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[return to "My "Are you presuming most people are stupid?" test"]
1. stephe+lc[view] [source] 2025-06-24 19:25:54
>>jger15+(OP)
How many people drive their car daily or near daily? How many people are good drivers?

The ratio of those two values shows, in my experience, that a lot of people are not very good at things they spend a lot of time doing, and are generally unaware of their own shortcomings

The average American spends 4.2 hours a week in the car. A typical 40 year old american has driven around 50,000 miles. For someone to continue to be bad at driving after that much experience, it must be a fundamental limitation on their capabilities for learning, thinking, or understanding. Drive to work any given day in Denver and you will see that a large number of people suffer from those fundamental limitations.

This article seems to present a world where most people the author interacts with can think critically about a complex topic, and are interested in learning or improving themselves. I wish I lived where the author lives, because I have had multiple jobs across multiple countries and never encountered an average population like the author describes.

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2. saghm+Eg[view] [source] 2025-06-24 19:46:04
>>stephe+lc
I feel like this hinges on the definition of what it means to be "bad" at driving; by definition, I'd argue that the average driver is average at driving, and around half of people are above average at it. If you think most people are bad at driving, I feel like the conclusion is "driving is hard", because there's not any secret set of platonic ideal drivers in real life to compare them to. Trying to measure by an objective metric like how many accidents a driver gets into can be useful, but drawing conclusions from that like "most people are bad at driving" won't be very meaningful for a similar reason to the ones the article dissects; the evidence is measuring something much more specific than the broad principle you're asserting.

(For what it's worth, I'm making this argument as someone who _is_ a bad driver, and that's a large part of why I don't drive anymore!)

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