It is always strange when people who have had an outsized impact upon others die. Prof. Nash wasn't just someone who was killed in a traffic accident. He was someone who touched the lives of many, many people in surprising ways. His work itself has a large sphere of influence that will exist without him, but I'm talking about a more personal kind of influence. He was an example of living to who you could be regardless of what was broken inside of you or what was "missing."
When I was a teenager, I had the good fortune of attending a lecture by Prof. Nash. Although I did not have the maturity to truly grasp what he was trying to explain - the event did influence my later life. I started reading up about him and his struggles with his schizophrenia, the work he wanted to do, the fears he had of never achieving it, and how despite everything he ended up manifesting his work anyway. This influenced my own struggle with teenage depression and made me realise that there was probably more I could contribute beyond the seemingly staunch limits of my own mind. That altered my life trajectory in a "tiny" but measurable way, so that I - a complete stranger - feel moved by the loss.
I'm sure he stands for so much more to so many people and that's a testament to the power of a life well lived.
I think that sort of excellence is born from resignation to "brokenness". Many many people waste their potential trying to fix the things they think they're missing.
Society is continually expanding it's notion of minimum acceptability. Standardized testing is a great example. The problem with this approach is that extreme excellence is fundamentally divergent. Revolutionarily smart people don't think the same way but faster. They think differently [1]. Also, excellence in one domain precludes it in others. For instance, you can't be a world class distance-runner and body-builder at the same time. The same holds for mental activities. Effective heuristics in one domain become cognitive biases in another. By expecting and accepting lower performance in general you create room for your comparative advantages to further develop. This can be summarized by the maxim: focus on your strengths. In this case I suspect insurmountable weakness enabled Nash to do exactly that.
1: or "different" if you're too focused to bother with grammar ;)
Like many people, I never wore a seatbelt while riding in a taxi. I'm not really sure why, it just seemed somehow to be the social norm and I went along with it. Then one day, my co-worker and his girlfriend were both severely injured while in an accident crossing the east river in manhattan.
Ever since then, I've gotten in the habit of using my seatbelt while in a taxi, car, bus, or whatever. Sometimes I get weird looks from it. Sometimes I find that the seatbelt is buried in the seat because seemingly nobody has used it for months. I do the same thing here in Tokyo and I believe its still rare for passengers to care but at least the cars are cleaner and the belts are better maintained.
It's a bit odd that we (New Yorkers in this case) allow the TLC to push back on those regulations and win.
Honestly I never understood that social norm of not wearing a seatbelt in a taxi. I'm much more confident in my driving skills than some dude yelling in some foreign language on his cell phone the entire time we're driving because at least I'm focused on one thing at a time. Sometimes the taxi doesn't even have visible seatbelts in the back (this is Philly I'm talking about, where getting around regulation is only a $200 bribe away!).
The one great thing about Uber/Lyft/et. al. is how they forced the taxi companies to step up their game and make getting a cab less of a shithole experience, at least here in Philly. Cabs are much cleaner, the drivers are not always distracted with some bullshit, and you can even hail them with an app. Before Uber came around, taxis were well aware that they were the fastest way from point A to point B (if you don't have a bike), and they gave precisely zero fucks whether you were having a nice/safe time.
I also never understood the social norm of not wearing a seatbelt in a taxi, but went along with it for my first few years living in New York.
I think the mention of "some dude yelling in some foreign language" is unnecessary. A person's native tongue says nothing of their intellectual capacity, nor of their ability to safely navigate a city.
" in some foreign language" is indeed irrelevant, I don't believe the "some dude yelling" (talking) is however. I've read different studies that suggest talking on the phone even while using bluetooth is severely distracting for the driver.
Andedotally, I've been in cars with taxi drivers who were on the phone when I got in and talked for the entire ride, whilst navigating a city traffic, while also looking at their gps to work out where I needed to go. I did not feel safe in the slightest.
If it ever happens again I'd like to think I could ask them in a polite way to end the conversation or exit the cab, but how?
For me, "yelling in some foreign language" is more disturbing because I don't know the argument he/she is trying to make. Is the yelling/frustration warranted or not?
Granted, when you're yelling at people on the street, it's likely roadrage and unwarranted in any language but, admittedly, that sense of rationality is slightly depressed in this situation.
There is a culture of not wearing the seat belt as a sign of trust.
When I was in Egypt, I'd get in the cab, wear my seat belt and the driver will look at me weird. "So you don't think I can drive?"
A few years later, the police started enforcing the law and most cabs didn't even have seat belts. You would get in and find a sort of belt that doesn't even tighten, hacked together only to circumvent the law.
Not to say that in the US it is any better. If you wear a seat belt while in the back seat, you are considered weird. It is a stigma that is not easy to get rid of especially for the younger generation.
Side note: I do get some dude yelling in English too. So yes, it is irrelevant.
If you wear a seat belt while in the back seat, you are considered weird.
By definition doing anything outside of "normal" is weird, but in the case of social conventions it's usually because people just haven't thought about it enough. I'd rather be considered weird than be in a crash without a seatbelt on.
Considering the driving conventions in some other countries where lawlessness is the norm, I think the mention of yelling in a foreign language adds information.
To top it off, getting in a taxi in NY for instance is a bit scary. The first time in one it was a wild ride.
I think people expect taxi drivers to get in less accidents because they are so seasoned. They can come within inches of other vehicles and dangers but with an indy 500 driving skill.
It seems like driving on the edge like this would encourage others to use a seat belt but alas when you have 3 people piled in the car for a short ride it gets overlooked. It really should be a standard to wear a seat belt.
Only kids school buses can get away with not wearing one and that is primarily because a school bus is so huge that others impacting it does little, and if a school bus driver had to seat belt all the kids it would take forever and the trip would be over before it started.
Funny enough, physically school buses are the vehicles that require seat belts the least. But politically probably the easiest to require seat belts in.
Yup, many states have 'click it or ticket' laws, yet school buses have no seat belts. The argument I heard growing up was that its 'actually more dangerous to wear one on a school bus'. I was never given a real justification to that, though. My adult assumption is that it's simply too expensive for cash-strapped school districts to upgrade, and the legislatures passing seatbelt laws don't want to increase school budgets to allow those upgrades.
Here is my guess as to the real reason those school buses have no seat belts: there is of course always at least one adult on the bus to supervise the children. If the bus had seat belts and one of the children were injured or killed while not buckled in, the employer of the supervising adult would face legal liability for neglecting to ensure that the child was buckling in.
Specifically, a complaint that the bus should have had belts can be met with the reply, "But that's the way school buses have always been." In contrast, there is no similarly-reasonable-sounding reply to the complaint, "If only the supervising adult had done his job and ensured that the kid was buckled in!"
I _always_ buckle up, even in bus.
I've gotten looks from taxi drives in south Europe for this, they treat it as an insult. I feel it's better to insult than be dead.
Afaik since you get fined quite severely in Norway where I live (and most of Europe) if you don't wear a seat belt, the rate of use is much higher than the US.
He will be missed. Hopefully it can put focus on such a simple thing to save lives.
Here's a fun fact: the yellow school busses most North Americans get trucked to school in usually don't have seatbelts. The reason is that they follow a different school of thought regarding safety.
The basic idea is that instead of giving everyone seatbelts that unruly kids won't adjust properly and will use to whack each other's teeth out, you make really high padded seats so that in the case of an accident the passengers go flying into the seat in front of them, but its a relatively short distance and a soft, sturdy landing. The theory is called 'compartmentalization' if you're looking for a google search term. Here's one:
We have a local school bus that took a head-on collision at speed (bus traveling 45mph, oncoming pickup at 60mph) and treated the occupants very well. The bus was full of high schoolers, the pickup was driven by another high schooler. The bus driver took a break near the ankle and none of the students sustained anything more than bumps and bruises.
Now, a lot comes into play here - the bus outweighs the pickup by several times, so it has the momentum to absorb the oncoming momentum and keep moving. But it's certainly not like hitting a flying bug. All that energy from the truck headed the opposite direction has to go somewhere, and it slows the bus dramatically in an instant. And these are high schoolers - no matter how many times the driver reminds them to sit down, sit correctly, they just won't. And even after all that, with no one besides the driver in a seatbelt, the students were all OK. (To satisfy curiosity: the driver of the pickup took serious injuries of which none were life-threatening; he spent two days in the hospital. He'd gotten impatient driving behind a tractor/trailer and decided to pass immediately after a curve without checking the lane first. This was a two-lane state "highway" and he was indeed in a zone that allowed passing.)
Then there's the Really Bad Accidents where the bus ends up on its side or upside down. Seatbelts are designed the hold under stress-- the button becomes near-impossible to operate and release. Smaller children will require the assistance of an adult. And there's ONE on the bus. With 50 kids. They make a safe belt cutter that a driver can carry, but now the driver has to visit every seat with multiple belts, cutting kids free, supporting them so they don't fall. This is not a scenario I'd care to have enter reality.
I can't speak to every seat belt buckle - but I went off a 20' foot cliff in a 70's sedan of some kind. (Grandmother was driving, she fell asleep). The seat belt left a perfect imprint of a bruise, down to the stitching on my chest and waste, but I (and my grandmother) had absolutely zero difficulty popping the seatbelt. The fall when we popped them wasn't that far, as 3/4 of the car had crushed.
Both of us walked away without a single injury other than the bruises from the seat belt. I've worn them religiously ever since that day.
> The seat belt left a perfect imprint of a bruise, down to the stitching on my chest and waste
One of the serious accidents I was in (my grandmother turned a corner very slowly and the other driver was going 130km/h, with a pregnant lady in the passengers seat) did the exact same thing to me. I also got a black eye; apparently right as the accident happened I entered the brace position so quickly I hit my eye socket on my own knee!
Are you sure the button becomes difficult to use? I might be very wrong here, but I'd at least hope that "release easily even when hanging upside down" might be a design requirement of the average safety belt buckle. Perhaps this is why aircraft belts have very different buckles than car belts? Can anyone provide more detail?
I'm not sure the claim is true. I only have one personal experience to base this on (fortunately) but I was in an accident as a passenger in a Jeep Wrangler which ended up upside-down on its roll-cage. Both the driver and I were hanging from our belts and had no problem undoing the buckles. We had to do it one-handed with our other hand trying to support ourselves so as not to drop on our heads after releasing the buckle. Click, release, just like normal.
I was in a severe single car accident in a 80s era truck, where I ended up rolling many times down into a ditch, and finally resting upside down. Seat belt did not release, the button was just solid, and I had to hold my body up to un-catch the strap ratchet so that it would relax, and I could wiggle out. In the whole event, the hardest part was kicking out the driver side window to get out of the cab.
The only part that saved my life was that I had stacked a bunch of HP servers right behind the driver seat, the rest of the cabin was completely crushed in ;-)
(Edit: I will never own a 4x4 or any high center of gravity vehicle which doesn't have a roll cage ever again. The day after the accident, I was sitting at the junk yard looking at the mashed ball of metal which used to be my truck, I couldn't believe I walked away without a scratch.)
The trouble with the theory is that the seats on the buses I rode on were neither particularly high nor particularly soft. On the bus I rode regularly, the back of the seat in front did not have exposed metal, but many in my town did. Frankly, the fabric covered ones were not much better as you could feel the metal bar beneath the fabric. Even as a kid, I knew I was likely to get seriously injured in the event of an accident. Thankfully, accidents are rare. Perhaps, newer buses are somewhat better, but I imagine most of the old ones are still in service.
My bus driver would stop and lecture us about this. His reasoning was that in case of an accident, evacuation is difficult if all the kids are buckled in. So if there was a fire (not sure how likely that is), we'd be worse off with seat belts. Now that I'm older, I'm pretty sure he wasn't speaking from a point of deep experience or research, but he was very passionate about the subject, enough to drop us off late several times due to such lectures.
As trivial as you may consider their argument, if the potential benefit of installing and enforcing the use of seat belts on school buses is small enough, it may not take much justification to do nothing.
In the US from 2003-2012, there were an annual average of 6 fatalities of non-driver occupants of school buses[1].
"They treat it as an insult" — also some US drivers. I just say "Oh, I trust _your_ driving, it's the drunks and crazies out there that I don't trust."
I've heard of people treating that as an insult, but I've had the opposite experience: I've had taxy drivers asking me to use the seatbelt when I forgot to.
Since you've mentioned south Europe, here in Serbia since a few years ago the fines for not using a seatbelt are so high that taxi drivers often ask you to buckle up if you don't do it yourself and they never give you strange look for using it. At least one good thing here.
Oddly, you get fined in the U.S. for not wearing a seatbelt in the car you're driving ("Click it or ticket!") but I've never heard of someone being cited for not wearing one in a cab. Is it because it's the back seat?
At least in manhattan, the yellow-taxi cab Taxi and Limousine Commission (the TLC I mentioned above) lobbied have an exemption to that law. Same thing with baby carriers. It's illegal to have a baby in a car without a certified car seat, but it's legal in a NYC taxi to just hold them:
Surely its the other way around. It's reasonable to expect all adults to wear a seatbelt in a taxi but not reasonable to expect all taxis to carry child seats. It wouldn't be unusual to expect on occasion for a parent to travel with 3-3 children; should all taxis therefore carry 3 child seats? No. Should all adults travelling in taxis use a seatbelt when one is available and required when travelling in private transport? Surely yes.
I wonder how much extra you could charge for having a vehicle in the uber fleet with a variety of child seats, or similarly various handicapped accessories.
Why? It would be a major hassle otherwise when visiting cities like SF or NYC if you are not planning to rent a car (if you are, you might be carrying a car seat). I wouldn't be comfortable using a random carseat in the trunk, and in any case, given different age kids require different carseats, it's not really feasible.
Would you be more comfortable using none than using a "random one in the trunk"? I do not really see how a carseat can cause additional harm in an accident.
This is just so fundamentally disconnected from anything I can relate with I don't know what to say. I'm all about being critical of "safety first", sometimes to the chagrin of my wife, but having or even requiring child seats is not bubble wrapping. (though I do find the "until they're 9" in California a bit much)
That is just bizarre to me. Being raised in Australia in the 90s, the idea that you would ever not wear a seatbelt in a car is just completely foreign to me...
Some busses don't have seatbelts, but for everything else it's just a subconscious thing that I always do (and as far as I know it's the same for almost everyone here because the penalties are quite severe - in some states, the driver can get demerit points if one of their passengers is not wearing one. For example, at certain times (usually holidays) in New South Wales when they have double demerit points, if you have two passengers unrestrained you get 12 points (at 13 points you lose your license for 3 months).
I started wearing the seatbelt in NYC cabs after I saw the results of a relatively minor cab accident. The plastic barrier between the passenger and driver compartments was covered in blood. That's all the convincing I needed.
I have gotten into the habit of always checking if the seatbelt is there before I get into a taxi and if its not I ride on the front seat. Well, I guess at least now I can tell a story about a famous guy who died from not wearing a seatbelt in the taxi whenever I get those odd looks from people.
I have always wondered why its so common to find cars with the rear seatbelts missing. The common story I get from taxi drivers is that passengers who don't like sitting on top of belt buckles shove them into the seat.
This is probably true. Most Beijing taxis are missing rear seat belts, usually shoved somewhere. Given Beijing traffic, it is quite scary, especially when the taxi driver looks like they are at the end of a 20 hour shift.
When I was working in Beijing, the seatbelts were usually there, but tucked underneath the seat cover (and so inaccessible).
I'm from the UK, where using a seatbelt is pretty much universal, and when getting into the cab I'd automatically pluck at where the seatbelt should be.
Once when I was taking a ride with our agent there, a local, and he saw me do this, he told me off quite sharply for it...
You should use didi zhuanche in Beijing, it's like Uber and the vehicles are nicer (Buick or high end VW usually in Beijing) without seat covers...so the seat belts are always usable. They also give you free bottled water. A bit more pricey than the taxi, but maybe living is worth it.
I was talking to a cab driver in Bristol about that and it is apparently because drivers were getting robbed by people strangling them with the seatbelt.
I had the same conversation with a private hire in Salford. He said that it's easy for someone to strangle you from behind with the seatbelt.
My dad never brought that curious aspect up (ex-taxi driver of ten years) but you can pick up dangerous people. I remember when I was younger, he had to take me to the police station as he identified someone in a photo book. He said at the time it was a 'runner' but I later found out it was because of a man who he had dropped off who went on to attack his ex-wife and ex-mother-in-law with an axe, which he had the whole time in my dad's car.
Knowing about these sorts of experiences, I can understand why they would forgo protection of a seatbelt when they potentially pick up these types of people.
It wasn't all bad though. He has fond memories of picking up famous Manchester Utd footballers, his favourite team, before they were famous, e.g David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, etc.
In Australia this used to be the case (same justification of taxi driver robberies), but I believe it's now only legal in Queensland - the other jurisdictions have all changed their rules in the last few years. The taxi driver lobby groups have not liked this.
Also in Germany, where the driver is allowed not to wear a seatbelt while carrying passengers, but has to wear a seatbelt as long as the taxi is empty (passengers are always required to wear seatbelts).
Before the current iteration of NYC in-cab media (the Windows system that plays a playlist of AVIs), there used to be a set of speakers in the rear of the cab.
At the beginning of every ride, it would play a pre-recorded message from you, generally from Michael Bloomberg or some other local celebrity asking you to buckle up. This got me into the habit of buckling up.
Now, the in-cab media plays a brief video message with no audio that tells you rates, who to call with an issue (311), and to buckle your seatbelt.
Maybe the lack of an audio prompt is why it's ignored now?
> Maybe the lack of an audio prompt is why it's ignored now?
Interesting. I am guilty of having missed buckling ever so often. Mainly because I have had a speed are so slow, it doesn't matter attitude. I am also new enough to the city that I didn't experience the pre-recorded messages.
In Bangkok I pay a premium to use Uber, because their seatbelts always work; the regular cabs here never seem to have them. As someone else mentioned, this might be a British thing, as it's completely inconceivable to me that you wouldn't put a seatbelt on if one was available.
> In Bangkok I pay a premium to use Uber, because their seatbelts always work
This is a bit off-topic. Do a lot of people use Uber? I have been here for a few days, can't seem to find an Uber. The app always says not-available. Flagging a cab seems a nightmare for a tourist. And grabtaxi works but there appears to be some level of negotiation at the end of the ride. The grabtaxi prices seem more like a suggestion.
Heavily dependent on the part of town you're in. Where I live, available 50% of the time. Sukhumvit is crawling with them. Also they're always available at the airport which is a huge win.
I think it's because people tend to associate the cabs with the slow speeds involved in the city.
I typically don't buckle up in Manhattan, except on the FDR or the West Side Highway, or if we're going above 30 mph.
For those unfamiliar with the NJ turnpike, where the accident happened, the speed limit is 65 mph and people drive like maniacs. Definitely a place where you want your seatbelt one.
Agreed. Another recent incident on the turnpike was the crash that injured Tracy Morgan (comedian) and killed another. If the NJ Turnpike isn't the place to wear a seatbelt then I don't know where is.
I'm going to start buckling up in cabs now. Same as wearing earplugs at clubs, you might get weird looks, but it's better to be uncool than dead (or living with tinnitus).
Does it surprise you at all that I also carried around a set of earplugs on my keychain all through my college years? I highly recommend these as they don't change the audio spectrum very much compared to the foam kind:
I think I just really like low-impact high-reward behaviors. People tend to over-insure for common and minor issues and under-insure fore rare but costly ones.
Here's a tip for those who may read this and pick up a pair of these. It may sound obvious, but do take some time to adjust the depth of the plug based on what sounds good. I spent a year using them, but taking them out for a favorite song, or only for bands I didn't like much, because they rolled off the highs too much. Then, (at an underwhelming Wolves In The Throne Room show) I backed them out of my ear just a little. It was a touch louder, and I got the highs I wanted.
Thanks for the complement! Hmmm... not easy to think of them. It's not that they're weird, in practice they come off as sounding very normal, but very conservative. I would say the first thing to do is to get to know all of the known cognitive biases surrounding risk because just about all humans suck at it:
Also, read Warren Buffett's annual letters to shareholders and try to emulate his approach to risk. I think he's very good at it.
My biggest problem, after becoming more risk-aware is being comfortable taking calculated risks. I often can come off as a bit of a party-pooper. Nothing says "Life of the party" quite like piling into a cab while hopping from one bar to the next and spending the first 45 seconds of a 5 minute cab ride trying to fish a seatbelt out from under your drinking buddy's ass.
I would say other behaviors that could seem odd to some people are:
* Never play lotto, but always buy tickets for local fund raisers or charity giveaways that have desirable prizes. My wife and I won a week long Black Sea cruise at a charity event where tickets were $10 each but I estimate less than 600 tickets were sold.
* Always buy things like renter's insurance (not likely to be used but will wipe you out if you need it and don't have it) but skip things like those insurance policies they offer at the store for non-big-ticket items.
* I stopped worrying about flying but I've become very pro-bicycle even though I don't bike much at all (because I'm a pedestrian and cars are a bigger risk to me than bikes).
* Pick software frameworks and libraries more based on well-trod paths than the new hotness. Avoid the very old and for the very new, wait a bit.
* And finally, on the other hand: I quit my job, moved halfway around the world, and started a startup in a country that is notoriously hard to do business in (Japan). That would seem very risky but it was the sum of a lot of very calculated moves that seemed like good bets when I took them.
There are probably a lot more. I bet you have some too.
One thing of note with them, whilst they are better than nothing, they are only rated to 12db, I carry a set of them at all times, but also some foam ones (rated at 30db attenuation) to protect my hears when music is 110db plus. (It won't sound as good, but stops my tinnitus from getting worse)
Pretty much everyone I know that goes out to a club regularly wears earplugs. People are unlikely to even notice if you are wearing a pair of musicians earplugs.
Cutting out 12db makes a huge difference (as decibels are measured on a non-linear scale). It can make the difference between hearing this for the rest of your life or not: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HIfqyHbKgY
In my case, in college, I would go to a club or show that was hearing-damaging probably at least once a week. Hundreds of shows a year, so I think that would qualify as very frequently as you say.
One of my friends was in a band and over the years that I knew him, I noticed he started to mix down his own music recordings hotter and hotter on the treble. I asked him why he was doing that and he said "I don't know, this is just how it sounds good to me." Later I realized that he probably has hearing damage and doesn't realize how much treble is in the mix for normal ears.
Keep in mind that 85db for sustained periods of time is the low end where noise induced hearing loss can begin. That's not really that loud. It's likely that your headphones can crank out over 100db and many people work in environments with loud, constant ambient noise.
I am always using the seatbelt. I recently realized that when you are on the backseat of a car, by buckling up you are protecting the person in front of you. In case of an accident applying your weight to the one in the seat in front of you might cause more damage than the accident itself.
A few years ago there was a series of adverts in the UK advertising exactly this danger. You might think you're OK with only a broken nose, but you've just crushed the person in front of you to death.
Sorry to sound so melodramatic, but I think that was the point of the advert!
I remember those adverts. I think they were very timely (1998) because it was only 1991 legislation came in to affect that required adults to wear seat belts in the back of the car. Various seatbelt changes were finally implemented in the 80s and early 90s, but attitudes unfortunately had not shifted much (the people who I knew, anyway).
Also, my parents and grandparents grew up in different times in which seat belts were not required, or even present in the rear.
That video also highlights something I do too often: paying too much attention to what's going on behind. The dangers ahead are far greater.
When I was in Japan and the majority of the taxis I got into would complain to the driver until I fastened my seat belt. I have made a point of wearing them in taxis for a while. The major place I don't though is buses.
That's why I really like cars which make a sound if you don't have your seatbelt on. That way they don't give you the choice of not wearing the seatbelt and it's how it should be. This is why in such cases I strongly believe governments should force companies to enable something like that.
The social norms are stupid and this would give you the excuse to ignore them without giving it a second thought (hey, the car is making me wear it!).
I like that feature, but I hate how the alarm goes off as soon as the car turns on. That just annoys me, and is the wrong time to give the warning, since you'd have to put the seatbelt on before turning on the engine, which it's much faster to do the latter first.
They should hold off on the warning until you've shifted the car out of park.
Every car I've had doesn't alarm until it's shifted out of park (it has a light always when on, it starts blinking when you shift out of park, and then beeps after ~30s in gear, or in one case after you go over 5MPH (I had to look up that one in the manual)).
A long time ago there were cars with the shoulder belt attached to a motorized track on the door frame that would pretty much force you to wear it...only for the front seats though.
Maybe instead of a power button, cars should turn on when you buckle up after the brake pedal is depressed.
They tried that with a few models and no they shouldn't. It was an actual pain and prone to failure. I had to rewire my friend's car (an all the time seat belt wearer) because of how crappy those things hold up.
People will wear them or not. Making things more complex just means it will fail and make people do strange things.
It should when it was tried and is just not a working concept. It basically comes in the same category as "bike handle bar warmers". Making an annoying ding is going to get most people to put on their belt. Making the car not move is one more thing that can go wrong in daily life and can make an emergency worse.
Well to me this seems like a passive solution that would convert most people who right now aren't using seatbelts to use them. Now, if some are trying to actively be stupid about it - I guess nothing in the world can prevent that.
The best the designers of products can do is "make them as safe as possible by default". There will always be people who actively work against those safety mechanisms though (like people turning off their ESP for that extra "sports-like" performance for their car - in urban traffic).
Good. Now, we have an active act of non-compliance with an (hopefully? please?) existing law that forces you to buckle up. Let's start the fines with 1k and see if this helps, if not, go up. Not buckling up is so insane, I cannot even begin to imagine it ..
Given that person is only harming themselves, it's totalitarian to apply a fine here.
If someone makes such a deliberate and conscious decision not to wear a seatbelt, maybe you could assume they have their own reason for that.
It's not even clear that forcing people to wear a seatbelt saves lives. It may increase the risk to other people, if people are seeking out a level of risk that they're comfortable with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt#Risk_compensation
They're not; they risk harming other people in the vehicle and there is extra effort to recover the injured body of someone from an RTA if that person wasn't wearing a seatbelt which puts emergency services at increased risk of harm.
I'll repeat my point in your terms: By forcing people to wear the seatbelt, other risk-taking behaviour is increased, which appears to result in more RTAs.
The evidence on either side is not enough to justify bankrupting fines.
I visited Fort Lauderdale, FL earlier this year and it seemed like all the taxis were Priuses which of course all have a very loud you must buckle your seat belt noise.
I certainly don't understand why the taxi allows you not to, but in your own car you should be in charge.
I don't really give a hoot about the counter arguments against it, but at the same time I wouldn't let anybody in a car I drive without the seatbelt on.
The culture around seatbelts in the US confounds me.
As an Australian I've spent my entire life wearing seatbelts. It's second nature. I don't even think about it. Taxis or otherwise. In fact I think it's required in all cases.
But in the US people seem to view the choice to turn a mild car accident into a severe or even fatal one as some kind of moral stance or personal freedom. Or rather any effort to require their use as Big Government or the Nanny State.
Some states still don't require rear passengers to wear seatbelts. [1]
Personally I wear a seatbelt in cabs and don't think twice about it. I'd feel uncomfortable without one.
The state I live in apparently has one of the highest seat belt usage rates (despite no rear seat belt enforcement for those 16+), which would explain why I almost never see people avoiding them. Sorting by usage in the Wikipedia table, I don't see much of a correlation between policy and the actual use except with primary vs. secondary enforcement, which would imply it's more cultural than not. That said, I agree that it's very disappointing that people don't understand the importance of wearing a seat belt when the cases are all around us showing that in almost every situation they are beneficial.
"Self-reported seatbelt use among adults in the United States increased steadily between 2002 and 2010, with the national prevalence reaching 87% in 2010. However, seatbelt use in states with secondary laws continues to lag behind that of states with primary laws. This lost opportunity has tremendous costs. NHTSA estimated that nearly 450 additional lives would have been saved, 12,000 nonfatal injuries prevented, and $1.6 billion in societal costs saved in 2009 alone if all states had primary laws."
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022437512...
Random anecdote: I travel to India on a reasonably regular basis to visit family, and I'm inevitably the one person that insists on wearing a seat belt and gets called out on it. Before traffic laws were actually (sort of) enforced in the city I generally visit, front seat occupants never really wore them either in my experience. It boggles my mind that people would travel at 120 km/h on inconsistently paved roads with insane drivers on the road and no seat belt to hold them in place.
It's useful to remember that while the extreme libetarian position is mostly American it's a minority position even in America. It overton windows the whole discussion, but most people who don't wear seatbelts are not "Free Men on the land" quoting Magna Carta. They're just not bothered.
I do not think the verbing of "Overton window" conveys the meaning you intend.
Did you mean, "it constrains itself to the Overton window?" Or, "it attempts to move the Overton window (up/down)?" Because saying it "overton windows" the discussion is meaningless.
The culture in the U.S. Is very much pro-seatbelt. Grizzly TV and billboard ads run all the time (in fact I just saw one last night). The slogan here is "click it or ticket" and police will ticket you for not wearing your belt.
For some bizzare reason though, it is somehow acceptable to not wear a belt when you are in a taxi, as if you are magically protected by the "professional" driver. I'm not 100% sure but it may have something to do with being in the back seat as well, as if that made it somehow safer.
I personally always fasten the seatbelt and have never had the slightest odd look from the taxi driver.
Seat belts are not required for people on the back seats, though. Since cab customers use the back seats, I believe that is the reason for not using seat belts on taxis.
There was an episode of Planet Money that covered why cars made for Europe can't be driven in the USA and vice versa.
IIRC one of the differences was in the airbag requirements, where cars designed for USA driving have air bag systems designed with the assumption the occupants aren't wearing seatbelts.
The state punishing people for not wearing seatbelts represents the idea that people need to be protected from themselves, by force.
If we go along that road, what's next? Should police officers be everywhere, ready to snatch a beer from an adult's hand if he seems to have had "too much" to drink already? What's too much? How do you know? The Nannier a state gets, the closer you are to complete tyranny.
Instead, we could just consider everyone personally responsible for their own choices.
- Didn't wear a seatbelt and got paralyzed in an accident? That's certainly tragic, but you're personally responsible for your choice to not wear a seatbelt.
- Didn't wear a seatbelt and nothing bad happened? Well good for you!
But the accidents are not usually single car incidents.
So, you are then leaving the driver of the other car having been in a fatal accident, because you did not want to wear a seatbelt.
If you want to drive on a private road without a seatbelt, drunk, whatever, that is entirely your choice. If you are likely to interact with other road users, then your choices impact others. (Note: your choices on a private road impact your family etc, but, you do not risk leaving someone feeling guilty because they had a car crash which killed someone)
It's a bit of a stretch to say that seatbelt tickets lead to tyranny--driving's mostly a privilege not a right. Seatbelts can affect other people due to an inability to control the vehicle after a collision, more likely use of emergency resources, etc. I generally agree with the sentiment about nanny states, though
Well, cletus, perhaps I can shed some light on this troubling question for you. Generally speaking (and there are naturally many exceptions, humans being the delightfully-flawed creatures that we are), the American government prefers to treat its citizens like competent adults who would rather not die if a suitable alternative presents itself. And so we don't generally have laws that require us to look both ways before crossing a street, or laws against poking angry bears with sticks and such like. America would rather you were smart enough not to do that sort of thing.
Of course, we have laws that all children must be suitably restrained in a motor vehicle because, hey, they're not adults. And we have laws that drivers must wear a seat belt because...well, I blame the insurance companies for that one. But America hopes you'll wear one anyway, because it's the smart thing to do.
The corollary, if you'll forgive my noticing, is that your government doesn't think you're smart enough to wear one on your own.
And so it's not really a "moral stance", but rather a general preference that our government not treat us like a bunch of ignorant monkeys. America wants you to live a long, happy life, but hey, you take your chances. Because you're an adult. And America will be sad if you fuck up and don't wear a seat belt, but life goes on. Mostly.
And now you may point out all the places where this convenant breaks down. The Drug War. The "Broken Windows" model of policing. The (up and coming!) Surveillance War. Well, fair point. Sure, we're flawed, remember? And so we try to make it better, over the long slog of decades. Sometimes it even works.
But the key idea, I think, is that by letting people fail, by letting them do stupid things, by treating them as fallible but sovereign citizens rather than a bunch of ape-men that need to be continually managed, they might become better, all on their own.
Well, that's a fair point, DanBC, but I generally regard laws about jaywalking to be a bit silly, and one of those things that I mentioned we'll need to fix at some point. If you're interested, I encourage you to Google "invention of jaywalking" for some insight into how that became a "crime".
And my thanks for your concern about downvotes, but I'm not very much bothered about them. What's the point of writing for the approval of a largely anonymous group of others? My only concern might be that my words would be construed as disrespectful to the late Dr Nash, but on a second reading I don't really see that. If some folks choose to disagree using some arbitrary points system instead of arguing properly, I guess that's their own affair.
I'd say that lack of references is more often a sign of ignorance than innovation. I see that every day; transformative work like John Nash's thesis only come along once in a while.
The way we publish research is broken. So much prior art goes unpublished because it is never accepted by a journal. Negative results, meh results, and flawed research all have value. Proper citation is often difficult but can be as important as the work itself, other wise the knowledge graph is fractured.
You're not in academia, are you? There're hundreds of obscure journals and conferences with very low standards. As long as you choose venues that are within your league, you can publish anything that remotely resembles research, and it will show up on Google Scholar. A new academic paper is published every 15 seconds, and most of them are "negative results, meh results, and flawed research".
Most of them are negative results, though usually not overtly presented as such. In my experience, it's extremely rare for a researcher to throw away months of hard work because the result is null. They almost always find a way to augment it or spin it, write up the paper with the phrase "more research is needed" in the conclusion, and submit to a mediocre venue.
It was an afternoon of Monday, May 9 2011 (the so-called ‘Victory Day’ in post-Soviet Union countries - that’s how I remember). For the previous 2 weeks, I was busy working on my final project for the Information Retrieval course - Natural Language Processing project which aimed to teach Japanese grammar with example sentences. The Spring semester was about to end, and I was struggling with my New Jersey pollen allergies while having a lunch with a friend at the Frist Campus Center.
We were sitting at the table right next to the tray return conveyors, so when I spotted a familiar figure returning his tray, I decided to approach him. That was indeed Prof. Nash. The topic for the conversation was not hard to find, as just a couple of days before on the Kazakh news sites, I saw that he was one of 6 Nobel Laureates who attended the annual Astana Economic Forum in my hometown. Apparently, he just got back from the forum past Friday. We talked about his meeting with the Prime Minister, the fact that the meeting with the President was cancelled on the last minute. He said it was his first time in Kazakhstan and his second time in the former Soviet Union country (he's been to Saint Petersburg a couple of times) and one thing that surprised him was the fact that all the signs in the Central Asian country were in Cyrillic (not Chinese). We chatted for about 5-10 minutes. I guess, that’s how you blow an opportunity to talk mathematics with the legendary mathematician.
Next year in May 2012 he attended the Astana Economic Forum once again. It just so happened that he flew back on the same Lufthansa Astana -> Frankfurt flight with my family who were traveling to the US for my graduation. My mom told me how over the course of the flight a few times on his way back from the restroom he stopped by my younger brother Nurym and in complete silence watched him time his 4x4x4 Rubik’s cube solves.
One year later in May 2013 while browsing the shelves of The Labyrinth Bookstore in downtown Princeton I stumbled upon the book “The Essential John Nash” which with plain and informal style attempts to explain the Nash’s diverse contributions to game theory as well as pure mathematics. It was so good that I finished one chapter right at the store and took the book home.
The world lost a beautiful mind. Rest in peace, Prof. Nash. The Phantom of Fine Hall.
I never understand why people don't wear seat belts, even in cabs. I think the thought is that it's the city, you probably won't be going fast. But humans are really bad at judging just how fast they are travelling.
Imagine I asked you to absolutely sprint full speed into a tree while blindfolded. So no time to brace yourself or slow down. You'd probably refuse, thinking this will either hurt very badly or even permanently injure you in certain circumstances. And that is at 12-15mph for most of us. In a car you are going at least twice as fast at all times, and have all sorts of fun objects to break your motion, like steering wheels and dashboards.
Cycling is great for giving an appreciation for what 20-30mph really feels like, without the car disconnect. Same as your sprinting example: go get a bike, find the steepest hill you know of, pedal as fast as you can down the hill (this is going to be 30-40 mph), then ask yourself if you'd like to hit a brick wall in that moment. Most people who are otherwise comfortable riding without seatbelts would be peeing pants and grabbing brakes long before 40mph.
These are both pretty terrible arguments, due to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_%28physics%29 Cars have crumple zones for a reason. This is not to say seat belts aren't good, as they along with air bags contribute to impulse, but there's a huge difference between shooting an egg (or person) at a brick wall at 50 mph while naked, vs. encasing it in sufficient amounts of bubble wrap first. I'll gladly sprint into a tree, or ram a bike into a wall, at such speeds provide I or the tree/wall are sufficiently padded. (https://youtu.be/DEP8juRSBRo)
Neither are terrible arguments. They are not exactly equivalent, obviously. A car does have crumple zones, meant to slow deceleration of the vehicle itself. It is assumed that passengers and objects are somehow attached to the car, such as by a belt device of some sort I imagine. The crumpling effect doesn't help you when you propel into the person in front of you, or as in many cases, through the windshield itself and into something that's not so crumply.
You absolutely would not drive into a wall sans seatbelt at 30mph, even with a newer car. You'd be a fool to do so, as you will get injured and MAY not survive said injuries.
I didn't feel sad, but reading that paper I feel something which knows no name. It is between respect, appreciation for beauty, and the need to do some maths. It isn't griefful, but it is truthful, and surely M.Nash would have liked it truthful.
A person who I knew nothing about became one of the inspiring figures in my life after I watched the movie, "A beautiful mind". I am neither a mathematician, nor an economist. So, I didn't get to dig his work deep. But, I often use his struggle with schizophrenia and his recovery as an example of unlimited potential of human mind.
I just watched the movie last night for the 2nd time, thinking that I was in for a completely fictionalized story, because I had uncritically accepted sensational blog titles like the one you linked to.
Turns out, the movie is a rather good depiction of the struggles that Nash went through. He published a groundbreaking paper as a grad student, married Alicia, suffered from schizophrenia, and learned how to manage it, eventually going back to Princeton as a damaged but wiser man, and worthy of a Nobel prize in economics. All of these major points were covered in the movie.
Nash himself found the movie to be close to reality, except that it may have suggested that he went back on newer antipsychotics--see the interview he gave to a Nobel reporter 10 years ago[1]. In fact, the movie was much more fair to his point of view than he admitted in the interview.
Some details of his life were left out, but his reputation as the "Ghost of Fine Hall" was preserved. I see the film as a fair presentation of his life, especially compared to the Hollywood standard for "true stories"--see The Hurricane, American Gangster, JFK, etc.
Interesting article but I don't think the movie is bad. It's just romanticised. In my view it doesn't distort the real story in a meaningful way for the audience.
Self driving cars can't come soon enough. I'd be fine with 100x the current punishments for drunk driving if someone has the option of a self driving car and actually chooses not to use it.
The metro buses I ride in to St. Louis do not have seat belts, do not have soft seats, and are not high but they drive on the freeway at 65+ MPH. It's even legit just to stand which I've done when the bus is crowded. None of this has ever felt safe to me but I assumed someone had determined that it was. For instance, I had not known how effective school busses' high, padded seats were at protecting its passengers until reading this thread and had assumed similarly that they didn't seem safe but must be.
Apparently (1998 figures) in the US about 41,000 people die in road accidents of which about four are motorcoach passengers. So in general anything to get people onto busses rather than cars would be a plus.
At Princeton, John Nash sat at my lunch table in the campus center a few times. The first time it happened, I didn't know for sure it was John Nash, but there was something about him that just told me that it was. It happened many more times and I always felt a sense of awe to be in his presence. Another example of the fine line between brilliance and insanity and how they are interrelated. Not the way you would have expected John Nash to go. Rest in Peace and thank you for your contributions to the world.
Just a note, New Jersey, like most states in the U.S. requires the use of seat belts for drivers and passengers, even in a taxi and police will cite you and passengers for not wearing them. Drivers will get double cited if passengers are not wearing them.
This feels really odd. I just saw John Nash a few days ago in the Fine Hall elevator. Hell, I used to see him all the time in Fine Hall. I will surely remember and miss him as I walk through campus next year and remember all the "sightings." What a loss.
It was through the movie A Beautiful Mind that I came to know about the man that is John Nash. an inspiring talented guy who is will be sadly missed. I have been guilty of not wearing a seatbelt in a taxi a few times before, as many others seem to point out there is this socially accepted practice of not buckling up in a taxi and I have no idea why.
If there is one thing we should take away from this highly tragic loss it is: seatbelts save lives.
Very sad. The non-wearing of seatbelts in taxis is something I'm acutely aware of at the moment as I'm in Bogota, Colombia, where taxis very rarely have seatbelts in the back seats and driving conditions are erratic.
In my experience, i.e. just the people I've met (mostly in their mid-20s), locals here don't care. In the rare cases seatbelts are available, they don't wear them, and they even laugh off my suggestions to do so. The taxi drivers generally do wear them in their front seat, but I've also noticed them going without.
It's very strange and infuriating to me that not wearing a seatbelt in taxis seems to just be the culture here. I'm from the UK so wearing a seatbelt has always been a natural instinct. It's such a simple, low-cost action that can have such a high payoff in the event of a crash. It just seems obviously a better strategy to wear one than to not, but maybe that's based on my points system where fitting in with the traditional, 'done thing' weights much lower than trying to optimise my personal safety.
I've noticed this in other Latin American countries too, in particular Brazil. In Brazil if I remember correctly the taxis did actually have seatbelts fairly often, but locals (again, just people I met in their 20s) don't wear them. Indeed, when I suggested a friend buckle up in a taxi doing 80 km/h on a city road, I was told something like "that's not the Brazilian way". I was absolutely dumbfounded!
Back in Bogota, one interesting side point is that Uber cars generally do have seatbelts, and are in much better condition than the typical street minicabs. As a result, when I can order an Uber, I do. I think it's a very interesting thing that's happening there - the Uber cars aren't just disrupting on price, but on standards too. The latter is far easier than the former here, I'm sure, and despite the non-seatbelt-wearing culture you'd imagine it has to appeal to enough people to give them a competitive edge, which may go some way to pushing up standards all round.
sigh I suppose it's a sign of the times that there are already Uber-vs-Taxi rants in the source article's comments (while there are some valid points there, it's rather tasteless.)
It's ridiculous to even think about ridesharing in this context. Better to focus on advancing self-driving vehicles, so that we may one day live in a world without the possibility of car accidents. Such an unnecessary source of injury and death.
Sadly, a lot of people subscribe to the mantra "never let a crisis go to waste". I miss the quite contemplation of the dead and then a thoughtful analysis of if we have a problem and what we can do to solve it. I guess that's long gone or only alive in niche areas.
As much as I hate to argue against thoughtful analysis, sometimes never letting a good crisis go to waste can radically improve chances that others don't die - and at that point I can live with not giving sufficient respect to the death.
I guess I've only seen half-baked solutions come out of crisis thinking. Also, there seems to be a tendency for some parties to put their little "pet project" into effect after a crisis. Since I just traveled, I would suggest the TSA as one of the prime examples of the way the road leads.
[edit: oh come on downvoters, tomjen3 is stating an opinion held by many and it kills any hope of discussion when someone gets downvoted into oblivion]
I was once in a taxi in which the driver would snort cocaine when we stopped at a traffic light. Needless to say I got out and walked.
Another time I was in a taxi and the driver fell asleep on the highway. We were in stop and go traffic and after a long "stop" the traffic started moving but we did not. I noticed the driver sort of slumped over in his seat. I yelled "hello?" and he startled awake. Couldn't just get out and walk, we were on a highway in the middle of winter in Montreal.
> (there's really no such thing as "dying of old age", despite the myth)?
There is. I was talking to a buddy of mine, whose in his seventies, says that some people don't really have anything wrong with them, just that everything slowly stops working. Nothing to point to as wrong, just a slow decline.
> Yet, it's understandable why people get angry when people start philosophizing about death when someone dies.
My biggest problem with secular culture is that we've lost a certain perspective and ability to handle our own mortality. People just get utterly irrational when it comes to death.
Life is beautiful, certainly, but death also has a dignified beauty to it too, and if you strip death of its dignity, then what you get is an abomination to life. So you see this culture where you lose control over your own dignity to satisfy other peoples' lack of emotional maturity. Really sad.
A car wreck isn't at the top of my list of preferred ways to die, but it's far from the bottom. Way more dignified than a lot of the alternatives.
What the fuck man? John Nash was an incredible man and it is tragic that both he and his wife passed away in this way. They didn't deserve to go out this way and this is really disrespectful to them.
"There's no such thing! Our bodies break down, sometimes when we're 90, sometimes before we're even born, but it always happens and there's never any dignity in it! I don't care if you can walk, see, wipe your own ass... it's always ugly - ALWAYS! You can live with dignity; you can't die with it!" — House
Yea, so what, you can quote a fictional character all you want but it doesn't give a person the right to say disrespectful stuff like this. It is lamentable that they passed away and all I'm saying is that we should pay respect to them, not debate whether they should have died or not.
He was a beautiful human being, I wish he had been wearing a seatbelt.
Maybe when we have self-driving cars men and women like John and Alicia won't have to be killed in "accidents" caused by people who don't understand how to drive without murdering others.
When I was a teenager, I had the good fortune of attending a lecture by Prof. Nash. Although I did not have the maturity to truly grasp what he was trying to explain - the event did influence my later life. I started reading up about him and his struggles with his schizophrenia, the work he wanted to do, the fears he had of never achieving it, and how despite everything he ended up manifesting his work anyway. This influenced my own struggle with teenage depression and made me realise that there was probably more I could contribute beyond the seemingly staunch limits of my own mind. That altered my life trajectory in a "tiny" but measurable way, so that I - a complete stranger - feel moved by the loss.
I'm sure he stands for so much more to so many people and that's a testament to the power of a life well lived.