[asdfasgasdgasdg]

There is at least a glimmer of a suggestion that the technical solution will be workable. Waymo seems to be doing pretty well, and for all Tesla's fumbles, their autopilot seems to do better than humans on freeways in good conditions, which may someday save a nontrivial fraction of the lives lost in car accidents.

On the other hand, nobody has any idea how to get Americans to change their minds on guns, cars, or red meat, and there is no foreseeable course of action that would work. That's not to say it's impossible, but I don't see how to get from here to there. This isn't a case of people just not knowing that if they drove more carefully they'd be at less risk of dying. Public education is not even remotely sufficient to the task of accomplishing the behavior changes we're talking about. Hell, I bet you could spend a hundred billion dollars and not even get to the point of a solid majority agreeing there's a problem to be solved, much less make any progress on solving it.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Changing minds on guns, cars, and red meat is exactly as easy as setting up and constantly reinforcing the original (toxic) narratives around guns, cars, red meat, sugar, and the rest.

It isn't difficult or expensive in its own terms. You don't do it with "public education", you do by consistently dramatising the results you want in popular media, and demonising the results you don't.

Give it ten years of consistent messaging from multiple seemingly independent sources and it's done. Give it twenty five and it's so done the alternatives are no longer thinkable.

The difficult and expensive part comes from the enclosed nature of political power in the US, which has a choke point on the kinds of messages that are allowed to appear in popular media.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

Cool, now you just need to convince popular media to include narratives about better road design and use in a way that is subtle enough to avoid pushback but obvious enough to have the intended shaping effect. This sounds both incredibly difficult and incredibly expensive, but you say it's not, and we have no way to test which one of us is right. Agree to disagree. :)

[CapricornNoble]

>>>nobody has any idea how to get Americans to change their minds on guns, cars, or red meat

Interesting that your list doesn't include alcohol.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

I think Americans are less of an outlier on that subject compared to other countries in the world. In fact, Denmark drinks more per capita than the US. But in any case it wasn't my goal to exhaustively list all the things Americans are stubborn about, just some examples that are ready to hand. ;)