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I maintain that Boston drivers aren’t bad, they’re spiteful.
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they're very skilled and, more than that, extremely creative
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other drivers will ask "is that a lane" and look to lane markings or some such. Boston drivers will ask "COULD that be a lane" and answer "yes, fuck your lane markings"
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Other drivers: i should use my turn signals to communicate where i intend to go Boston drivers: you FOOL, all warfare is based on deception
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*BLINK* Once is happenstance. *BLINK* Twice is coincidence. *BLINK* Three times is enemy action!
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All driving is war by other means Now watch closely as i brake check this semi truck
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when I drove a lot I developed an elaborate theory of how to manipulate other drivers to minimize my travel time and risk of citation based on the principles of ninjutsu. if only I was kidding about this. it was also an important part of the genesis of the ideas behind my company.
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Wait really? Im so curious, tell me more
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well ok so first: cops are looking for outliers, so you always want to be the second slowest car on the road. therefore, you should find a car that wants to go fast and goad them into going faster and faster trying to pass you, so you can always be slightly slower than them
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in order to do this you have to know what those other drivers want, which ones are desperate to pass you and can be goaded into accelerating ever faster even when that serves them no real purpose; thinking about that is how I realized that driving was primarily a theory of mind task
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you can really figure out, with other drivers, what their theory of the road is. maybe they're just blasting through, but more often they have some cockamamie theory like "if I get in front of the cars I will get there sooner" or "if I have a car behind me cops can't see me"; it is obvious
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anyhow what I realized is that if THAT is obvious we're really doing a LOT of theory of mind reasoning while driving, and the more I looked at it the more I realized that MOST of driving was that kind of thinking, which subsequently led to pondering how self-driving cars couldn't do that at ALL
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I always remember the story of investors getting stuck in a Google self driving car in mountain view for maybe 45 minutes because it was programmed to follow the rules on merging and no one would let it into the road
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they still can't handle unprotected lefts, in general. they route around them.
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frankly it's hard to blame them for this as I, a human, tend to route around them too. other people are too untrustworthy and keep trying to murder me