Not entirely. You don't always hit another car. There is likely a countervailing benefit to all drivers as cars get heavier and don't decelerate as abruptly on collisions with immobile objects.
And yes, it does seem like an arms race to me too. Not just for weight, but for higher ground as well. I'd guess that's at least as important as weight - which car has the higher center of gravity and keeps it's passengers higher.
I thought (though I don't now remember where I heard it or how trustworthy the source) that although being higher up tends to make you feel safer it actually tends to make you less safe because the vehicle is more likely to end up rolling over. Is there any actual benefit to higher CoG?
(You can have higher passengers without higher CoG, which is probably good -- but then you need a load of extra mass at the bottom, which means higher fuel costs, more pollution, and maybe less manoeuvrability.)
[EDITED to fix a typo (missing space).]
Diana Hsieh interviews Dr. Doug McGuff about avoidable injuries and deaths.
He's an emergency room physician in South Carolina, so he's pretty much just talking about what he's seen-- different regions have different characteristic injuries.
He says that you're safest in the largest car you can afford, which raises some interesting ethical issues.
There's a fair amount about the risks of getting overfocused on getting something done. This adds tremendously to the hazards of using ladders.
Also, did you know trees can go sproing? One of hazards of chainsaws is that a good bit of energy might be stored in a twisted tree trunk. Don't just know your physics, apply it!
More generally, there are machines and situations (ATVs, chainsaws, airplanes, skiing, etc.) which tend to make people feel more competent than they are.
On the other hand, injuries from rock climbing and horseback riding are less common than you might think. I don't know why the ancestral environment didn't give people a reflexive distaste against diving into water. Perhaps people back then had too much sense to dive much.
One of the pieces of advice-- to get out of stressful relationships-- is too general. This is mostly a good idea, but from what I've read, leaving a violent relationship can lead to more risk of violence. It's still a good idea to leave, but it's important to leave cautiously.
Both McGuff and Hsieh are objectivists, so some of the discussion might be in mind-killer territory.
Edited to add: It's possible that objectivism would be better discussed under a new post. It's certain that there's a bunch of interesting material in the podcast, and avoidable accidents are worth discussing.
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