http://seas.harvard.edu/softmat/downloads/2011-10.pdf

The legal status quo is secondary to public perception, which - other than some technophile aficionados - is quite reserved. There's too much male identity attached to driving, not only are cars used to show off status, but so is the driving style you use them with.

I think you substantially overestimate how important this is. As urbanization continues and suburbs empty out, cars simply become impossible for many people to support. Further, the car mystique is being attacked at the root: young people. As minimum wages stagnate, teen unemployment continues to increase, insurance maintains its inexorable creep upwards, and additional obstacles put in the way of getting drivers' licenses, teens literally cannot afford cars unless their parents buy them. It's hard for anything to become part of your identity when you cannot obtain it.

Secondly, the reaction to a robot (car) causing accidents - killing people (gasp) is vastly disproportionate in relation to human-caused killings that are accepted as part of the supposed fabric of nature/society.

Certainly. This is one of the factors making me pessimistic in the short-run. Autonomous cars are simply too novel, and will be treated under a massive double-standard. But as the young people grow up and the statistics start to percolate through the old peoples' heads, combined with the expected improvements in autonomous cars, the problem will abate. This may not have happened in your physician example, but then again, if taxi drivers had veto power over autonomous cars, it might not happen there either...

Related reading: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/09/the-cheapest-generation/309060/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/why-are-young-people-ditching-cars-for-smartphones/260801/

Signalling has an academic definition in economics, for sure. It's used both in an intentional sense ("workers signal their conscientiousness to employers by making their way through a 4-year college degree") and an unintentional sense ("being a high school dropout signals to the employer that a worker is in the bottom 5th percentile")

However, I do think LW uses it in a intellectual hipster sense as well - "Do you really think that, or are you just signalling?". The difference seems to me that instead of jockeying for economic advantage, we are accusing someone of jockeying for social status. Of course, such social jockeying is widespread, simply by dint of human nature. But I suppose we could replace this use of the word with "posturing" or something of the sort.

Excellent post by Yvain... your excerpt really doesn't do it justice.

Regarding the comic: if the sun exploded and it's nighttime, you could still find out by looking to see if the moon just got a lot brighter.

Obviously you are willing to extend this sort of cost benefit analysis to all kinds of influencing government?

If me grabbing a nanoslice of power in the form of casting a vote is like donating a thousand dollars to charity, me grabbing more than a nanoslice even by illegal means shouldn't be dismissed out of hand and deserves even handed analysis. The value of such information seems to be pretty high.

Alice, believing that the world will end, will spend all her money by her predicted end-of-the-world date. She will then be unable to pay back. Bob, knowing this, would never lend her the money.

It's posts like this that remind me that the sequences are vast, excellent, and most importantly of all, not particularly organized at the moment.

Every so often, Lukeprog or others will make a small effort towards collating the sequences, but the resulting product disappears into the ether of Discussion archives.

Talk is cheap, but somebody really needs to do something about the sequences to make them more accessible and visible to a newcomer. The LW wiki index of the sequence is incomplete, and seems like it hasn't been changed since 'Tetronian' created it six months ago.

You know... purposely violating Godwin's Law seems to have become an applause light around here, as if we want to demonstrate how super rational we are that we don't succumb to obvious fallacies like Nazi analogies.

Note that a nicely formatted and typo-corrected version of The Sequences is currently being prepared for PDF, Kindle, and iBooks.