"Supertaskers" Can Safely Use Mobile Phones While Driving 388
nk497 writes "While most of us are dangerous when texting, chatting on a phone or being otherwise distracted while driving, one in 40 are actually just fine with such distractions. In a small study, such 'supertaskers' were just as good at driving when carrying on a conversation over a hands-free phone as they were when fully focused. That said, the researchers warned that most people are much worse at driving while chatting and shouldn't do it, adding: 'Given the number of individuals who routinely talk on the phone while driving, one would have hoped that there would be a greater percentage of supertaskers.'"
That 1 in 40 aside, reader crimeandpunishment writes "The US Transportation Department is calling for a permanent ban on texting while driving, for interstate truck and bus drivers. An interim ban has been in place since January. The government says it is doing everything it can to make roads safer by reducing the threat of distracted drivers."
Yup.. (Score:5, Funny)
I'm just fine with the added distractions. In fact, while driving, I usually #*&&&%>...
NO CARRIER
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
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Wha, you don't know about 9600 BAUD modem-based gateways used to submit comments to slashdot?
If he gets disconnected in the middle of typing, it disconnects, to avoid loss of the message, the other side of the gateway dutifully posts it, including the last bit of noise, and the 'NO CARRIER' error reported by the modem.
Another fun thing to do with those gateways is to post the following on every slashdot comment,
+++ATH0
+++ATH0
FB GUR SRYYBJF HFVAT PURNC XABPX-BSS ZBQRZF GUNG PNA'G VZCYRZRAG CNGRAGRQ
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Screw typing... what about engraving "AAARGH" in stone as you die?
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Re:Yup.. (Score:4, Funny)
I've just got to:
Brother Mainar*: "The castle of Aaaaaarrrrgh!"
King Arthur: "What?"
BM: "The castle of... Aaaaaaarrrgh"
Bedevere: "What is that?"
BM: "He must have died while carving!"
Lancelot: "Oh, come on!"
BM: "Well that's what it says"
KA: "Look if he was dying he wouldn't bother to carve 'Argh' he'd just say it"
BM: "Well that's what's carved in the rock!"
Galahad: "Perhaps he was dictating?"
KA: "Oh shut up!"
Re:Yup.. (Score:5, Funny)
Two days later my thigh was at it again. It went into my e-mail, found an email from a school club mailing list i was part of. Replied to the whole mailing list (the club was setup so anyone posting to the mailing list would have their message relayed to the whole group). I got like 15emails like "what is 'sadofiefew'?".
From this I concluded of course that my thigh is smarter than a monkey. And there is a hypothesis that it is upset about the IE number of users.
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R u a hooman? (Score:5, Funny)
This is precisely why more forums are using catpchas.
Re:Yup.. (Score:4, Funny)
"leik cex[TAB][ENTER]"
Sounds like your cat was *really* trying to say: "Like sex. Tabby. Enter." and just didn't have a full grasp of what the [TAB] key does.
Re:Yup.. (Score:5, Funny)
Man, back in the day, I could drive with a joint in one hand a beer in the other hand and an arm around my girlfriend (this was in the days before Slashdot nerd-dom). All while bobbing my head madly to The Ramones and being high on 'shrooms. And I could do all this while timing all the stoplights on Belmont Avenue so I'd never have to shift my Gremlin out of third gear.
I'd like to see some sissy F1 driver try all that.
[Disclaimer: Sweeheart, you know Daddy's a big kidder, right? He's just showing off for the guys at /. and never really did any of those things. And that burnt hemostat you found in the closet is from when I was a thoracic surgeon working on burn victims. And that picture of me in the shoebox where I'm sucking smoke through the bottom of a beer can is just some joke that your Uncle Izzy photoshopped in 1975 before he went to prison.]
Re:Yup.. (Score:5, Funny)
And that picture of me in the shoebox where I'm sucking smoke...
Far out, man. How did you squeeze yourself into that shoebox?
Justification (Score:5, Insightful)
This gives many ignorant people justification to feel like they are really one of those 1 in 40. Just don't fucking do it, whether you think you are good at it or not. I'm sure I could do it, but I try not to even answer the phone when I'm on the road.
Re:Justification (Score:5, Funny)
>I'm sure I could do it
Oh the irony...
Why not test? (Score:2)
Are they just worse drivers to begin with? (Score:4, Interesting)
The sample size was really small in this - 200. So 5 people out of 200 showed no deterioration in driving skill with improved memory performance.
I'd love to see how their driving metrics compared to everyone else though. Is it that the keep driving well while on the phone, or are they just crap drivers who don't concentrate on the road even when they're not on the phone?
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The sample size was really small in this - 200.
Seriously, waaaay too small to jump to conclusions.
Plus the study needs to be repeated multiple times in different areas by other independent researchers before the results are dependable.
The odds are just as high that the area in Utah they surveyed is home to the ONLY 5 supertaskers in the world.
Re:Are they just worse drivers to begin with? (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with calling some people "supertaskers" is that it implies a timeless ability, but testing for a timeless ability requires repeating the tests at regular time intervals over an extended period of time. And even then you can only claim "supertasking" as a transient ability.
It's bad science to impose a preconceived notion directly in the terminology. It's better to just call them statistical outliers, and to ask how many of those are expected?
For example, you might get somebody who is really bad at multitasking, but on the day of the test everything works just right. There's green lights, few cars on the road, and they look like supertaskers. Whereas the next day, there might be a string of red lights and a jaywalker and everything goes wrong. The same "supertasker" would be labeled an "undertasker" if the test was done a day later. Even something as simple as whether they had cereal for breakfast, or they are going through an extended divorce could have a nontrivial effect.
The expected variation in external inputs is what causes an expected number of people to lie at the extremes of the distribution. With a normal distribution, about 5% (ie 10 people out of 200) are at least 2 standard deviations off the mean. That's the extra push that could turn a negative effect into a positive one for those people.
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I don't care about relative performance. How well do these supertaskers driving wile focused compare with a normaltasker while focused, and how good are they compared to some standard of safe? In other words, the supertaskers might be great at normal and distracted driving, or really
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Better driving skills (Score:5, Funny)
I wonder how many of those had a foreign driver's license.
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I wonder how many of those had a foreign driver's license.
Are you trying to say non US drivers are worse or better?
I've heard plenty of people say non-US are better, but my limited experience in Spain, Italy and Greece says otherwise. The study suggests what I believe: where ever you have humans, you have huge steaming mounds of stupidity.
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Are you trying to say non US drivers are worse or better?
Yes, I believe he is.
I've heard plenty of people say non-US are better, but my limited experience in Spain, Italy and Greece says otherwise.
I'm going to chalk this one up to limited sample size: you picked the three countries known in Europe for their reckless drivers. I remember my dad driving 90 kmph on a 70 kmph road and other cars honking while flying past us at over 120 kmph. That said, I almost got hit by a raging lunatic driver today as well (in Belgium). The difference is that here in Belgium, I don't expect people to be raging lunatic drivers. In Italy, I hesitate to even get in a car.
Current Slashdot Poll (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the current poll [slashdot.org] is informative here. While I suspect that the average IQ of a slashdot reader is indeed above average, The percentage of "super genius" is probably exaggerated.
The lesson is that while 1/40th of the population falls under the "supertasker" category, the number that claim to be is much, much higher. My estimate would be 1/4th or more perceive themselves that way. And that's a dangerous perception to have.
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I don't even know if there's a correlation between 'supertaskers' and super geniuses.
Back in high school I took a class that accepted only 28 students from the entire class of 450 (an advanced class for math and science). However, I don't recall anyone being especially good at driving and one was certainly absolutely awful, crashing 3 cars due to being distracted by conversations (in his case he would always want to face the person he was talking to--not a good thing if you're a passenger talking to him whi
Re:Current Slashdot Poll (Score:5, Insightful)
"The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect [wikipedia.org]
"People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it."
http://psycnet.apa.org/?fa=main.doiLanding&doi=10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121 [apa.org]
Re:Current Slashdot Poll (Score:5, Insightful)
The Dunning-Kruger effect has been running this country for decades.
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The lesson is that while 1/40th of the population falls under the "supertasker" category, the number that claim to be is much, much higher. My estimate would be 1/4th or more perceive themselves that way. And that's a dangerous perception to have.
The assumption is that these 1 in 40 "supertaskers" are competent drivers when not talking on the phone (or, deity forbid, texting). It seems more likely they are crap drivers under normal conditions, and remain just as shitty behind the wheel while on the phone.
I
I dislike the legislative approach (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's face it: nobody is willing to say "no phone use at all" while driving. So we have an entirely ineffective compromise which requires hands-free devices. This is a great way to pretend to do something while not actually doing any of it.
However, far worse, I think there is another factor here: If avoid all distractions while driving on a long trip one of two things will get you: highway hypnosis (a real form of hypnosis sometimes including post-hypnotic amnesia) or your brain will make up its own distractions. Really, has anyone here not had the experience of driving somewhere, getting there, and realizing that there is a chunk of time missing in your memory for part of the drive? While it is profoundly stupid to talk on the phone while navigating through a school zone crowded with students just released from school and their parents picking them up, I am not sure one can make a case that it is a net safety hazard to use a cell phone (hands-free or otherwise) driving down he freeway in the middle of nowhere. In fact, insofar as it prevents more dangerous hypnotic states from developing, it might be a net safety win to talk on the phone.
A much better approach would be to ban all use of cell phones while driving through residential and school zones, ban most cell use while elsewhere within city limits, and allow driving and talking on the phone on open roads in the country. That's not a popular view tough.
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While it is profoundly stupid to talk on the phone while navigating through a school zone crowded with students just released from school and their parents picking them up
I don't know if it's stupid, but it is somewhat sporting. After all, if you aren't paying attention, you might miss a few of them.
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While it is profoundly stupid to talk on the phone while navigating through a school zone crowded with students just released from school and their parents picking them up, I am not sure one can make a case that it is a net safety hazard to use a cell phone (hands-free or otherwise) driving down he freeway in the middle of nowhere.
I actually find the reverse. Here in Aus, the speed limits near schools are 40k/h (25mph). When driving near schools, I'm going so slowly that stuff like instant awareness and reaction speed isn't as necessary as when I'm belting down the highway at 110.
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I think hands free is a good compromise. If your Toyota suddenly accelerates out of control, your other hand wouldn't be too busy holding your phone to put your car into neutral.
It's far safer to drive with both hands unoccupied than just one hand. The second hand isn't always occupied, but in the few situations when you do need to use it, you really do.
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Because 'no phone use at all' is retarded. If you're going to allow passengers to talk in the car, hands free is pretty much the same thing. The driver can ignore both if they are capable doing so, but most aren't. If you're not going to allow using a phone because its
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Study is largely only of US importance (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem is this study will be shown to be proof worldwide when there are big differences between the US and other countries when it comes to driving and cars.
In the UK we're mostly manual transmission drivers. An auto is easier to drive when holding a phone, but try holding a phone, steering and changing gear at the same time!!
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LoL. Admittedly, its easy to hold a conversation, but I can't shift gears while texting with my right hand. I just set it down on the passenger seat real quick while needing to shift.
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Open Season (Score:4, Insightful)
Walking and _____ing at the same time. (Score:4, Interesting)
I saw this teenager once shooting hoops while talking on his cell phone. For about five minutes he just kept at it, didn't miss a shot, didn't pause talking while doing a jumpshot or anything. Someone else started using the same hoop, no sweat, didn't even have to wait just perfectly synchronized with the other kid.
Damn.
1 in 40. Not me.
Try catching a tube while you're on the phone (Score:2)
http://surfermag.com/features/onlineexclusives/sterling_spencer_gets_shacked_on_his_cell_phone/ [surfermag.com]
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Its easy when you're young. The older you get, the harder it gets.
Ambulance (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ambulance (Score:4, Informative)
That's not necessarily a supertasker - that's being well trained and experienced.
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Ambulances (while doing the work that requires frantic multitasking) have lights and sirens, though, which makes a big difference. People are (generally) very attentive and get-out-of-the-way-like towards them. Nobody expects them to stop for a pedestrian crossing, for example.
Idiots who text while driving don't have those obvious warning signs. Perhaps they should?
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Ahhh ... its happening already ... someone who thinks he's the 1 in 40 rather than realizing he's just not a statistic/blood splatter.
I guess you were the special one and that the 40 or so other people you worked with weren't supertaskers ... how did they do pretty much the same thing you do without being a supertasker?
Great. (Score:3, Insightful)
Story Title casting a broad net. - hands-free vs . (Score:2)
The story title seems to cast a rather broad net with its "`Supertaskers` Can Safely Use Mobile Phones While Driving"... there's a huge difference between...
One just requires you to listen and yap - still not as good paying attention to your driving 100%, but people listen to (talk) radio and whatnot and sing along with songs or carry on conversations with o
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Indeed -- talking is merely a distraction, texting should be prosecuted as attempted murder.
super attentive (Score:2)
As a contractor for the past 10 years, I often found myself in situations where I am driving and there is a phone call and there is an emergency or there is a meeting and I have to be there, whatever, I always hate those, because I know it is not a good idea to drive and be on the phone where I actually have to solve something, pay attention, participate. Have to do it anyway, so I don't know if these 'super-taskers' have a natural ability or they just do what I have to do and increase the attention that I
Task Saturation (Score:5, Interesting)
1 in 40? I wonder if that is the same proportion of people who can be fighter pilots. In a past life I was a Weapons Director in the Air Force - fancy title for someone who looks at a radar screen and says "the bad guys are over there!" I worked with fighter pilots (primarily the F-15 and F-16), and the thing is, no one task they do is all that complicated. The catch is that you have to do several at the same time:
1) Fly the plane
2) Operate the radar
3) Search visually outside the cockpit
4) Talk/listen to your wingman
5) Talk/listen to radar controllers (that was me)
Only when you have mastered all these can you then:
6) Develop a mental picture of what is going on - "Situational Awareness" (SA)
7) Decide on the proper tactics and execute them, and
8) Get yourself into position and employ the weapons systems
Experienced pilots are obviously masters of all 8. An inexperienced pilot can get bogged down on step 2, and never hear you repeatedly telling him that the bandit is rolling in on his six-o-clock.
Of course, they get better, and I wonder if proper training could turn more people into 'supertaskers'. Then again, we don't spend hundreds of hours and millions of dollars training the average driver.
These laws are so stupid (Score:2)
That's me! (Score:2)
I'm one of those supermultitaskers! Yes I am! In fact, right now I'm driving while I posqoaherohd;lk
I hate these laws. (Score:2)
But I follow them because I realise that driving is a privilege and not a right.
Think of the physical and mental thought processes when up shifting in a standard transmission vehicle.
Your brain interprets, through the speedometre and tachometre, that you need to shift.
You press the clutch in with your left foot.
Shortly after you press the clutch in, you move the shifter into the next gear. You may have to move down, up and to the right, up and to the left, depending on your make of car.
You allow the engine
Texting while driving is enormously stupid, but .. (Score:2)
My cat is a supertasker (Score:2)
Meowing on the phone doesn't detract from her driving ability in the slightest.
In other words, perhaps their attention is more or less permanently divided between driving and a Walter Mitty like daydream. Then the phone distracts them from their daydream. That would imply that their driving performance doesn't decline because even when not distracted they drive like the rest of us would while on the phone.
TFA doesn't have enough information to know if the analysis considered that or not, it only spoke of re
What's the question? (Score:2)
Is this hoohah about talking on your phone, or texting with it? C'mon...
Talking on the phone has never been too distracting for me, and is at least as safe as having a passenger, unless she's better looking than my phone. Another problem.
But texting for me is an interesting proposition. Sometimes I do fine, and someetimes I have to stop cause I'm just not supertasking. I can see banning that, but banning conversations talking on the phone, that's stupid if you have a headset. If you don't, you should c
I guess I am 1 in 40... sorta (Score:2)
Am I am of the 1 in 40? I can talk on the phone while driving with little to no performance suffering on the driving side. BUT- I prioritize driving so much higher that you wouldn't WANT to talk on the phone with me, since I often miss half what is said or pause to respond.
$renice 20 phoneuse
That just illustrates I *can* use the phone safely, but something is going to suffer, and I let it be the phone. I find it no more or less distracting than a passenger talking. That said, I very rarely use the phone
Don't UNO and drive! (Score:2)
http://www.aqfl.net/?q=node/7470 [aqfl.net] :D
what to do about it? (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate riding around and seeing idiots jabbering on the phone in their SUVs and driving like I'm not even there. I feel like there's absolutely no recourse to the action. They aren't likely to hear me if I cuss them out, and I don't typically carry items to throw. I feel like there's nothing to reinforce proper behavior until they kill somebody, because there's just nothing I can do to them to get it through their heads that they are dumbasses before they drive off. Seriously, is there any way to get these idiots off the road? Will sending photos to police help?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>Would sending photos to police help?
I'd think knowing a driver's insurance company and being able to send photos of risky behavior to them would be more effective than the cops. Money is a pretty powerful motive.
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Asperger supertaskers, that will be...interesting.
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I can see now a lot of people claiming to be supertaskers.
Well yes, obviously all of us here are among the elite. ;)
(I am so not... you would not believe the extent of injuries I've endured simply walking around the office or my home while thinking about something else... my pinky toe on my right foot is currently broken... again...)
Re:Oh, Great (Score:4, Funny)
Probably there are more supertankers than supertaskers on /.
That was how I initially read the headline for an instant.
Re:Self-correcting problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope. Just like with drunk drivers, usually the people killed in accidents are the ones who just happened to be in the way, not the person who was doing something really stupid.
Re:Self-correcting problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Mod parent up. I've recently passed my driving test and, just before I took it, I was nearly hit by a woman who skipped a red light whilst texting. She would have hit the driver's door and I'd be dead. She would be fine. The only thing that saved me was that I'd come out onto the main road slower than I should have; she'd missed the green by a good 10 seconds.
Seriously, anyone who talks or texts whilst driving is a danger. Not only are you distracted, you are NOT in full control of your car as you have only one hand on the wheel.
Not "anyone" just most people. (Score:3, Insightful)
The article you are responding to clearly states that 1 in 40 people who engage in these activities are not any more dangerous while doing it.
Re:Not "anyone" just most people. (Score:5, Insightful)
The article you are responding to clearly states that 1 in 40 people who engage in these activities are not any more dangerous while doing it.
Based on 5 outliers in a sample of only 200, in a study whose methodology has not yet been published but possibly observing only voice calls using hands-free systems, and ignoring the complete lack of previous support for this theory from a diverse body of evidence gathered over quite a few years now into both road safety and cognitive theory.
I think I'll wait until the jury is back before I start jumping to any conclusions on this one.
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1 in 40 people who engage in these activities are not any more dangerous while doing it.
Does it mean that they normally drive as if they were constantly texting, even though they don't? Those people should be removed from roads :-)
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But why is that? Are they actually "supertaskers" as the article suggests? Or is there a subset of that 1 in 40 that's actually so bad at driving that it doesn't matter if they're paying attention?
Anyone can be a danger on the road. It's a risk we accept every day by being on them.
I think we need to just forget this car thing and start working on the tube technology....
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Reductio absurdium? Yeah, I'm sure I've got that wrong, but you get the idea. If you're sitting at a desk, banging away on a keyboard, only some absurd set of circumstances can possibly enable you to injure or kill someone with your crummy typing.
Even if you ARE a super geek, and even if you can multitask better than Windows, Linux, and OS X combined, you have a RESPONSIBILITY to put all your silly shit aside, and pay attention to your driving, so that you DO NOT injure or kill someone.
Phrased in a much m
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Self-correcting problem (Score:5, Funny)
Been driving for 35yrs and I also drive a manual, after reading how good you think you are I'm pretty sure I know what your doing with your other hand.
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Sitting on one, rather.
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Re:Self-correcting problem (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't drive as if every vehicle approaching on a side street might fail to stop. I was clobbered by a young inexperienced driver who ran a red light. Saw him, too, and didn't like how fast he was coming up to the light, so I moved away one lane and slowed a little. I was thinking he might not be able to quite stop. Instead, he sped up, running the light, and put himself squarely in front of me. If I'd thought of that possibility, I might have been ready for it and able to avoid him. Might. On the other hand, had I not slowed a little, he might have nailed me in the side, and I might be dead. For his part, he claimed he never saw the light, and there's a little something to that-- it's the sort of light that while quite visible physically, is not so mentally visible. Drivers are conditioned to expect lights in that kind of setting to be green when they approach.
For the first week after returning to the road, I was cringing at every approaching vehicle. And discovering that there were always approaching vehicles. You can't drive like that. It's stressful and exhausting, and you still won't see everything. You've got to play the very high odds that others will not make a boneheaded mistake like that, and that if they do, your car will protect you well enough that you aren't seriously hurt.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm going to use this quote. Nice post.
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which is why we end up with a duality of society. Drunks and complainers that were able to avoid being killed by a drunk.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Drunks tend to survive because the state of their body at the time of impact, i.e. not tensed up. Its not random luck, or irony, or any other mysterious factors ...
Drivers texting while driving aren't going to have the effect of a drug in their system, they'll be as ridged as a board as their body gets destroyed in the accident just like everyone else.
Good job though, you almost managed to inject an irrelevant and unrelated statement into the conversation.
Re:Self-correcting problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Wrong, partially. When one person runs into another person, the person getting hit tends to sustain more damage, especially since the person doing the hitting usually does it with the front end of their car, and the person getting hit frequently gets hit somewhere other than the front end, such as in the door. This is very common at intersections when some moron runs a red light. Doors don't offer much protection against impact compared to the front end of a car.
Secondly, if the drunk/texter runs into a pedestrian or cyclist or motorcyclist, again the drunk is going to get away injury-free while the innocent party is screwed.
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You assume there's no intersection between the 1/3 that know they can't do it, and the 1/40 that actually can. I'd actually bet reasonably heavily that the intersection there is rather large – the ones who can do things are usually the ones underestimating their ability.
Re:Natural selection at work? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, what happens is the non-supertaskers take out other people in their way who may or may not be supertaskers. The net effect will be no change in the supertaskers:non-supertaskers ratio.
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To avoid this, we have to add some explosives to every new car: If it detects an active phone signal in the car during the crash, it detonates!
Re:Cell Phone Vendetta (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not a politician and I'm not in a huff. Instead I'm outraged at the assholes who take my life and that of others in their hands by driving around chatting on their cellphones absolutely oblivious to other drivers.
This is the first time I've cursed on slashdot. I don't like to do it and see far too much of it here and elsewhere. In this case though it's perfectly fitting.
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Re:Cell Phone Vendetta (Score:5, Funny)
This is the first time I've cursed on slashdot.
Once you start, it's really fucking hard to stop.
Re:Cell Phone Vendetta (Score:5, Insightful)
are you retarded enough to suggest just because we can't ban all possible distractions, we should just let drivers do dangerous shit like text while driving? this sounds like the same logic as "condoms are only 99% effective so lets not bother with them!".
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The keyword is "yet".
I didn't get pulled over a single time until I was 38, yet I probably broke every traffic rule in the book.
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I don't know if I'd call "Not being a dumb ass" as super-tasking.
Pretty much. I wouldn't trust myself to text and drive, but talking and driving, while still being able to focus on what's going on the road, is not fucking hard. I do think hands-free devices are useful, because you remove the temptation to focus on "not dropping my phone" rather than driving, but other than that it's really damn trivial. I have no idea how people have so much trouble with this.
Re:I haven't gotten into an accident yet (Score:5, Insightful)
This was probably bait but I took it.
If you honestly believe you have a system for using the phone safely while driving you are far dumber than you think you are. While your attention is on the phone at any time your attention is not fully on anything else. Thus you loose situational awareness. Thus when you return your attention to driving your brain has to process a huge chunk of information to catch up. If you are task flipping your brain will start to devalue lesser pieces of information.
For example a kid riding a bike on a side walk. You will devalue that in your brain in order to concentrate vehicles on the road. You won't have a full picture of what the kid was doing previously. For example he could have show previously that he had poor balance and wobbled a lot. You didn't see it because you were texting. All of a sudden this kid falls onto the road in front of you. Your fine but now the kid is in hospital. Technically it was the kids fault but really it was your dumb ass brain that was at fault. You did not have a full situational aware that you would have easily had, had you just kept your eyes on the task of driving.
Using a phone while driving is dangerous period.
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Bike rider here too. Its april 1 btw. Shame that nobody gets the joke. On my commute I have seen bike riders in the dark with no lights, both hands off the controls and talking on a phone. No kidding. And yeah, plenty more car drivers on the phone. It should be possible to trace phone use after a crash. The network records when you sent an SMS, and when you are on a call. Why not do this for phone accounts owned by the drivers of vehicles?
One thing which worked against alcohol here in Victoria, Australia is
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ADHD is a myth. Much like the 1 in 40 are supertaskers.
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No you aren't.
How do I know? Because you know someone else with ADHD, which translates into you don't really have it, you're just in that group of people that was raised by parents who never made you actually sit down and focus for more than ten minutes.
Contrary to popular belief, THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD DOES NOT HAVE ADHD.
You're just an idiot, nothing more, nothing less.
Mostly harmful. (Score:2)
Most of them are wrong.