I'm going to get a little bit abstract here, but bear with me. I'm not smart enough to know the word for this, but look at these comics through the lens of their function, what they do. Not what they're intended to do, ignore that for now, but what does a reader experience when they read this. I imagine for most people, all it will do is make them afraid. And, in my opinion, needlessly afraid.
Now, statistically, yeah, driving causes a lot of deaths. But that 'a lot' is only 'a lot' relative to other things. Compared to heart disease it's jack nothing. You're more likely to die from suicide. There's only a million deaths worldwide per year. That's WORLDWIDE. The odds of you, you the person reading this, dying in any given car crash is astronomically low.
All this is to say that the comic is essentially fear-mongering. And that is incredibly spiteful of me to say, but Randall has a large audience and it's callous of him to post things that only scare and worry people. These aren't awareness things, the last one isn't even the push for self-driving cars that it could be. And yes they're presumably Randall's honest feelings and yes he has a right to say it and all that but it's very lame that he was unable or unwilling to make a comic that expressed those feelings as his personal phobia rather than as something that is easily generalized to the reader.
I'd also like to point out that at least in my state of Rhode Island, high schoolers have to first take an unbearably boring driving class for like seven hours a day for two weeks, then drive with a legal adult who can drive for two hundred hours, then take a drivers' test. And that only gets you the restricted licence which doesn't let you drive with more than one underage passenger or after dark for (if I'm remembering correctly) nine months. And THEN you get your real licence. (Some of the fine details might be slightly off, it's been a while.) Other states probably have different laws, but no, not everyone on the road did a single test. And even IF that's all you have to do, you presumably have to have PRACTICED driving to get to that point. AND if someone does get into a crash, their licence can be taken away for being a bad driver so they don't get into another crash!
Oh yeah. Neither of the comics are jokes nor do they provide any valuable insight into anything. The second comic in particular seems to be based on wild conjecture. As that second link says, most car deaths occur between the ages of 15 and 44, but Randall's first chart has his current age of 33 as a low point of probability.
In conclusion, the best part of these comics is that one of them is numbered 1990, which is the year my favorite album came out.
I wouldn't be so cocky with the assertion that driving deaths are insignificant. That's around 37,000 deaths a year in the US, which is on par with suicide (a major problem in its own right) and about double the murder rate. Sure, it's less than the monsters of heart disease and cancer, but it's still a problem that's very much worth solving.
ReplyDeleteIncorrect on the laws in Rhode Island. That’s ONE way to get a license. Wait until you’re 18 and all it takes is a driving test and a knowledge test.
ReplyDeletePretty sure there's more than 1 million deaths per year worldwide. The global population is 8 billion (I think Americans say 8,000 million). Life expectancy worldwide is 72. The implication is 100 million deaths, not 1 million.
ReplyDeleteNot that this detracts from your point, but I get all uptight about what Randall Munroe calls "someone being wrong on the internet".