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110phil comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong
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In recent years, portable battery boosters have become cheaper, which means you won't need jumper cables at all.
For $50ish, you get a battery in a sealed plastic case, with two "jumper-cable"-type alligator clamps, one red and one black. You flip the on switch, then clip the red onto your battery's positive terminal, and the black onto your battery's negative terminal. Then you start the car. Once the car is running, you remove the black connector, then the red connector, and you're done.
There are at least two advantages over jumper cables. First, you don't need anyone else's car or help. Second, there's 50% less chance of error, since you're connecting only two clamps and not four.
If I am not mistaken, some of the deluxe models have built in protection against putting the clamps on backwards. But I'm not 100% sure about that.
But there are still only two ways to connect the four clamps, since cable color doesn't matter when they're acting purely as cables.
Right, that's true if you're connecting them randomly -- you have a 50% probability of getting it right either way.
But if your intent is to connect red to positive, and black to negative, and you do that fairly reliably but with some chance of a mistake, then there are twice as many chances to make an error, and your chance of getting it wrong by making an odd number of errors is higher (although not exactly twice as high, which I incorrectly implied).
On the other hand more science knowledge is required to be sure of which way they go. "Does '+' go with the other '+'? Wait, no. It's like magnets, the plus goes with the minus... Oh damn. Why is it doing that?" People are less likely to be in doubt when they have a box with wires saying "attach to positive", "attach to negative".
Ah, a good point.