purely on anecdotal evidence (what I've seen on the news regarding accidents involving self-driving cars), on my own experience as a driver, and on my experiences of other drivers while I am driving. The only accidents I've ever been involved in as a driver (two in total) are ones in which I've been hit from behind.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Self-driving cars are not currently better than human drivers. That'll take a few more years. This is also why they have rules that you must be engaged as they drive - because they are not as good as humans, yet. When they do reach the 'better than human in all conditions' level, that requirement will go away.

 

[morgenstern1]

The problem with this line of thought is that humans like to drive dangerously. Self-driving cars don't. They are going to be so much safer than flesh-and-blood drivers that insurance will rapidly make driving your own car prohibitively expensive.

Some humans might like to drive dangerously. Others might drive very responsibly. In any event, the phase "going to be so much safer" is the part that concerns me ... the transition between "you have to pay full attention in a self-driving car" and "you can start the engine, set your destination, and then take a nap" is what concerns me.