It doesn’t have to be this abstract, though. This will likely change in the next 20 years.

Consider the move from horse drawn carriages to vehicles.

It was an acceptable risk that anyone might be permanently disabled due to being kicked in the head or trampled by a horse.

This might be a horse you are simply walking past. Or one that is spooked and running down the street. The owner of the horse beared little to no responsibility.

Now it is largely acceptable, to permanently disable or kill someone due to a mistake or some form of common negligence while operating a vehicle.

It is almost not a crime to accidentally run someone over. This is “normal” or “not intentional.”

In the future, it will seem insane to have allowed so many people manual control over multi-ton vehicles.

Just as it does not make sense that a horse would be tied up outside Trader Joe’s and due to a spook permanently disable you as you exit the store.

It will seem so primitive to have such loose controls on cars that if you chose to drive a manually controlled car killing someone will likely be seen as dangerous enough of a choice that a person would be held liable for manslaughter.

I don’t disagree with the principles you’re standing up for here; but we’re not having an ethical argument, we’re talking about what went into the author’s analysis. And AFAICT, in said analysis, they just took for “human deaths caused by humans”, the set of deaths where one human thought “I want that other human to die”, and then caused that to happen. Situations with legal mens rea for killing.

Ok, but that makes it incompatible for comparison with the other animals killing humans. In some cases maybe (sharks, wolves, lions, crocodiles) the animal could be actively wanting the human to die, but in others (freshwater snails, tapeworms, mosquitoes), that's probably not the case.

Peace talks sometimes work. Asking sharks to tone down the chomping does not. There is no point to differentiating ‘attack vs incidental’ animal deaths in the same way as w humans...

I feel like maybe I misread your post. Perhaps I didn't understand the larger point you were making.

> Now it is largely acceptable, to permanently disable or kill someone due to a mistake or some form of common negligence while operating a vehicle.

There were many years at the beginning of the automobile where laws were created[1] to save humans, horses, and livestock from being run into by automobiles or locomotives. After enough of society was normalized to the existence of large guided missiles, these ways were dismantled.

> It is almost not a crime to accidentally run someone over. This is “normal” or “not intentional.”

It's not 1st degree murder (usually), but the circumstances of a traffic collision do sometimes bring felony convictions. Society has absorbed the risk and people have adapted.

Interesting note: US and Euro cars can't be homogenized because the US NHTSA tends to assume that passengers don't wear seatbelts (so manufacturers optimize for fewer injuries with that assumption) whereas the Euro equivalent assumes that all passengers do wear seat belts and optimize for that assumption.

> In the future, it will seem insane to have allowed so many people manual control over multi-ton vehicles.

I think future people will be capable of some amount of empathy with people who came before them who had to deal with inferior technology.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws

I'm not sure if you are equating horses and cars or not. Are you saying the risk of either is unacceptable?

I don't know if horses were statistically more or less dangerous than cars, but I feel like when I read about a random historical figure from before cars it's pretty common they died from a riding accident.

Today, horses are allowed on public streets and not regarded as particularly deadly, at least in my locale. In particular, the police ride them during public events.

I have, on occasion, ridden a horse, a bicycle, a motorcycle, driven a car, and ridden in planes. The only time I was seriously injured was on a bicycle.

> In particular, the police ride them during public events.

Horses give excellent visibility, they can stand and walk slowly, the take less space than a car, they are fast if needed and people tend to move away from a moving horse quite naturally

What makes you think mosquitos are deliberately spreading malaria?

There were several interviews on CNN. Apparently some mosquitos do talk to press.

One of them told me so.

Oh, they probably talk too fast for me to understand. I just heard a high-pitched buzzing sound.

I mean it’s pretty clear that traffic deaths are humans killing humans. We don’t need to wring our hands over some imagined slippery slope.

Presumably if you're speeding or driving while intoxicated, you're doing so intentionally. It's not as if someone is forcing you to drive too fast or too drunk. These things (especially speeding) dramatically increase the likelihood of being in a collision.

It's difficult issue.

While I think that we should totally put the blame on drunk drivers, I would still make a distinction between negligence and intentionality.

Saying that drunk drivers intentionally kill people opens the door to saying that bad doctors kill people, bad medicine teachers kill people, people who vote for the wrong politicians kill people, politicians who enact bad laws kill people, etc.

At that point the discussion devolves into "your party kills people because your ideology is wrong", "no, yours is"

"Malfeasance" is the general term for doing something bad (usually professionally) for your own gain (or your own laziness), that can end up harming others, but where this is not the goal per se, just something that is an "acceptable loss" for your gain. An engineer who doesn't bother to verify the safety of a design before signing off on it, is committing malfeasance.

We distinguish this from "malice", which is when you do something with the direct intent to cause harm. An engineer who verifies that a design causes harm, and signs off on it because they want to cause harm, is being malicious.

Malfeasance is a crime, but it's one we actually can't catch very well, which is the reason we can't "do statistics" on it. Unlike with murder (where we almost always know that somebody caused someone's death, even if we don't know who; and therefore we can work out the statistics even without resolving the perpetrators); we have no idea (without thorough, expensive investigations that don't usually happen) how many of the e.g. buildings that fell over, fell over because of malfeasance, rather than because of a complex accident.

Your aim isn't to kill anybody. A careless maintenance worker in a factory also doesn't intent to kill someone when he intentionally skips a job. Or a shopkeeper when he sells cigarettes to a customer. You would end up including nearly all deaths as caused by humans if you go down that road. The bus driver who gave an overweight person a ride instead of making them walk.

Well, my point was that most automobile collisions aren't 'accidents' in the true sense of the word, and most automobile related injuries (and deaths) occur when someone does something negligent. The vast majority of collisions are caused by some combination of being distracted, intoxication, speeding, or just being reckless. Deaths (or serious injuries for that matter) rarely occur at low speeds, it's most often in situations that involve speeding.

There's a lot of data[0][1][2][3] to back up the correlation between speed and deaths, that's the whole focus of vision zero[4].

[0]: https://nacto.org/docs/usdg/relationship_between_speed_risk_...

[1]: https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/speeding

[2]: https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-safe...

[3]: https://www.curbed.com/2017/7/28/16051780/us-traffic-death-s...

[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero

But how do you exclude all those other causes? We know that cigarettes kill people too so if you intentionally sell them to somebody, you're being reckless or negligent too. It's a continuum so where do you draw the line? At breaking the law? That's arbitrary and depends on the country.

Negligence implies a standard of reasonable care.

Is it appropriate to apply a universal standard, or the standard of the person who was involved in the event?

It depends on what you want to calculate. I think in a way, the latter is more objective than using an arbitrary single standard.

A million people killed by cars prevents five million from dying how?

Cars are obviously important for the economy which provides money for all life saving things. Stopping all driving would certainly cause many deaths.

American has three times the traffic death rate of the Britain and six times of Norway’s. What’s the benefit?

Based on the statistics I have seen, if the US took Sweden's approach to the current epidemic (which has been recently held up as a model on HN and elsewhere) and got similar results, an additional 30,000 people would have died thus far. I haven't seen anyone bring this up and ask for an accounting of the benefit that is greater.

Uh huh, I said Norway. The point is that not every cost has a benefit. If you're so offended by international comparisons, check out US states:

https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/states/occupant_death...

I don't know that California (4.2 deaths per 100,000) would be somehow more productive if people died form cars at the rate of Missouri (10.2).

While there has been a high death rate in Sweden, especially in elderly homes which weren't isolated properly, you have to be careful when comparing stats between countries. Sweden seems to file more deaths as COVID, instead of just attributing it as death by age, heart attack, or some other unexplained reason, including those dying in elderly care and not only those in hospitals.

Here is a more complete summary: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22945974 NYC had 30% increase of unexplained deaths recent months, whereas Sweden had -4%.

Ranking countries is not the point; the point is that people who endlessly lecture on why the US is inferior have no particular preference for whether 30,000 more or fewer Americans die, so rhetoric pretending to be concerned about highway deaths seems vapid and insincere.

You seem to be confirming that you are one of those people for whom a conversation that mentions the US can have no fixed point other than how inferior it is to Europe or the Nordic countries. Which is what I'm annoyed by. It's the lack of genuine dialog that is the issue.

Agreed. If you just believed it all, you'd think Nordic countries never do anything wrong and other countries should just do what they do. But they're in a league of their own. And sorry to say but it's minor leagues in the world stage. You can't just mimic what might work there if you're in a completely different league.

Inventing just about everything ever? America also has 50% more GDP per capita than the UK. Perhaps the extra 200% traffic deaths are needed to provide that boost.

I'm not going to argue this directly, but I can provide evidence of how vital I think ordinary people consider highway transportation. It reminds me of a scandal in the US that you may or may not have heard of:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Lee_lane_closure_scandal