Of course, the flip side of acknowledging that nonetheless there is such a thing as a “cautious driver” (and even aside from the logic described in the grandparent, it’s clearly much too intuitive a concept to give up—witness the fact that you use it yourself!) is realizing that although we might not have access to that data now, there is no principled reason why we couldn’t have such data…
I think I’m making a distinction between using it colloquially (i.e. I can say that my uncle is tall, which can be true, but it doesn’t tell you much about my uncle’s actual height) and using it with the rigor that Bezzi implied (i.e. “has someone studied this clear category of cautious drivers”?)
Yeah, okay.
Look at me thinking like an engineer—“but it’s not useful from a practical point of view because we don’t have access to that data”.
Sure, that’s a reasonable view.
Of course, the flip side of acknowledging that nonetheless there is such a thing as a “cautious driver” (and even aside from the logic described in the grandparent, it’s clearly much too intuitive a concept to give up—witness the fact that you use it yourself!) is realizing that although we might not have access to that data now, there is no principled reason why we couldn’t have such data…
I think I’m making a distinction between using it colloquially (i.e. I can say that my uncle is tall, which can be true, but it doesn’t tell you much about my uncle’s actual height) and using it with the rigor that Bezzi implied (i.e. “has someone studied this clear category of cautious drivers”?)
Then again, my example here seems to have failed because people do study tallness: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000291499390523F , but they crucially define tallness as above the 95th percentile. Other studies I’m glanced at use height as a continuous variable, so who the heck knows.