Nope, 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 precautions do not eliminate the risk (do police officers not move?), and further, they are non sequiturs: listing possible precautions do not prove or disprove anything about teenegers' risk perceptions and receiver rewards, neither their elevation or reduction.
Third, one third of american teenage deaths are in motor vehicles. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db37.htm
What Thom said. Sumner has a good maxim, 'never reason from a price change', that applies here as well. Prices have at least two factors, demand and supply, which interact to give the price - but two factors means you can't reason backwards from the price (or its change) to infer how or whether either the demand or supply changed. We are dealing with an equation with even more variables than a simple supply-demand graph, of which the death-rate is only one and already addressed by the risk underestimation. It is not very useful to learn of a rate with no context or information on what the best rate is. (Another economist said something to the effect that, I don't know what the best number of falling buildings in an earthquake is but it probably is non-zero. Similar observations are true of risk-taking in general.)
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.
Your failure to deal at all seriously with the idea (that teens do derive large amounts of utility from the risky activities and this justifies them) isn't very appropriate for LW. I did not stereotype, I drew the logical conclusion from an age-related neurobiological change combined with a lack of empathy that the community has frequently noticed, and I did so in a deliberately non-insulting way.
(Had I intended to be immature, I would have gone with something like 'coward' or 'age-dulled senses' as descriptions of older non-teens' reduced enjoyment of the risky behavior under discussion.)
Gwern wrote "(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 and by the previous logic, these teenagers must be making extremely biased assessments of risk; they should stop that. 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.)"
Gwern, you stated the above ad hominem, which I find insulting, regardless of whether you meant...
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.