[caminante]

Seconds count for 911 calls, but really your odds are already bad if calling about...a heart attack. There's one study about non-runners having heart attacks during marathons due to road closures [0]. If they had a heart attack that day, they were 15% more likely to die within a month. Not good, but it's not that bad.

Going full SV utilitarian, I'm curious what's the net change in accidents between

(1) texting

(2) no texting?

I've read that texting is the equivalent of having 2 beers. Even "hands free" is distracting. I continue to see people sucked into their phones and oblivious that they're operating a 4,000+ pound machine.

[0] https://hms.harvard.edu/news/marathon-risk-non-runners

[cucumber3732842]

>I've read that texting is the equivalent of having 2 beers

Is that supposed to be a lot, or a little?

We talking two 12oz coors lights for a 300lb career sailer or two 16oz quadruple IPAs for a 90lb nail salon tech?

[caminante]

Well, you're picking extremes when AFAIK, it'll put the average person at the legal limit.

One beer will start to impair you.

Everyone thinks they're light texting on the road. Just like people think they can drive drunk.

[cucumber3732842]

>Well, you're picking extremes when AFAIK, it'll put the average person at the legal limit.

>One beer will start to impair you.

Thank you for illustrating exactly the problem. Impairment is a binary in colloquial usage. Statistically no average-median-ish person has ever been impaired in the colonial sense by one average beer. Any everyone knows this. Two average beers applied to an average person won't get you to the legal limit without aggravating circumstances (i.e. zero time to metabolize + empty stomach, or perhaps conflicting medication).

I will be the first to admit you can give a bunch of people one beer and detect statistically significant difference vs a control group or you can give one person one beer many times and evaluate against a baseline and detect a statistically significant difference. But statistical difference does not "impairment" in the colloquial sense make. And everyone knows this based on their own observed life experience, even people without experience should be able to deduce this by observing how the world behaves for if what you say were true, the way things work would be very different.

And by using the term impairment to describe/quantify the impact of one beer and then re-using that term in contexts where it may overload with the colloquial more binary usage the upper bound of what "one beer" is such that one beer at the top end may equal two or three at the low end.

So now we nor does any casual reader know if texting is equivalent in danger to two "real beers", which almost makes it sound not bad for how distracting it seems to be, or if it's equivalent in danger to two "paternalism beers" in which case it's pretty seriously dangerous.

And this key word overloading problem seems to be endemic to all manner of issues these days.