= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
NancyLebovitz comments on Rational Home Buying - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (137)
Possibly commutes are surprisingly wearing because, in addition to the obvious (time taken, polluted air), if I'm a fair sample, the shortest route to anger is a belief that things can and should be different. There you are, in a car on a road, and if there weren't so many people on it, you could just go. If my theory is correct, then commuting in traffic is significantly worse than commuting without much traffic. On the other hand, driving in traffic is more work even without an anger factor. I'm not sure how you'd distinguish the two.
Maybe driving on a highway with enough traffic so the cars go 30 mph vs an empty road of speed limit 30 mph? (Or speed limit 20 so people actually go 30).
In another forum, I once saw someone complaining that their commute should take 10 minutes, but usually took 20 because of the traffic. Someone else pointed out to them that what they really had was a 20 minute commute that they were occasionally fortunate enough to do in 10.
In my case, my commute provides me with a lot of anger, because I routinely am stuck in traffic for up to an hour because they have closed off the same section of road that they've been working on daily for THREE YEARS now. Most of the time, they close the road off and start the traffic jams several hours before starting work. And because 495 is deliberately designed to prevent there being any alternate routes anywhere between Rockville and Falls Church - all of the exits are planned so that it's impossible to get off the beltway, drive parallel to it, and get back on. (It's also impossible to get to the metro stations along 495; you can sometimes see them as you drive by, but would have to go many miles to get to them.) And where they do have side routes, from Braddock to Gallows, they sometimes do road construction on 495 AND on ALL 3 SIDE ROUTES simultaneously! These are roads they work on only a few days each year; yet somehow they will all be blocked on the same day, during morning rush hour. Really, I think someone in the Dept of Transportation is just evil.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence" :P
I feel like this quote is probably intended to be a joke. But, I have to ask anyway:
I always heard this quote as "never attribute... explained by ignorance," with the moral being that ignorance is repairable, but malice is a (presumably?) permanent character trait. Is incompetence supposed to be a repairable or a permanent trait, in this phrasing?
/end randomness...
Interesting question... I never thought of it in that way.
I thought of it more along the lines of "don't think they're out to get you... they're much more likely to be just incompetent".
Both malice and incompetence can be fixed... but I think the quote is more about how to perceive other people. I have a vague idea that "assuming ill intentions" is a bias in itself.
I am curious -- how would you go about fixing other people's maliciousness?
There was never ayn intention that you could fix other people's malice...
The post that I replied to was implying that malice was a fixed trait that cannot be changed in any way, and that is not my understanding at all. A person can choose to become less malicious if they wish.
But to your point (even though it diverges from the original intention). It is plausible you could attempt to fix somebody else's malice using some of the standard ideas: explain that other people have feelings too. Ask how they'd feel in the situation they're putting the other person. I'd ask them if they wanted to live in a world where it's ok for everyone was nasty to each other, and talk in general about "the social contract". I'd also point out the negative utility in doing something that makes many enemies and how it's quite difficult to get along in this world with more enemies than friends.
ie I'd start by trying to trigger their empathy. If that fails - I'd work on their sense of fairness, then if that doesn't work, fall back to purely selfish utility reasons.
Note - all of the above may still fail - but it may serve to persuade some.
If I personally were trying to fix the maliciousness of an actual person that I cared about fixing - I'd also spend some time to go look up the psychology of maliciousness and strategies in persuading them otherwise.
The quote is commonly called "Hanlon's razor" (by analogy with Occam's Razor)
It is usually interpreted as pointing out that the prior probability of incompetence is much, much higher than the prior probability of evil. So that with any given fuck-up, even if it seems obviously evil, is still more likely to be caused by incompetence.
In this case, it is very unlikely that there is any person or persons in the DoT that is amused by PhilGoetz's frustration and rage. It is highly likely that, between unions, and construction companies, and highway patrol departments, and schedule slips and general inattention, there is systemic incompetence in the DoT industrial complex.
It's also highly likely that things are organized the way they are organized because it benefits someone -- e.g. unions, and construction companies, etc. etc. -- and nobody cares about the convenience of the masses.
"It's just good business" -- Lord Cutler Beckett.
But that's exactly what I mean. The union, the construction company, all have a stake, but none of them evil. It could even be all good guys. Say the planners are all looking out for the little guy. But one is worried about construction noise, and another about worker safety, and another about secondary traffic effects in local neighborhoods and another about cost overruns.
It's the n-dimensional, multiplayer tug of war that produced a fucked up result, not actual malice on anyone's part.
What do you mean, "evil"? They all have a stake and they all arrange the situation to benefit themselves. It's not malice, just, as noted, "good business".
Well probably also the feeling of being out of control which comes from being stuck in traffic adds to your stress levels and unhappiness.