[coldtea]

>at least for driving in the Eastern European capital city where I’m currently living where you have to actually “guess” what the other traffic participants will do next: is that kid going against the flow of traffic on his bike? (answer: yes) Is that cab going to cut me off in the middle of the intersection and should I take my foot off the acceleration pedal so that we won’t crash? (answer: yes to both questions). Are those pedestrians going to jaywalk without checking for any incoming vehicles? (answer: yes). All these things happened to me during my short city drive half an hour ago.

Those sound very quaint. Try India, China, SEA, most of Latin America and so on...

[needles]

Is there a reason you have brought up the inferiority of third-world countries in your last several comments?

Blind comparisons (to put things into perspective) aren't useful. You need to have a point of some kind.

[sewer_bird]

It's not really inferiority: the commonality of the other countries is that they typically follow a different regime of negotiation of the road. In specific, the USA and other anglophone countries are extremely strict about what motions are allowed on the road: the expectation is that everyone stays precisely within the lanes and drives a bit robotically.

This, however, is actually not that common in most of the world, where the road is much more 'negotiated': speeds are slower but the streets more chaotic. I wonder sometimes if it's more like treating the vehicles as horses rather than boxes of death, or something similar: it's a markedly different mode.

I imagine his point is that self-driving cars rely on the robotic driving customs of parts of the West to do as well as they do, and that he's skeptical of these vehicles' ability to interact with more dynamic streetscapes filled with e-scooters, rickshaws, tuk-tuks, people carrying stuff, and so on.

(Source: living in China/Asia)

[coldtea]

>Is there a reason you have brought up the inferiority of third-world countries in your last several comments?

Is there a reason you have been "stalking" my last several comments across different threads? Checking what this or that commenter wrote in different threads to call them on it is kind of abusive.

For my part, the reason is quite simple: I first wrote about such countries in a thread, and so had the situation there fresh in mind when I encountered a couple of other threads with similar issues. I've also travelled and worked in those places for periods of time, so I also have them in mind.

Also, note that I didn't bring up the "inferiority of third-world countries" (those are your words).

I mentioned how they drive in some of them - which I don't find inferior. If anything it's more lively and less obsessed with cushioning the individual, which I appreciate).

In another comment I mentioned how countries near the tropics where billions live have lots of mosquitos and lots of heat -- and that was again in a positive spin, to contrast someone complaining about how Houston was unlivable before air-conditioning because of such things.

And that's it, a grand total of 3 comments, 2 about traffic patterns and driving, and one about heat/mosquitos.

Not all places I mentioned are "third world" either. I explicitly included e.g. China which is the 1-2 biggest economies in the world. Do you consider all of those places "third world"?

>Blind comparisons (to put things into perspective) aren't useful.

"Blind" is a weasel word without which there's no argument above.

Those are not "blind comparisons", they are simply "comparisons". Putting things into perspective is extremely useful alone.

In fact you first need to put things into perspective (survey what's going on across countries/domains/etc) and only _then_ form your "point". Else it's just a priori dogma.