Category: behavior

The six main causes of car crashes.

Car crashes are mysteries. Even though roughly 6 million of them happen each year in the United States alone, we seldom learn much. When we do drive by a crash, we often slow down to have a look. But there’s never much to see. Two crumpled cars. Maybe one upside down. An ambulance closing its doors. I usually feel bad—for those who may have gotten hurt (or worse), of course, but also because my rubbernecking contributes to the logjam of cars behind me.

I want to know what happened because there’s an obvious payoff. I want to make sure that the same thing doesn’t happen to me. Was it some bonehead move that I would never make? Or did someone commit a minor transgression and then pay a major price? Give me an instant replay like I get when I’m watching football. A slow-motion video with expert commentators who draw diagrams and who reveal in explicit detail how it all went down.

Without the details of how crashes happen, we tend to dismiss them as the work of “idiots”—drivers who occupy the lower echelons of driving skill and common sense. But while humankind’s measured intelligence is increasing, so is the number of deadly car crashes. After a lifetime of improvement, we saw an 8 percent jump in crash fatalities during 2015, the largest in 50 years. That number rose again in 2016, when more than 40,000 people died in collisions.

The six main causes of car crashes.

How Fortnite Captured Teens’ Hearts and Minds | The New Yorker

Fortnite, for anyone not a teen-ager or a parent or educator of teens, is the third-person shooter game that has taken over the hearts and minds—and the time, both discretionary and otherwise—of adolescent and collegiate America. Released last September, it is right now by many measures the most popular video game in the world. At times, there have been more than three million people playing it at once. It has been downloaded an estimated sixty million times. (The game, available on PC, Mac, Xbox, PS4, and mobile devices, is—crucially—free, but many players pay for additional, cosmetic features, including costumes known as “skins.”) In terms of fervor, compulsive behavior, and parental noncomprehension, the Fortnite craze has elements of Beatlemania, the opioid crisis, and the ingestion of Tide Pods. Parents speak of it as an addiction and swap tales of plunging grades and brazen screen-time abuse: under the desk at school, at a memorial service, in the bathroom at 4 A.M. They beg one another for solutions. A friend sent me a video he’d taken one afternoon while trying to stop his son from playing; there was a time when repeatedly calling one’s father a fucking asshole would have led to big trouble in Tomato Town. In our household, the big threat is gamer rehab in South Korea.

Game fads come and go: Rubik’s Cube, Dungeons & Dragons, Angry Birds, Minecraft, Clash of Clans, Pokémon Go. What people seem to agree on, whether they’re seasoned gamers or dorky dads, is that there’s something new emerging around Fortnite, a kind of mass social gathering, open to a much wider array of people than the games that came before.

How Fortnite Captured Teens’ Hearts and Minds | The New Yorker

How to form healthy habits in your 20s – The New York Times

When you woke up this morning, what did you do first?

Did you hop in the shower, check your email or grab a doughnut? What did you say to your roommates on the way out the door? Salad or hamburger for lunch? When you got home, did you put on your sneakers and go for a run, or eat dinner in front of the television?

Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits. And though each habit means relatively little on its own, over time, the meals we eat, how we spend our evenings, and how often we exercise have enormous impacts.

This is particularly true in our 20s, when so many of our habits are still up for grabs. The patterns you establish right now will impact your health, productivity, financial security and happiness for decades. How much money you make, how much time you spend with your friends and family, how well your body functions years from now — all of these, in many ways, are products of the habits you are building today.

How to form healthy habits in your 20s – The New York Times

How much alcohol is too much? The science is shifting. – Vox

A couple of drinks a day aren’t bad for you and may even be good for you.

Right?

That’s been the message — from researchers, governments, and beverage companies — for decades. And as a result, many of us don’t think twice about tossing back a couple of glasses or wine or a few beers after work.

But maybe we should. Because it turns out the story about the health effects of moderate drinking is shifting pretty dramatically. New research on alcohol and mortality, and a growing awareness about the rise in alcohol-related deaths in the US, is causing a reckoning among researchers about even moderate levels of alcohol consumption.

In particular, an impressive new meta-study involving 600,000 participants, published recently in The Lancet, suggests that levels of alcohol previously thought to be relatively harmless are linked with an earlier death. What’s more, drinking small amounts of alcohol may not carry all the long-touted protective effects on the cardiovascular system.

“For years, there was a sense that there was an optimal level which was not drinking no alcohol but drinking moderately that led to the best health outcomes,” said Duke University’s Dan Blazer, an author of the paper. “I think we’re going to have to rethink that a bit.”

Alongside this study have come disturbing reports of the alcohol industry’s involvement in funding science that may have helped drinking look more favorable, as well as a growing worry that many people are naive about alcohol’s health effects. How many people know, for example, that as far back as 1988, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer designated alcohol a level-one carcinogen? Some say too few.

Maybe it’s time that changes — with some caveats, as usual.

How much alcohol is too much? The science is shifting. – Vox

The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield, Revisited – The New York Times

On a recent Monday in a crowded Newark courthouse, the former Rutgers philosophy professor Anna Stubblefield admitted she touched the penis of a man with cerebral palsy who could not legally consent. In an earlier trial, which I wrote about for The Times Magazine in October 2015, Anna was convicted on two counts of raping the same victim; last summer, that verdict was overturned on appeal. Her guilty plea has now forestalled a second trial, and barring some surprise at the sentencing in early May, she will receive no further time in prison beyond the nearly 22 months she has already served. It seems that this long, complicated story has come to a demoralizing end.

The Strange Case of Anna Stubblefield, Revisited – The New York Times

The Real Story of the Hawaiian Missile Crisis | GQ

On January 13th, 2018, the residents of Hawaii picked up their phones to find a warning: a missile would be hitting the islands imminently. Sean Flynn found out what people do when they think they only have moments left to live.

The Real Story of the Hawaiian Missile Crisis | GQ

Yes, self-driving cars will kill people. Here’s how they’ll decide who to save.

We’re on the brink of a new era of transportation, with self-driving cars making decisions as we take the back seat. One analyst recently made a “conservative” estimate that 10 million autonomous vehicles would be on the road by 2020. But this future also forces us to confront an ugly question: If an autonomous vehicle has to suddenly choose between killing two people, whom should it choose?

What would a human do?
A recent study from the University of Osnabruck in Germany examined how human drivers would react to a sudden ultimatum. Scientists put study participants in virtual reality driving scenarios and forced them to make a choice between hitting one virtual object and another. While “driving,” the study participants would suddenly be confronted with a split-second moral decision — if they swerved left, they might hit and kill a virtual man walking his dog, for example. If they swerved right, they might kill a virtual woman walking alone.

“The truth is, humans put a price tag on each and every thing. There’s a price tag on the left lane and a price tag on the right lane,” Peter König, a professor at the University of Osnabruck’s Institute of Cognitive Science, said in a phone call. “Autonomous [vehicles] will decide as a consequence of their construction.”

Yes, self-driving cars will kill people. Here’s how they’ll decide who to save.

The six main causes of car crashes.

Car crashes are mysteries. Even though roughly 6 million of them happen each year in the United States alone, we seldom learn much. When we do drive by a crash, we often slow down to have a look. But there’s never much to see. Two crumpled cars. Maybe one upside down. An ambulance closing its doors. I usually feel bad—for those who may have gotten hurt (or worse), of course, but also because my rubbernecking contributes to the logjam of cars behind me.

I want to know what happened because there’s an obvious payoff. I want to make sure that the same thing doesn’t happen to me. Was it some bonehead move that I would never make? Or did someone commit a minor transgression and then pay a major price? Give me an instant replay like I get when I’m watching football. A slow-motion video with expert commentators who draw diagrams and who reveal in explicit detail how it all went down.

The six main causes of car crashes.

Why most of us lean to the right when we kiss

Your brain is an organ of two halves – the left side and the right side. And there are many brain functions, such as language skills or which hand you write with, which are organised mostly in one side of the brain or the other.

Simple behavioural tests have now allowed us to see how this organisation is revealed through biases in how we see and interact with the world – and each other – often without us being aware of it.

Examining how people perceive a diagram of variously orientated lines and angles provided clues that people typically have a subconscious bias for seeing things set out in clockwise orientations.

We then realised that this might also be related to a number of physical instincts that people have, such as which way they turn their heads. After looking at recent research in visual psychophysics and visual neuroscience, we saw various perceptual and behavioral phenomena in which humans can have a directional bias.

Many of these turning behaviours are seen early in life. For example, infants have an initial bias for turning the head to the right (and consequently extending the left arm outward to compensate for that movement).

Some previous research found that such an instinctive turn to the right extends to adulthood – when an adult kisses another on the lips, their heads tend to automatically lean to the right. But is this an extension of the bias that humans are born with, or do people simply learn to kiss that way?

Why most of us lean to the right when we kiss

How to view coworkers with empathy — Quartz at Work

Quietly judging people is something of a pastime for me, wherever I am. But there’s something different about the way I judge, and see, my therapy waiting-room cohort. I have nothing to forgive them for, but I forgive them—for tapping their feet; for turning their earphones up too loud; for being genuinely happy; for being unapologetically sad. I do not know their lives, but I have true empathy for them—for their broken relationships; for their loneliness; for the harm they’ve endured; for their fears, anxieties, and attempts to feel better, all communicated through that glance we share as they exit the room, and I enter.

Lately I’ve been trying to bring a similar approach to how I see people at work.

How to view coworkers with empathy — Quartz at Work