External vs. Internal Risk: or, Why People Who Are Afraid to Fly Still Ride in Cars.

I don't understand the dilemma some people see with self-driving cars.

Go ahead and read the article. It's OK, I'll wait....

Many people seem to expect a computer to solve every problem before we can let it make decisions that involve risk to human health or life. What we really should be aiming for is for the computer to do significantly better than a person would do *in the exact same situation*...and let's face it, we're already there just because a computer has a MUCH faster reaction time. The real issue is how to allow it to make even extremely low risk decisions.

The article discusses whether risking the life of the driver would be considered acceptable. Considering how much you can lower the risk to life for auto occupants when 1) occupants are wearing seat belts, 2) they are protected by airbags, and, most importantly 3) the car is driven at a safe speed for road conditions, which includes slowing down when visibility is impeded, the risk to occupants is incredibly low, because that last item requires by definition that the car be driven at a speed at which an accident is almost always avoidable.

Unfortunately, because we drive so often and accidents are so few and far between for the majority of people, we've come to see some risk as acceptable in order to save a few seconds here and a few minutes there. But with self-driving cars we may have to reevaluate that calculation, because people see a higher risk that they bring upon themselves (internal risk) as more acceptable than a lower risk that they cannot control (external risk). For example, that's a major reason that there are plenty of people who are scared to fly but are not afraid to drive, even though the latter is much more risky.

Until we can recognize and try to overcome that inaccurate, emotional evaluation of risk, we can't act completely rationally with regard to health and safety risks.

What do you think?

The Post In Which I Decide That An Essay Is Not Always Required; or, how to get your phone to connect to the wifi at Starbucks.

So, yeah, it's been a while. I have many Weighty Things about which I'd like to write, but these require a lot of Heavy Thought, which of course means a metric fuckton of editing and revising, even after I get it all down on paper.

Sitting here in Starbucks, it occurs to me that maybe, just maybe, I should post whatever's on my mind, whether it's a Deep Thought or not. I'm not exactly going to go for quantity over quality, but as I am fond of saying about many things, I'm going to stop letting the perfect be a barrier to the possible or even the perfectly fine.

So, today's post:

Why won't my phone connect to the wifi at Starbucks?

I've got my laptop and my phone here, and my laptop connected just fine with a popup window, but my phone kept saying "data connection not available" when I tried to update the weather in my weather app, and the proxy window would not come up in Chrome. I tried forgetting the connection, diddling with other settings, but it was actually much simpler.

Chrome would not bring up the proxy login window to log me in to Starbucks, so I went to the stock browser. (T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S5, or SM-G900T.) Bingo! That's it. I clicked "Accept" there, and everything else worked.

As usual, YMMV, but I can see that this might be an issue on many phones, as many like to always consider their stock browser the only browser for some core tasks, even if you set it as the default.

You are what you....say?

Yes, you are what you say. I know I've said before that actions matter much more than words, and I still believe that. I promise a full blog post on that later, but in brief, my thoughts on this are that you can profess to believe something until you're blue in the face, but it's your actions that will both matter to others and that will prove what you truly value the most. However, words can be crucial in other ways.

What I'm thinking of right now is how our words can shape our attitudes. Yes, our words express our attitudes, but like many things, there is a complex feedback loop of interdependence. We cannot easily just change our feelings or attitudes, but we can go out of our way to say something considerate even when we're not feeling considerate, and this has been proven to temper one's attitude.

This occurred to me when having to deal with someone whom I love very much, but nonetheless I know that I still sometimes have trouble being patient with them. At my worst I sometimes complain under my breath about them, or to a few trusted confidantes, but I also try very hard to express sympathy and understanding for them out loud, either to myself or to my confidantes. I do this to remind myself that they are not just a problem for me, they are a person with problems of their own with which they have to cope. Although their actions sometimes bother me, and I believe actions are much more important than intentions, on those occasions I try to remind myself out loud of the good in them, because their actions are not under my control, and so at those times I need to find a way to think of them with sympathy rather than frustration.

Research has proven that the act of regularly turning up the corners of your mouth as if smiling can actually improve attitude. So while in the end it is your actions that matter much more than your intentions, you can make it easier to act in the way you want by using small actions or even the right words to help shape your attitude and intentions.

Sometimes it takes a village...to sexually harass someone.

Internet stalking, gaslighting...I know that more often than not they are gender-targeted forms of harassment...but really, you could say that about just about any harassment. But reading this Washington Post article, describing men harassing women by pretending to be their target and trolling online for sex, it occurred to me that this wasn't just a crime perpetrated by a lone individual. Can you imagine a woman trying to harass a man by placing ads asking random women to meet him for sex? Even if women showed up, which I find highly doubtful, it would not be nearly as threatening for the target. Spurning the advances of a random woman is a lot less likely to lead to violence.

And what kind of men would travel to see a woman they have never met and expect sex? I'm guessing it's the kind who would blame the victim for not having sex with them, not the kind to feel bad for the target and embarrassed for themselves.

So this kind of crime is not just the lone act of a harasser, although they certainly deserve a lot more than they will get from our justice system. My point is, it's a crime that would be impossible if there wasn't an undercurrent in our society of treating women like mere sex toys. Without the complicity of these other men, the harasser would not be able to do anywhere near as much damage from behind their false online persona, and they would be caught much more quickly. To me, the attitude of the men who responded to the ads by showing up at someone's door demanding sex is as much the problem as the harasser themselves.

I don't know what it gains us to point this out, or what else we can do about it right now other than keep shaming and fighting harassment and bullying, but I'm hoping that the more we notice and understand societal problems like this, the better equipped we will be to eventually deal with them.

Bigger isn't better, Google...

If you just noticed your Google Chrome context (right-click) menu get bigger, then you were using the --disable-new-menu-style switch, which has very recently been disabled. You, like me, like a compact, concise user interface and got used to exactly where each line would be in it, so you could almost use the Force to navigate it blindfolded.

Well, Google didn't like that, for some reason. The rumor is that Google was "looking to create a unified experience for Chrome users across all versions of Windows." So why not also make everyone have the same start pages, and background, and only support one OS, since uniformity is so wonderful?

Anyway, if you were using the previous command line switch, try this one instead, it worked for me:

--force-fieldtrials="NewMenuStyle/Compact2/"

(If you aren't familiar with command switches, just right-click your desktop shortcut to Chrome, click "Properties", and at the end of the "Target" field, paste in the text above.)

There really is an "American Taliban"....

You know, I keep thinking that the term "American Taliban" is overblown hyperbole...and then something like this happens, and I remember how accurate it really is.

"Indiana GOP passes law making it a crime for clergy to perform gay weddings"

For those who don't want to click through, my tl;dr version: for those faiths that are in favor of marriage equality, the law clearly makes it a crime for clergy to perform a religious wedding ceremony according to the tenets of their faith. The article finds that the wording of the law considers the performing of the religious marriage ceremony, regardless of the marriage's legal status or licensing, illegal.

Overheard this morning...

“Mom, chameleons shouldn’t French kiss. Their tongues would be too sticky.”