I don't remember if the wording was specifically like this, but it was something that to me logically obvious answer is "yes", but the correct answer and what they expect is "no", to show that you are a reasonable driver who won't speed unnecessarily.
And I think throughout the driving exam there were several questions like that. This type of thing really annoys me.
EDIT: I found the actual question - although I still had to translate it - and I think I was giving the question a benefit of the doubt from my memory, with the term "planned" as I had written here, the actual way the question was setup was following:
What affects the duration of a planned journey?
a) Length of the journey.
b) Maximum speed in few lone sections of the journey.
It uses checkboxes, so you can check both.
They expect you to check only a), but b) is in my view also logically correct answer as if at any section even if it's shorter than 1 metres, if your max speed nears 0, duration of your journey will reach infinity. But it is worded in such a way that most people will get the hint that B) should not be checked.
Something along the lines of "speeding in most urban areas doesn't actually help get someone to their destination faster. There are always multiple traffic lights and other cars to contend with, so it's not helpful to go over the speed limit and it increases the risk and severity of an accident." It's perfectly solid advice, who hasn't been passed aggressively by an ah-ole with tinted windows only to catch up to them at every traffic light?
The question obviously wants to screen for that tidbit of knowledge, but it's not phrased rigorously enough for the HN-crowd, I guess.
The task was to drive from Duesseldorf to Munich. Two identical cars, two very experienced drivers. one was told to go as fast as possible without breaking speed limits on the way (we don't have a general speed limit on the German Autobahn (highway)) tthe oother ro drive at a relaxed 120 km/h were possible and also honor speed limits.
Both were equipped with EEG (heart rate and stuff).
The driving distance is slightly above 600km.
The first drive (as fast as possible) arrived first. Waiting for the relaxed driver to come in second. That happened 20 minutes later. So on a trip of > 5 hours the gain was 20 minutes.
But at what cost. The EEG told a story of pure stress, massive heart rate spikes even for an experienced driver like the one behind the wheel. While the other one came in not only at a relaxed speed but a way more relaxed body and mind.
Medical doctors concluded that the EEG of number two was way more healthy.
Btw: One reason why the first car was only 20 minutes quicker was the fact that the driver had to stop to refuel. This cost him minutes. While the second driver arrived with gas to spare. So even economically it made sense to drive a relaxed style. Not to speak of the ecological aspect.
So to wrap up. The fast driver often comes in first. But not as quick as the feel they are. And at a high price.
In this case you're probably right that the faster driver was just more stressed for no real benefit, but an EEG is not always a good proxy for how "healthy" something is (even ignoring obvious cases like physical exertion).
If you have a link to the study I'd love to read more.
EDIT:
One other thing I missed on the first read of your comment was the fact that the driver was instructed to "drive as fast as possible" and then given access to roads with no speed limits. I feel like that would have the potential to exacerbate the 'negative' side of things and that a more reasonable middle-ground could be found both in terms of driver stress and also fuel economy.
The spikes and reactions were stress reactions measured by medical doctors from the monitoring of multiple signals (heart rate being one).
So they came to the experimental conclusion that (at least in this experiment) driving at the limit of what was possible in terms of speed the car could go and speed traffic would somehow allow was a factor of stress for the driver.
They also qualified the added amount of fuel necessary to drive the distance.
But they did not say one was better, one was worse. They just let the viewer decide on which variant they preferred.
And as I said: If the externalities were priced into taxes and cost of fuel - why not let people and the market decide if it was worth to them to arrive 20 minutes quicker on this distance.
Basically this guy made his scientific career by doing epic experiments where he observed communities of baboons during various social interactions, blow-gunned individual baboons with tranquilizers, then very quickly, took samples of their blood to analyze glucocorticoids (these are stress-response hormones and have a half-life measured in minutes).
Anyway, crudely stated, the major finding is that animals have intense episodic stress throughout their lives but never suffer health consequences from that stress because it's occasional. Humans, on the other hand, can get the same levels of "fight-or-flight" stress but at long-lived, daily intervals. Excessive glucocorticoids, over a long term, can interfere with the normal functioning of the body and precipitate a wide variety of health problems including heart-disease (and ulcers, as the title suggests).
In the case of driving, an aggressive lane-changing drive in a fast car might be exhilarating under certain conditions, but it's a different story for a daily commute. It's no accident that the advice given to people that experience aggressive drivers on the road is often along the lines of "Let him go, don't become a part of his bad day." Aggressive driving is a self-reinforcing bad habit that becomes part of people's identity in many cases. Personally, I don't care about the health of aggressive drivers, but I do care about their propensity to cause accidents and hurt innocent people.
Absolutely agree. I live in a 30km/h zone (regular speed in a city is 50km/h in Germany). And we have speeders every day. While kids are playing and elderly people trying to cross the streets.
What I wanted to say:
I care - and we petitioned the city to at least have marked parking spaces implemented with big flower pots on every side to at least reduce the speed people can go here.
They found that weaving between lanes is faster, but not by very much depending on which lane you're comparing it to. The final result (shown at 3:54 in the link) was:
* Weaving between lanes: 1h 16m
* Lane 1: 1h 19m
* Lane 2: 1h 20m
* Lane 3: 1h 29m
* Lane 4: 1h 33m
Lanes 1 and 2 are close enough I can imagine it being chance and more tests resulting no noticeable difference. And for an over-an-hour drive, it's already no reasonable difference anyway.
If you know the area and traffic patterns you can do that and basically stick to your lane for long periods and just switch a few times. I have something like that on my pre-covid commute for example, where you have to be in the right most lane until between a certain off ramp and the corresponding on ramp. There's always lots of traffic and you go between 10 and maaaybe 40 km/h. There you switch to the leftmost land so that you don't get bogged down by the regular mergers from the on ramp in the right lane and the 'middle lane drivers' who merge into the middle lane right about there too. Then until the next on ramp you stay on the left lane but have to switch over to the right lane again because no trucks allowed on it and most people try to pass on the left lane while everyone else is stuck with middle lane drivers and trucks.
If you know the area in the above example, just choose lane 1 for sanity. If you don't know the area and happen to stick to lane 4,id rather try weaving to be honest.
over enough journeys, driving faster will always decrease your average travel time (unless you crash or get pulled over, I guess). the way to discourage people from speeding is not to tell them something obviously wrong, but to discuss the legal/safety risks and the increased gas and brake pad consumption. I understand that I can get places faster by speeding in the city, but I don't do it because, to me at least, the gains are marginal compared to the risk, cost, and stress.
Keep in mind that driving manuals are deliberately written at a 6th to 9th grade reading level depending on the state.
Yes, you're right that the gains from speeding are marginal compared to the risk, cost, and stress. But it's hard to communicate that kind of nuance. If the manual just says lead-foots aren't going to get somewhere faster by speeding to each intersection that's "good enough" and very close to reality for the purpose of the manual. National merit semifinalists can get the queue-theory version from their high-school math/driving instructor during driver's ed.
Is it though? Almost all the knowledge we have is taught using flawed and simplified models that we can niptick and find "obviously wrong" when deeply examined. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_ladder
And IME, when I'm explaining something, pedantry and specifics almost always get my audience confused more than help to get the point across.
I put false without thinking. I had everything else on the test right and part of the course was the instructor reviewing your test and going over your incorrect answers. He wasn’t a programmer (I think former military tbh) and didn’t really understand why I got it wrong even after I explained it…
On a test for a gun license, it could get a little squishy as there are likely questions about the law (which only sometimes aligns with common sense) translated into lay English (which lacks the degree of precision you would likely find in the actual legal phrasing).
From Reddit ELI5:
"Cream or Sugar, in coffee is OR it means one the other or both
Fish or Chicken, for dinner is XOR it means one or the other not both."
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4v6dcd/c...
Most cases where "or" is taken to mean xor are actually asking for a choice, expecting one of the options as an answer. If the "or" is part of a question expecting a yes/no answer, then it is much harder to justify it being an xor.
What affects the duration of a planned journey?
a) Length of the journey.
b) Maximum speed in few lone sections of the journey.
It uses checkboxes, so you can check both.
They expect you to check only a), but b) is in my view also logically correct answer as if at any section even if it's shorter than 1 metres, if your max speed nears 0, duration of your journey will reach infinity. But it is worded in such a way that most people will get the hint that B) should not be checked.
"few" and "lone sections". As in statistically irrelevant. The assumption is that people 'get' for example (and its being taught over and over in driving school too) that if you speed to get through one traffic light in the city you'll not make it through the next one anyway and thus not really be faster. On the highway if you only speed once or twice for a short lone section you won't really notice in the end.
You don't even have to come at it with a nerd mathematicians mind and play tricks like Max speed near zero (not a realistic scenario so not something a driving exam would ask but definitely a fun scenario in a math lecture at university maybe). I can think of multiple sections in my city where speeding through the right traffic light when it's "cherry green" will net you a significant advantage because of the awful street and intersection layout and traffic light phases in that area. If you do the same just one traffic light after it though it won't help you at all because the next light will catch you unless you really want to cause an accident.
And if you are driving a 500km+ route and you can "speed" through it at 160+ km/h for a significant portion of it vs. going 120 that will save you a noticeable amount of time on the journey. This assumes something like Germany and your route being in parts with not many speed limits and not too much traffic so that you can comfortably cruise at 160 to 180 vs. arriving as a nervous wreck close to a heart attack because of all the near crashes from slowing down for the grandma going 100 switching to the left lane a few car lengths in front of you.
The free-response question was something like: “What is the single most important thing you can do to improve your safety as a driver?”
I answered: “Always drive sober.”
The “correct” answer was: “Fasten your seatbelt.”
I can only imagine the grader’s face / thoughts when they had to mark my answer as incorrect.
But it does slow your reaction time, and it does massively increase your accident risk. And that's couched in, "And now it's going to take many many more minutes for another unit to get to your patient than the few seconds you'd have saved".
If it were a question only about cars at rest it would be phrased something like "how far behind a car should you stop when queued" or something of that nature.
You can think of it as "it'll take you one second to react and one to brake to a stop, so you should be two seconds away".
A vendor offers you season tickets to the Cubs games. Are you allowed to accept?
1) Yes, because neither of you are in the baseball business.
2) No, not under any circumstances.
3) Yes, if you give the tickets to someone else, such as your brother-in-law.
The "right answer" was quite obvious, making it more of an intelligence test than an ethics test.
I suppose in this case it might instead just be a formality? And no one has actually ever failed that test?
That said improvised psychology is as bad as anything improvised, only people are generally more comfortable improvising it (and indeed commenting on it) without knowledge of their lack of knowledge, as opposed to fields that look more like science such as software engineering.
* "Does the author really mean what they are asking? Are the mistakes in the phrasing or corner cases intentional, meant to catch me, test my deep knowledge?", or
* "Is the author just not very good with logic / not thinking this through?"
I go with the latter in "soft social" contexts. Never regretted it yet.
This saved my hide recently in June, when I had to undergo a mandatory psychological examination for my gun license permit. Serious official stuff, with my permit on the line… And the "serious" psy-test was exactly as "robust" you'd expect from the field of psychology.
I answered the way I figured the test author construed the questions (= what they likely meant to ask), not what they actually asked. Easy pass.