Thanks for the thanks! Sometimes I feel bad when a comment I think is particularly helpful sits at zero and comments I think were cheap applause buttons are voted up. Most people like sugar and few people like broccoli, and this felt like a broccoli comment that maybe(?) I shouldn’t have bothered with… until you responded :-)
The “freezing in place in traffic” as a “do nothing” response was interesting. I would not have lumped that with “not taking out a mortgage”, but I can see how some people do. I think there might be something important there in terms of agency and cooperation/competition dynamics. It jogged a memory...
When I was growing up we had rabbits that ran free in the front yard, and they would sometimes sit at the bottom of our narrow driveway and freak out when you came home, running away from the car (up the driveway) as though it was a predator. It was particularly tricky because they seemed to have this instinct for running “away” along one vector (which was the same one the car took because it was trapped going up the driveway, so it reproduced “being chased” conditions to a first approximation) and then at the last second they’d swerve to “dodge the snapping teeth” of the car/predator. But if the you tried to dodge a rabbit at the last second based on the rabbit’s initial trajectory, you and they would swerve in the same direction. If the rabbits had run away totally naively it would have served them better, because car drivers are not actually predators. Which meant that the right thing for a driver to do was to sort of half-heartedly follow through “as though to hit the rabbit” so they could dodge a simple form of the thing their instincts expected to happen.
Thanks for the thanks! Sometimes I feel bad when a comment I think is particularly helpful sits at zero and comments I think were cheap applause buttons are voted up. Most people like sugar and few people like broccoli, and this felt like a broccoli comment that maybe(?) I shouldn’t have bothered with… until you responded :-)
The “freezing in place in traffic” as a “do nothing” response was interesting. I would not have lumped that with “not taking out a mortgage”, but I can see how some people do. I think there might be something important there in terms of agency and cooperation/competition dynamics. It jogged a memory...
When I was growing up we had rabbits that ran free in the front yard, and they would sometimes sit at the bottom of our narrow driveway and freak out when you came home, running away from the car (up the driveway) as though it was a predator. It was particularly tricky because they seemed to have this instinct for running “away” along one vector (which was the same one the car took because it was trapped going up the driveway, so it reproduced “being chased” conditions to a first approximation) and then at the last second they’d swerve to “dodge the snapping teeth” of the car/predator. But if the you tried to dodge a rabbit at the last second based on the rabbit’s initial trajectory, you and they would swerve in the same direction. If the rabbits had run away totally naively it would have served them better, because car drivers are not actually predators. Which meant that the right thing for a driver to do was to sort of half-heartedly follow through “as though to hit the rabbit” so they could dodge a simple form of the thing their instincts expected to happen.