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Re: Side tracking aside, you have it backwards again
Posted by Reality (more from Reality) on Sat, 17 Dec 2011 07:33:57
In Reply to: Re: Side tracking aside, you have it backwards again, James, Sat, 17 Dec 2011 06:02:55
Media attention to safety in the 70's after the publication of Ralph Nader's "unsafe at any speed" was far more intense than today's. Earlier decades also had far more fundamental changes in vehicle safety design, such as the introduction / legal mandating of airbags in the early 90's, seat belts in the 70's; crucially important safety devices such as crumple zones and side impact beams were almost all introduced and spread in the earlier decades.

In the last decade, we witnessed incremental improvements riding on inventions that had already been widely used in earlier decades, like the multiplication of airbags from two to 6 or 8, which are obviously in the realm of diminishing return and have less impact on fatality rate decline (knee airbags obviously save less lives than the first two airbags in the car). On top of that, the majority of new vehicles sold are SUV's, allegedly less safe than cars that they replace according to the Luddites; the overwhelming majority of new cars in the past decade also come with GPS or driven by owners with after-market GPS, which are also claimed to be unsafe by the Luddites; then the two orders of magnitude increase in cellphone subscribership in the past decade on top of that all. What magical safety improvement has taken place among the tiny minority of non-GPS using and non-cellphone using car drivers in order to counter-act all those alleged "despites"?

While it is epistemologically impossible to determine whether any of the physical laws such as Newtonian Physics or Quantum Mechanics government our part of the universe, vs. say, an alternative theory of a bunch of elves pausing the time every infinitisimal fraction of a second to re-arrange the world and present to us as if the world follows physical laws . . . most scientific minds would at least tentatively subscribe to a theory that explains observed phenomena / correlations in the simplest terms possible ("becauses") instead of a theory that involve zillions of "despites" to explain consistent correlations.

posted by 24.91.39...
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