Great piece! Well done. I'll be very interested to find out how your letter is received by the sponsoring entity.
Now that you've brought up the subject, I have to speak a peace here.
Like everybody else who has driven shite-tons of miles in their lifetime, I've watched thousands and thousands of people driving on highways and streets over the years, and have always wondered why -- of all things -- the single most dangerous and most common tactic on the roads is something cops practically never give tickets for.
The thing I've noticed is that the greatest cause of accidents BY FAR isn't speed per se, but the idiocy of pretending that no one will ever stop or slow down unexpectedly. I.e., the practice of TAILGATING. Following too closely the car ahead of you.
It seems like more than 50% of drivers have such an itch for velocity that they will instinctively push and creep forward and follow so closely that when a sudden slow-down arrives, they have absolutely no time to respond. (Especially if they were checking their texts at that unexpected moment, but even if they were paying full attention.)
Drivers do this on city streets which is bad enough, but the worst place to do it is on highways, at highway speeds, and an enormous number of drivers do this all the god damned time, as a matter of common, everday course. The massive risk they run for effectively zero benefit is dumbfounding.
I can see two rationales behind this:
Rationale #1: "If the traffic around me is limiting me to 75 miles an hour, I'll get to my destination faster if I stay three feet from the guy in front of me instead of 30 feet. (He's right! He'll get to his destination faster -- by approximate 1.5 seconds. But of course, he pays for that irresistible sliver of advantage by spending every minute of his entire trip running an extra 700% risk of dying and killing others in a violent accident.)
Rationale #2: "If I get on that guy's bumper [at 80 miles an hour, mind you], he'll be intimidated into going faster or getting out of my way. ... I'll keep my brights on too, by the way."
TL;DR:
In my opinion, reasonable speeds (even high speeds in proper contexts) have an exceedingly tiny margin of danger EXCEPT in the presence of the exceedingly common and absolutely idiotic practice of riding on top of the vehicles ahead of you. (This concept has some application laterally too, as in the case of weaving through traffic like a madman, cutting people off, etc.)
I'm reasonably 100% certain I'm right about this, and I don't understand why police don't focus on THIS more than mere speed.
I'm sure there's a lot that goes into the real answer there. Why do people tailgate. But to me it's a solved problem inside a larger problem. That's how I always work. Cut the trunk and I can ignore the branch. Basically none of this is right. 99% of trips don't even need to happen. Most of it is pointless hamster wheeling for bank tokens. And we keep trying to cram into the same 20 minutes like a stick of dynamite in a sewer with that same road being tumble weed town at 2am.
There's probably a physical solution. Like whiskers. Make it legal to put spines on the back of your car that fold down when moving. Like you wanna follow me at 10 feet? Fine. Enjoy scratches on your hood and holes in your radiator :P
But any solution here has a counter. The real problem is the larger situation. Virtually always that's true imo.
I have to say I like the idea of making tailgating (safely) damaging in some way. Not that I can imagine any realistic way to do this, but it's sensible as an idea and it would be deserved. And it would save huge numbers of lives, in my opinion.
Meantime, however, this rebellious commenter wants to drive anywhere he wants and whenever he wants, and he wants to do it at logically reasonable speeds, which are higher than what's posted on most signs. :-)
Classic tragedy of the commons. What makes 100% rational sense for each player, can harm the game, including the player in question. But being real, we joke about this to avoid the reality. You could be burned alive. Literally. Or do it to someone else, just by being there. We really shouldn't let that be an option.
It's like, if aliens killed as many people as mosquitoes, we'd xenocide them. But we keep finding reasons to keep being systematically insane.
I agree that car accidents (especially highway ones) are almost always immensely traumatic, catastrophic, deadly events.
But when you say, “we shouldn’t let that be an option,” do you mean that we should all, individually, endeavor to stop driving except when we really need to? (In other words, in the same way that we may voluntarily choose to eat healthy food versus processed shite?) Or do you think that government should restrict our freedom of movement (such as by direct restrictions or through fees and charges)?
If the second, I imagine I’d feel a heck of a case of claustrophobia. If, for example, I couldn’t up and take an open-ended cross-country trip on a whim just because it’s awesome and beautiful to see the world; if I felt down one day and suddenly got an urge to go out into the world and hang out at a cafe and be among people; if I just felt like de-stressing via a drive in the country.
Given the tiny risk of incident (on an individual level and as an assertive but safe-driver), I feel as though the soul/life benefits made possible by freedom to “move about the cabin” are irreplaceable. If it came to a government disallowing travel except in X, Y, or maybe Z case (if a special form is submitted and eventually approved), … I think I’d be really depressed. Even if I didn’t own a car or have enough money for gas, I’d still be depressed knowing that I’d still not be able to drive if I did.
About the risks of driving, it seems to me that each person enters the the street or the highway of his own will (obviously) and each person’s safety seems to me to be vastly under his own control — how much space he leaves around him, whether or not he risks sudden moves to make a yellow light or not miss a late turn, etc. Whether or not he’s smart enough to assume that other drivers may behave badly at any given moment, etc. I.e, the risks of accident for any given individual seem to me to be hugely under his own control.
It would be interesting to me to find out the actual odds of a highway accident on the individual level. I think that would help determine whether the benefits of taking desirable trips is worth it, especially given that safe and watchful drivers would have odds much better even that those agnostically calculated by the stats. For example, if only one in a thousand drivers has a highway accident according to accurate data, that would be 3/1000ths of a percent chance of having an accident, and much less if the particular driver in question actually keeps the typical three-seconds recommended distance between himself and others.
(I know that sometimes some other driver (on drugs or having a heart attack or on some gang or fraternity initiation) will do a thing that no one could predict or respond to and that one can’t protect oneself from such incidents, but those would be exponentially rarer than the regular stats.)
…
What you said about driving seems to be an instance of the view on suffering that you’ve expressed elsewhere, in the context of EE — that of suffering as something to be taken very seriously and something that we should make a priority of exiling from the world insofar as possible. (If that is an accurate statement of your view.) It doesn’t not make sense to count horrible deaths as such suffering. (Is that a double- or triple-negative?)
I guess freedom just feels more urgent and necessary to me than the small chance of harm it necessitates for me. And I promise not to add any chaos to the road.
The individual risk framing is the camouflage the structural argument is designed to cut through. The question isn't what percentage of trips end in harm for any given driver. The question is what rate of death the system guarantees per year, and whether any aggregate of individual preferences can justify that rate.
The freedom argument treats an abstraction as more real than the concrete suffering reports of the 40,000 annual dead. That's the structure that enables systematic atrocity: something beyond present experience gets weighted against the present experience it consumes, and the abstraction wins. Nation. God. Race. Productivity. Freedom. The variation is just which unprovable external got selected. The template is identical.
Imagine a puppy farm: if operating the farm requires burning one alive per year, the farmers' enjoyment doesn't enter the calculation. The one guaranteed burn is disqualifying. Spike events of sufficient loathsomeness are categorically prior to preference aggregation. Children at crosswalks aren't a cost-benefit item. You don't get to bring the soul value of open road drives to that table.
What a genuine response looks like isn't a government ban on driving. It's attacking the need to drive: urban design, rail infrastructure, economic restructuring that stops forcing people into situations where personal vehicle operation is their only viable option. Most of these trips don't exist in a world built around human proximity and transit. The driving problem is downstream of systems that manufacture the need for it, which is why it persists, not because the engineering solutions are mysterious.
The desire for freedom of movement is real and the distress of losing it would be a suffering signal worth responding to. The response just can't be: keep the lottery running.
The driving problem isn't a transportation problem. It's one output of a system that also produces factory farming, compelled labor, medical debt, housing insecurity, and a dozen other ongoing guaranteed casualty rates most people have simply agreed to stop seeing. The car sits at a particular intersection of economic coercion, infrastructure architecture, and urban design that manufactured the conditions for it. Traffic deaths persist for the same structural reason animals are processed in ways that maximize distress rather than minimize it: the cost of doing it less badly is currently being paid by the victims instead of the system. Once you start pulling that thread seriously you end up somewhere that looks nothing like the current arrangement, and the honest version of that conversation is very difficult.
Cleaning up this mess, even starting the plan for it, it's massively complicated. But I know it's ground floor will be nuclear reactors, robots, and aligned AI.
Nature is currently all about accumulating biomass, and hedcore just says start authentically caring about suffering reduction as well, and acting on it.
[I just spent half an hour replying to this when my computer went black mid-passage. Lost it all. Starting again ...]
---
I just read that all carefully. Will read it again too by the time the day's over.
I'll just say the following for now, which will almost surely frustrate, since I'm still resting on the basic principles I started with.
> " The question isn't what percentage of trips end in harm for any given driver. The question is what rate of death the system guarantees per year, and whether any aggregate of individual preferences can justify that rate. "
I don't think the system itself is responsible for the death rate. I think of the death rate not as the inevitable consequence of the system itself, but realistically as the responsibility and choice of some 40% of drivers on the road (my guesstimate) who recklessly and voluntarily deny themselves the response-time buffer that would permit them to react to any surprise ahead of them.
Judging from what I see on the highways, I think that more than 95% of highway accidents are almost certainly the result of this foolishly overconfident idiocy. This bars and holds innocent, of course, any innocent casualty of someone else's behavior on the road, which means I'm admitting that there are indeed victims of accidents who are not responsible in any way for their trauma, other than that they got on the road knowing that there is always a very small risk of incident.
But everyone knows these risks before they get into their cars, and we all know, further, that we ourselves have the ability to buffer ourselves from surprises, enough to reduce our odds of accident from a small fraction of the reported death toll to a tiny sliver of a fraction of a percent of the death toll. Almost to literal zero, effectively.
The death toll (I warrant) is almost completely incurred by particular individuals behaving badly and is not an imposition or necessity of the system per se. That's how it looks to me still.
And to millions of people, such tiny odds are worth the overwhelming benefits of travel. It being a choice, and an easy one at that, I don't see an injustice being done to drivers. They're in control, 99.9x%, as it seems to me. Hardly anything else has better odds than that.
(I know you said the rate of death at the individual level isn't relevant to your argument, but I wanted to calc it. You gave an approx of 40,000 deaths per year. If I assume 150 million drivers (out of 350 million US population), that would amount to 2.6 deaths per 100,000 people. A 0.00026% risk of death.)
Except I can see how you'd say that for people who want or need to travel without running any of the risk, there really is no alternative to the streets. And I can see how you could object to my statement that people "choose" to hit the road since there isn't any realistic alternative to it.
I admit that's true. But the cost of designing, eminent-domaining, and building a viable replacement to driving must cost billions or trillions that nobody possesses except the big bad boys who own the world and run the show. I know I wouldn't be willing to lose a quarter of my salary to this public project. And it's not that I don't care about 2.6 strangers out of 100,000 -- I just can't afford it. Nobody can, including those 2.6. I'm also wary that massive public initiatives may involve some fundamental social and/or political concessions from the populace that they might not care to submit to. I'll let other people think of examples. I'm at the two-hour mark now.
You mentioned creating alternatives to driving that drastically reduce, presumably, any risk of accident/suffering. I'm imagining more and better trains, perhaps auto-driving cars and buses, other rail-type transport, etc., along with other foundational technologies such as you mentioned, including nuclear power and AI. I have nothing in principle against these things at all, assuming that the American public isn't manhandled or steamrolled or bled dry in order to make it happen.
Anyway, I know we're on different land masses here. Nothing wrong with that.
I suspect if you put it to a vote, a majority of regular old people would vote not to do what, as you spell out, needs to be done. So I don't think it's just transportation officials. Us regular old people don't want nanny governments telling us to slow down. If I had to vote, I'd vote for a slowdown (plus I spent many hours, with the help of some others, going door to door all along my 3 mile street getting enough signatures for the city to install speed bumps - and it has really slowed traffic down) and the other things you suggest. But in other ways, I want my convenience just like everyone else, even at a cost. Humans! We are not a very responsible lot.
The tragedy of the commons is a massive argument for organisation but I think the reason that organization hasn't earned our trust is the real problem. It's not the the idea of government is bad, it's just that every time one gets made it instantly gets captured. So people are basically right for the wrong reasons. And anarchy would be captured too, that's basically what government is, since every rule started with a vacuum.
We could compromise though, roll out free robot cars and peg public transit funding to defense spending. Imagine if we spent Trillions a year on rail/bus/auto car... They would move at mach 15 through vacuum tunnels and or fly. And make a rule, if a single person dies, the whole system shuts down for a month for retrofits to prevent it Ever happening again. Make cars obsolete/anachronistic. We didn't have to outlaw horses.
But I'm not a fool, any rule can be gamed and these would be no exception. Any system can be hacked :/ Plus we just love killing people. We think blood is cool. We're predator monkeys. :/
Being fully aware of your feelings while also trying to manage them so you act (as best you can) in loving ways that will benefit as many others as possible is very difficult.
Indeed, and just establishing a basis for that apparently required solving reality, as this is basically the ai alignment question. And solving it > solved human alignment > lead to EE. XD Though TBF I was doing EE informally LONG before, however, even then my framing was simplification, trying to work out best practice at the largest deepest possible scale. https://innomen.substack.com/p/my-ground-floor
I must admit, having a true synthesis is satisfying. It's like being able to clean a room with a snow shovel and a big empty bin. Everything goes inside no muss no fuss XD
Great piece! Well done. I'll be very interested to find out how your letter is received by the sponsoring entity.
Now that you've brought up the subject, I have to speak a peace here.
Like everybody else who has driven shite-tons of miles in their lifetime, I've watched thousands and thousands of people driving on highways and streets over the years, and have always wondered why -- of all things -- the single most dangerous and most common tactic on the roads is something cops practically never give tickets for.
The thing I've noticed is that the greatest cause of accidents BY FAR isn't speed per se, but the idiocy of pretending that no one will ever stop or slow down unexpectedly. I.e., the practice of TAILGATING. Following too closely the car ahead of you.
It seems like more than 50% of drivers have such an itch for velocity that they will instinctively push and creep forward and follow so closely that when a sudden slow-down arrives, they have absolutely no time to respond. (Especially if they were checking their texts at that unexpected moment, but even if they were paying full attention.)
Drivers do this on city streets which is bad enough, but the worst place to do it is on highways, at highway speeds, and an enormous number of drivers do this all the god damned time, as a matter of common, everday course. The massive risk they run for effectively zero benefit is dumbfounding.
I can see two rationales behind this:
Rationale #1: "If the traffic around me is limiting me to 75 miles an hour, I'll get to my destination faster if I stay three feet from the guy in front of me instead of 30 feet. (He's right! He'll get to his destination faster -- by approximate 1.5 seconds. But of course, he pays for that irresistible sliver of advantage by spending every minute of his entire trip running an extra 700% risk of dying and killing others in a violent accident.)
Rationale #2: "If I get on that guy's bumper [at 80 miles an hour, mind you], he'll be intimidated into going faster or getting out of my way. ... I'll keep my brights on too, by the way."
TL;DR:
In my opinion, reasonable speeds (even high speeds in proper contexts) have an exceedingly tiny margin of danger EXCEPT in the presence of the exceedingly common and absolutely idiotic practice of riding on top of the vehicles ahead of you. (This concept has some application laterally too, as in the case of weaving through traffic like a madman, cutting people off, etc.)
I'm reasonably 100% certain I'm right about this, and I don't understand why police don't focus on THIS more than mere speed.
I'm sure there's a lot that goes into the real answer there. Why do people tailgate. But to me it's a solved problem inside a larger problem. That's how I always work. Cut the trunk and I can ignore the branch. Basically none of this is right. 99% of trips don't even need to happen. Most of it is pointless hamster wheeling for bank tokens. And we keep trying to cram into the same 20 minutes like a stick of dynamite in a sewer with that same road being tumble weed town at 2am.
There's probably a physical solution. Like whiskers. Make it legal to put spines on the back of your car that fold down when moving. Like you wanna follow me at 10 feet? Fine. Enjoy scratches on your hood and holes in your radiator :P
But any solution here has a counter. The real problem is the larger situation. Virtually always that's true imo.
I have to say I like the idea of making tailgating (safely) damaging in some way. Not that I can imagine any realistic way to do this, but it's sensible as an idea and it would be deserved. And it would save huge numbers of lives, in my opinion.
Meantime, however, this rebellious commenter wants to drive anywhere he wants and whenever he wants, and he wants to do it at logically reasonable speeds, which are higher than what's posted on most signs. :-)
Classic tragedy of the commons. What makes 100% rational sense for each player, can harm the game, including the player in question. But being real, we joke about this to avoid the reality. You could be burned alive. Literally. Or do it to someone else, just by being there. We really shouldn't let that be an option.
It's like, if aliens killed as many people as mosquitoes, we'd xenocide them. But we keep finding reasons to keep being systematically insane.
I agree that car accidents (especially highway ones) are almost always immensely traumatic, catastrophic, deadly events.
But when you say, “we shouldn’t let that be an option,” do you mean that we should all, individually, endeavor to stop driving except when we really need to? (In other words, in the same way that we may voluntarily choose to eat healthy food versus processed shite?) Or do you think that government should restrict our freedom of movement (such as by direct restrictions or through fees and charges)?
If the second, I imagine I’d feel a heck of a case of claustrophobia. If, for example, I couldn’t up and take an open-ended cross-country trip on a whim just because it’s awesome and beautiful to see the world; if I felt down one day and suddenly got an urge to go out into the world and hang out at a cafe and be among people; if I just felt like de-stressing via a drive in the country.
Given the tiny risk of incident (on an individual level and as an assertive but safe-driver), I feel as though the soul/life benefits made possible by freedom to “move about the cabin” are irreplaceable. If it came to a government disallowing travel except in X, Y, or maybe Z case (if a special form is submitted and eventually approved), … I think I’d be really depressed. Even if I didn’t own a car or have enough money for gas, I’d still be depressed knowing that I’d still not be able to drive if I did.
About the risks of driving, it seems to me that each person enters the the street or the highway of his own will (obviously) and each person’s safety seems to me to be vastly under his own control — how much space he leaves around him, whether or not he risks sudden moves to make a yellow light or not miss a late turn, etc. Whether or not he’s smart enough to assume that other drivers may behave badly at any given moment, etc. I.e, the risks of accident for any given individual seem to me to be hugely under his own control.
It would be interesting to me to find out the actual odds of a highway accident on the individual level. I think that would help determine whether the benefits of taking desirable trips is worth it, especially given that safe and watchful drivers would have odds much better even that those agnostically calculated by the stats. For example, if only one in a thousand drivers has a highway accident according to accurate data, that would be 3/1000ths of a percent chance of having an accident, and much less if the particular driver in question actually keeps the typical three-seconds recommended distance between himself and others.
(I know that sometimes some other driver (on drugs or having a heart attack or on some gang or fraternity initiation) will do a thing that no one could predict or respond to and that one can’t protect oneself from such incidents, but those would be exponentially rarer than the regular stats.)
…
What you said about driving seems to be an instance of the view on suffering that you’ve expressed elsewhere, in the context of EE — that of suffering as something to be taken very seriously and something that we should make a priority of exiling from the world insofar as possible. (If that is an accurate statement of your view.) It doesn’t not make sense to count horrible deaths as such suffering. (Is that a double- or triple-negative?)
I guess freedom just feels more urgent and necessary to me than the small chance of harm it necessitates for me. And I promise not to add any chaos to the road.
The individual risk framing is the camouflage the structural argument is designed to cut through. The question isn't what percentage of trips end in harm for any given driver. The question is what rate of death the system guarantees per year, and whether any aggregate of individual preferences can justify that rate.
The freedom argument treats an abstraction as more real than the concrete suffering reports of the 40,000 annual dead. That's the structure that enables systematic atrocity: something beyond present experience gets weighted against the present experience it consumes, and the abstraction wins. Nation. God. Race. Productivity. Freedom. The variation is just which unprovable external got selected. The template is identical.
Imagine a puppy farm: if operating the farm requires burning one alive per year, the farmers' enjoyment doesn't enter the calculation. The one guaranteed burn is disqualifying. Spike events of sufficient loathsomeness are categorically prior to preference aggregation. Children at crosswalks aren't a cost-benefit item. You don't get to bring the soul value of open road drives to that table.
What a genuine response looks like isn't a government ban on driving. It's attacking the need to drive: urban design, rail infrastructure, economic restructuring that stops forcing people into situations where personal vehicle operation is their only viable option. Most of these trips don't exist in a world built around human proximity and transit. The driving problem is downstream of systems that manufacture the need for it, which is why it persists, not because the engineering solutions are mysterious.
The desire for freedom of movement is real and the distress of losing it would be a suffering signal worth responding to. The response just can't be: keep the lottery running.
The driving problem isn't a transportation problem. It's one output of a system that also produces factory farming, compelled labor, medical debt, housing insecurity, and a dozen other ongoing guaranteed casualty rates most people have simply agreed to stop seeing. The car sits at a particular intersection of economic coercion, infrastructure architecture, and urban design that manufactured the conditions for it. Traffic deaths persist for the same structural reason animals are processed in ways that maximize distress rather than minimize it: the cost of doing it less badly is currently being paid by the victims instead of the system. Once you start pulling that thread seriously you end up somewhere that looks nothing like the current arrangement, and the honest version of that conversation is very difficult.
Cleaning up this mess, even starting the plan for it, it's massively complicated. But I know it's ground floor will be nuclear reactors, robots, and aligned AI.
Nature is currently all about accumulating biomass, and hedcore just says start authentically caring about suffering reduction as well, and acting on it.
TLDR: Triage.
[I just spent half an hour replying to this when my computer went black mid-passage. Lost it all. Starting again ...]
---
I just read that all carefully. Will read it again too by the time the day's over.
I'll just say the following for now, which will almost surely frustrate, since I'm still resting on the basic principles I started with.
> " The question isn't what percentage of trips end in harm for any given driver. The question is what rate of death the system guarantees per year, and whether any aggregate of individual preferences can justify that rate. "
I don't think the system itself is responsible for the death rate. I think of the death rate not as the inevitable consequence of the system itself, but realistically as the responsibility and choice of some 40% of drivers on the road (my guesstimate) who recklessly and voluntarily deny themselves the response-time buffer that would permit them to react to any surprise ahead of them.
Judging from what I see on the highways, I think that more than 95% of highway accidents are almost certainly the result of this foolishly overconfident idiocy. This bars and holds innocent, of course, any innocent casualty of someone else's behavior on the road, which means I'm admitting that there are indeed victims of accidents who are not responsible in any way for their trauma, other than that they got on the road knowing that there is always a very small risk of incident.
But everyone knows these risks before they get into their cars, and we all know, further, that we ourselves have the ability to buffer ourselves from surprises, enough to reduce our odds of accident from a small fraction of the reported death toll to a tiny sliver of a fraction of a percent of the death toll. Almost to literal zero, effectively.
The death toll (I warrant) is almost completely incurred by particular individuals behaving badly and is not an imposition or necessity of the system per se. That's how it looks to me still.
And to millions of people, such tiny odds are worth the overwhelming benefits of travel. It being a choice, and an easy one at that, I don't see an injustice being done to drivers. They're in control, 99.9x%, as it seems to me. Hardly anything else has better odds than that.
(I know you said the rate of death at the individual level isn't relevant to your argument, but I wanted to calc it. You gave an approx of 40,000 deaths per year. If I assume 150 million drivers (out of 350 million US population), that would amount to 2.6 deaths per 100,000 people. A 0.00026% risk of death.)
Except I can see how you'd say that for people who want or need to travel without running any of the risk, there really is no alternative to the streets. And I can see how you could object to my statement that people "choose" to hit the road since there isn't any realistic alternative to it.
I admit that's true. But the cost of designing, eminent-domaining, and building a viable replacement to driving must cost billions or trillions that nobody possesses except the big bad boys who own the world and run the show. I know I wouldn't be willing to lose a quarter of my salary to this public project. And it's not that I don't care about 2.6 strangers out of 100,000 -- I just can't afford it. Nobody can, including those 2.6. I'm also wary that massive public initiatives may involve some fundamental social and/or political concessions from the populace that they might not care to submit to. I'll let other people think of examples. I'm at the two-hour mark now.
You mentioned creating alternatives to driving that drastically reduce, presumably, any risk of accident/suffering. I'm imagining more and better trains, perhaps auto-driving cars and buses, other rail-type transport, etc., along with other foundational technologies such as you mentioned, including nuclear power and AI. I have nothing in principle against these things at all, assuming that the American public isn't manhandled or steamrolled or bled dry in order to make it happen.
Anyway, I know we're on different land masses here. Nothing wrong with that.
Love your entry!
I suspect if you put it to a vote, a majority of regular old people would vote not to do what, as you spell out, needs to be done. So I don't think it's just transportation officials. Us regular old people don't want nanny governments telling us to slow down. If I had to vote, I'd vote for a slowdown (plus I spent many hours, with the help of some others, going door to door all along my 3 mile street getting enough signatures for the city to install speed bumps - and it has really slowed traffic down) and the other things you suggest. But in other ways, I want my convenience just like everyone else, even at a cost. Humans! We are not a very responsible lot.
The tragedy of the commons is a massive argument for organisation but I think the reason that organization hasn't earned our trust is the real problem. It's not the the idea of government is bad, it's just that every time one gets made it instantly gets captured. So people are basically right for the wrong reasons. And anarchy would be captured too, that's basically what government is, since every rule started with a vacuum.
We could compromise though, roll out free robot cars and peg public transit funding to defense spending. Imagine if we spent Trillions a year on rail/bus/auto car... They would move at mach 15 through vacuum tunnels and or fly. And make a rule, if a single person dies, the whole system shuts down for a month for retrofits to prevent it Ever happening again. Make cars obsolete/anachronistic. We didn't have to outlaw horses.
But I'm not a fool, any rule can be gamed and these would be no exception. Any system can be hacked :/ Plus we just love killing people. We think blood is cool. We're predator monkeys. :/
Being fully aware of your feelings while also trying to manage them so you act (as best you can) in loving ways that will benefit as many others as possible is very difficult.
Indeed, and just establishing a basis for that apparently required solving reality, as this is basically the ai alignment question. And solving it > solved human alignment > lead to EE. XD Though TBF I was doing EE informally LONG before, however, even then my framing was simplification, trying to work out best practice at the largest deepest possible scale. https://innomen.substack.com/p/my-ground-floor
I must admit, having a true synthesis is satisfying. It's like being able to clean a room with a snow shovel and a big empty bin. Everything goes inside no muss no fuss XD