On Sat, 15 Oct 2016 17:19:50 -0400, (PeteCresswell) wrote:

Both in Australia, and in the United States, the fact is that cellphones
aren't any more distracting than talking to a passenger,

I would disagree with that.

There are some things where people trust their intuition more than they
trust facts.

I'm never going to change your intuition, unless you yourself, are able to
discuss facts.

We can discuss intuition until the cows come home, and we'd get absolutely
nowhere, since opinions are as common as body parts.

For example, many people have an "opinion" that glass flows in farmhouse
windows such that it's thicker on the bottom. Fact is, nobody on this planet
has ever shown any proof that this happens. Nobody. In fact, it can't
happen. Yet you don't know how many people have the opinion that it does,
simply because they know enough data (it's an amorphous solid, for example),
to be dangerous.

As another example, many people have an "opinion" that you get colds in cold
weather because it's cold. Fact is, nobody on this planet has ever shown any
proof that this happens. Nobody. In fact, it can't happen. Yet you don't
know how many people have the opinion that it does, simply because they know
enough data (there's a flu season, for example, which is in the winter
months), to be dangerous.

As one more example, many people have an "opinion" that their brake-related
vibration is due to their disc brake rotors "warping" (think potato chip).
Fact is, nobody on this planet has ever shown any proof that this happens at
any appreciable rate on close-to-stock street vehicles. Nobody. In fact, it
can't happen. Yet you don't know how many people have the opinion that it
does, simply because they know enough data (disc brake rotors can get red
hot, for example), to be dangerous.

Your intuition is telling you that cellphones are an added distraction, and
I agree with that assessment of your intuition. So neither one of us
disagrees that cellphones *are* "a" distraction.

Your intuition should also tell you that there is an already long list of
distractions that people handle every single day while driving, and that
many accidents were caused by drivers distracted by *those* (non-cellphone
related) distractions in the past, before cellphones ever existed. I would
agree with that also.

The only thing that's "new", is that cellphones came on the scene, but the
accident rate never changed.

So you and I have to look at that fact (keeping Rod Speed's clever aliens
out of the argument if we can).

How does your intuition account for the fact that the accident rate in both
the United States and in Australia shows absolutely zero effects of the
explosion in cellphone ownership in both countries?

Do you simply ignore that inconvenient fact?
Do you explain it away (as Rod Speed does) by saying aliens manipulated the
data?

If cellphone distractions were as bad as your model seems to predict, why
didn't the accident rate change the moment they came on board, and why
didn't the accident rate zoom up at a rate consistent with the number of
cellphones and why even today does the accident rate not show any effect
whatsoever from cellphone use?

How does your intuition handle that inconvenient fact?

When a driver is talking to a passenger there is an unspoken covenant:
driving comes first... and the conversation ebbs and flows around that
understanding. Same thing with CB radios.

Fair enough but when it comes to facts, we have to look at the facts.
There are no accidents.

What are you going to do about *that* fact?

NOTE: I'm not talking freak accidents, nor anecdotal accidents - I'm talking
overall accident rates in both Australia and the United States.

The accidents don't exist.

If you and I can't look at *that* fact, then we may as well start discussing
religion instead. Or maybe that WWII Bomber found on the Moon.

OTOH, the person on the other end of a cell phone call has no such
understanding and the driver tends to keep up the conversation no matter
what is happening around the vehicle.

Fair enough. But what you're forgetting is that the accidents don't exist,
yet cellphones are ubiquitous.

That means a lot of things - but one of the things it means is that the
distraction from a cellphone isn't anywhere nearly as dire as many people
would have you believe.

If the distraction *was* as dire as many people would have you believe, then
there would be accidents.

Where are the accidents?

Also, the operation of a cell phone seems to take some degree of the
driver's attention. I do not see drivers conversing with passengers
and wandering back-and-forth across lane lines - OTOH I see that
regularly with drivers talking on the phone. Dunno what they are
doing, but they are clearly doing something besides driving.

I don't think there is a person on this planet who doesn't agree that
cellphones are yet another distraction in a long list of distractions that
US and Australian drivers face every single day.

However, there isn't anyone on this planet who can *find* any chnage in the
accident rate in either Australia or the United States due to the fact that
a huge number of people own cellphones and a given percentage of those
people are using them while driving every single day.

The fact that millions of miles of driving occur while people are looking at
cellphones *should* change the accident rate.

But it does not.
What does that tell you?

NOTE: Rod Speed is gonna bring up those mathematically clever aliens who
exactly and precisely hid the huge number of accidents that are caused by
people using cellphones from the overall real world record.