"So you say." Nope, so the author of the article reveals by relaying what the driver said (and implied) about risks. Further it's obvious the teenage driver didn't drive the route before his speed run, or he'd have likely seen the police officer who busted him and not have done the speed run at that time, that probable lack of a pre-drive increased his risk of accident and made certain he got busted that particular time.
"You exaggerate. That's only if you are caught and worst-case scenarios if you are caught to boot. Is it worth it? Ask any skydiver; I've gone skydiving, and it is amazing. And I'm not even a teenager any more. (This sounds like the usual generalizing problem; "I don't think that sounds insanely fun and awesome, so obviously no teenager can find it that rewarding. Also, these teens should just stop laying in bed all morning and staying up all night." You are a respectable sober adult, I should not be surprised to learn.)"
First it wasn't an exaggeration it was the facts as revealed by the article you posted! Second, the worst case scenario I can think of isn't killing himself, it's driving at 113 mph into a school bus and killing and maiming 40 children, then surviving and being paralysed from the neck down for the remainder of his life which is spent in a prison hospital. Third, one third of american teenage deaths are in motor vehicles. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db37.htm
With regards to your skydiving example, how about you be a good chap and link the appropriate lesswrong description for ludicrously weak analogy.
As for your inclination to dismiss me due to your (somewhat inaccurate) stereotyping, like seriously mate, please put a sock in it I came to lesswrong hoping to get away from that kind of immature nonsense.
1Nope, so the author of the article reveals by relaying what the driver said (and implied) about risks.
So your interpretation of the anecdote as presented by the author overrides the stated summary of the surveys by an involved academic?
Further it's obvious the teenage driver didn't drive the route before his speed run, or he'd have likely seen the police officer who busted him and not have done the speed run at that time, that probable lack of a pre-drive increased his risk of accident and made certain he got busted that particular time.
Your precaut...
When I first read the words above—on August 1st, 2003, at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon—it changed the way I thought. I realized that once I could guess what my answer would be—once I could assign a higher probability to deciding one way than other—then I had, in all probability, already decided. We change our minds less often than we think. And most of the time we become able to guess what our answer will be within half a second of hearing the question.
How swiftly that unnoticed moment passes, when we can’t yet guess what our answer will be; the tiny window of opportunity for intelligence to act. In questions of choice, as in questions of fact.
The principle of the bottom line is that only the actual causes of your beliefs determine your effectiveness as a rationalist. Once your belief is fixed, no amount of argument will alter the truth-value; once your decision is fixed, no amount of argument will alter the consequences.
You might think that you could arrive at a belief, or a decision, by non-rational means, and then try to justify it, and if you found you couldn’t justify it, reject it.
But we change our minds less often—much less often—than we think.
I’m sure that you can think of at least one occasion in your life when you’ve changed your mind. We all can. How about all the occasions in your life when you didn’t change your mind? Are they as available, in your heuristic estimate of your competence?
Between hindsight bias, fake causality, positive bias, anchoring/priming, et cetera, et cetera, and above all the dreaded confirmation bias, once an idea gets into your head, it’s probably going to stay there.
1Dale Griffin and Amos Tversky, “The Weighing of Evidence and the Determinants of Confidence,” Cognitive Psychology 24, no. 3 (1992): 411–435.