“Cautious driver” is not a real category. It’s not something my crash database can filter on.
What makes “cautious driver” “not a real category”? You don’t mean that it’s “not a real category” just because you don’t have data on it in your database… do you?
I mean it doesn’t describe something objective/measurable unless you define it explicitly in terms of behaviours. People can do research on e.g. crash rates for drivers who never drink and drive vs frequently drink and drive, people who speed and people who don’t, etc.
Are you suggesting that there’s no correlation between such behaviors (e.g. between frequency of drinking and driving vs. frequency of texting and driving, or vs. frequency of speeding, or vs. frequency of failing to use turn signals properly, etc.)?
(Because if there are such [positive] correlations, then a “carefulness” factor would emerge, such that we could give the value of the factor for a given driver and it would predict behavioral metrics we hadn’t measured yet. That would be objective and measurable.)
Of course, the flip side of acknowledging that nonetheless there is such a thing as a “cautious driver” (and even aside from the logic described in the grandparent, it’s clearly much too intuitive a concept to give up—witness the fact that you use it yourself!) is realizing that although we might not have access to that data now, there is no principled reason why we couldn’t have such data…
I think I’m making a distinction between using it colloquially (i.e. I can say that my uncle is tall, which can be true, but it doesn’t tell you much about my uncle’s actual height) and using it with the rigor that Bezzi implied (i.e. “has someone studied this clear category of cautious drivers”?)
What makes “cautious driver” “not a real category”? You don’t mean that it’s “not a real category” just because you don’t have data on it in your database… do you?
I mean it doesn’t describe something objective/measurable unless you define it explicitly in terms of behaviours. People can do research on e.g. crash rates for drivers who never drink and drive vs frequently drink and drive, people who speed and people who don’t, etc.
Are you suggesting that there’s no correlation between such behaviors (e.g. between frequency of drinking and driving vs. frequency of texting and driving, or vs. frequency of speeding, or vs. frequency of failing to use turn signals properly, etc.)?
(Because if there are such [positive] correlations, then a “carefulness” factor would emerge, such that we could give the value of the factor for a given driver and it would predict behavioral metrics we hadn’t measured yet. That would be objective and measurable.)
Yeah, okay.
Look at me thinking like an engineer—“but it’s not useful from a practical point of view because we don’t have access to that data”.
Sure, that’s a reasonable view.
Of course, the flip side of acknowledging that nonetheless there is such a thing as a “cautious driver” (and even aside from the logic described in the grandparent, it’s clearly much too intuitive a concept to give up—witness the fact that you use it yourself!) is realizing that although we might not have access to that data now, there is no principled reason why we couldn’t have such data…
I think I’m making a distinction between using it colloquially (i.e. I can say that my uncle is tall, which can be true, but it doesn’t tell you much about my uncle’s actual height) and using it with the rigor that Bezzi implied (i.e. “has someone studied this clear category of cautious drivers”?)
Then again, my example here seems to have failed because people do study tallness: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/000291499390523F , but they crucially define tallness as above the 95th percentile. Other studies I’m glanced at use height as a continuous variable, so who the heck knows.