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Blame Your Mistakes on Technology
Techdirt has an quick look at how it is becoming much more common for people to blame their mistakes on technology. "There are people driving off cliffs and through flooded roads and taking detours that span half of England, apparently at the behest of their navigation units. Things got so bad in one place that authorities even had to put up "ignore your sat nav" signs. Now, a woman's car got hit by a train, and for some reason, she's blaming a GPS navigation unit."
it's much easier to blame someone/something else than take personal responsibility for your actions. Is this really a surprise to anyone?
~/.sig: No such file or directory
... if you don't know how to drive, get the fuck off the road.
Technology is a supplement, it is not meant to replace common sense.
I got a message with a series of points criticizing Americans for blaming companies and institutions rather than themselves. I partly agree with the underlying message that people should take charge and solve problems, rather than just cast blame on others. However, the points go too far--they whitewash companies and institutions that really did something wrong. Let's see if I understand how America works lately . . . If a woman burns her thighs on the hot coffee she was holding in her lap while driving, she blames the restaurant. Ordinarily, when you spill coffee on yourself, it hurts but doesn't really injure you. MacDonalds was serving coffee too hot, and as a result, a woman who spilled her coffee was seriously burned. It turns out MacDonalds had been warned about this before--they knew they were doing something dangerous. That's why she won that lawsuit. If your teen-age son kills himself, you blame the rock 'n' roll music or musician he liked. Actually, we don't. A few people tried to blame the musicians, but they did not win those cases. If you smoke three packs a day for 40 years and die of lung cancer, your family blames the tobacco company. If the tobacco company got you addicted when you were a child, because they lied and said smoking was safe when they already knew it was dangerous, it has a lot to answer for. If your daughter gets pregnant by the football captain you blame the school for poor sex education. A responsible teacher would have taught her effective birth control techniques as well as pleasurable sex techniques. If your neighbor crashes into a tree while driving home drunk, you blame the bartender. Bartenders are not supposed to serve alcohol to people who are intoxicated, but they face the temptation to do so anyway in order to sell more booze. If your cousin gets AIDS because the needle he used to shoot up with heroin was dirty, you blame the government for not providing clean ones. Actually other people tried to provide clean needles, specifically to prevent the spread of AIDS, and we blame the government for stopping them. If your grandchildren are brats without manners, you blame television. I suspect the real culprit is the economic system that is set up so that parents can't spend much time with their children--so they use TV to keep the kids distracted. However, some present evidence that the introduction of TV in a society has an effect on the way children generally behave. If your friend is shot by a deranged madman, you blame the gun manufacturer. This goes too far, but there is a core of good sense in it. Nowadays there are things gun maufacturers can do to make it hard for anyone other than the owner to use the gun. And if a crazed person breaks into the cockpit and tries to kill the pilots at 35,000 feet, and the passengers kill him instead, the mother of the deceased blames the airline. This, if it happened, is the only one I won't try to defend. I must have lived too long to understand the world as it is. So if I die while my old, wrinkled ^*%#$* is parked in front of this computer, I want you to blame Bill Gates, OK?
I'm guilty of placing my trust in my HP Travel Companion perhaps a bit too much. It hasn't actually led me anywhere bad, but I do find myself paying attention to it instead of road signs. Now, I have gone on incorrect routes because I trust it to warn me of things ahead of time, but when the turn comes, I'm in the wrong lane (freeway splits, for example).
That being said, I still won't ever get directions the old way ever again (unless they build a new city somewhere or something and I don't have the maps for it).
Anyway, the moral of the story is that we have an innate ability to shift blame. No "technology" is required. (Or rather, maybe blame shifting is a technology.)
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
The woman's car got crunched because the rail crossing was so poorly lit and poorly marked that she didn't know she was on train tracks. I do think she's overreacting by swearing of navigation systems, but then I'm sitting at a desk and she nearly got hit by a train. Let some time go by and her head (and others) will clear and that problem with the crossing will be addressed.
I have a friend whose partner was driving down a motorway (equivalent to a freeway) in Britain. Unlike California where lanes are de-facto equivalent, in the UK it's customary to have faster lanes towards the "outside" (more to the right) of the road; she was driving in the fast lane at ~100 mph, as was typical for the road.
Her BMW had an "intelligent" system on-board as well as the GPS, and out of nowhere, it told her to "stop the car". So she did. Quickly. In the fast-lane, on the motorway. Chaos ensued.
She's not unintelligent (though, being blonde, she did get a certain amount of follicle-related humour directed at her), but she did as she was told, in a pressure-situation. She's one of those people who don't interact well with machines or computers. She didn't think it through, she just reacted. In fact there *was* something seriously wrong with the engine, but nothing that would prevent her from pulling onto the hard-shoulder (the emergency lane).
There seems to be a tech-friendly "gene" (though whether it's nature or nurture is up for debate) whereby people either abrogate all responsibilty to the machine, or they treat it as an advisory adjunct to their daily lives. Perhaps it's just the growing pains of a society in the midst of rapid change. Perhaps in a couple of decades, when the holistic neural interface(TM) is commonplace, it'll be us "techno-savvy" yesterday's-(wo)men that people will be laughing and pointing fingers at, Nelson-like. I wonder what it'll feel like, when the boot is on the other foot...
In other words, sure, people do stupid things, but this is an opportunity to educate, not to mock.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The article makes it sound as if people are suspending their (previously) impeccable judgment when turning on their GPS unit... Certainly that's not the reality. The only thing new here is people blaming the GPS, instead of any other little thing that came to mind, like street lighting, road signs, other cars/pedestrians/animals, etc.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
...whatever you do, don't put the blame on you.
It's actually quite common, and I think it has to do with the way many people are brought up. And it translates into our everyday life and actually corporate life.
In many companies, it does not matter when anything goes wrong, as long as you got someone else to blame. It's funny. Should you happen to work in a large company and something goes wrong, take a close look around you. The only person or people who get(s) very nervous, no matter how trivial or bancrupcy-threatening it is, is the one who can't find anything or anyone to blame but himself.
That's how our education and business system works. It starts with the homework-eating dog and doesn't even end at the report-shredding Xerox. It's never you. It's someone else or, and that's more comfortable, something. Something is better than someone, because something rarely objects.
And technology is better than pets. First of all, the pet excuse gets old. And second, and that's more important, many people don't have the foggiest idea just what computers or gadgets can do. They will readily believe you. Not to mention that some things might have even happened to themselves already. Your report's not ready in time? Sorry, boss, computer BSODed on me, JUST before I could save.
He'll understand. Take my word for it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
once tripped onto a chair (she was around 3 years old) and hurt her knee.
After crying a lot... she yelled: "TUPID CHAIR!" and kicked the chair.
Somehow by reading the article summary this scene came to my mind.
These are the same people who used to blame peons. Technology eliminated the peons, so what is left? (Mark Twain wrote a book about the earlier phenom, by the way: Prince and the Pauper)
The woman that won against mcdonalds suffered severe burns (more than you'd get from normal coffee) and sued for medical costs (they'd settled hundreds of times for the same issue). The jury fined them one day's coffee sales, as a symbolic way of punishing mcdonalds. This about was later reduced by the judge. All told, this isn't a frivolous suit.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Right - and the person/company that writes software stupid enough to include such routes bears none of blame? Bovine exhaust. I know it's popular on Slashdot to blame the sheeple - but this isn't a case of using a hair dryer in the shower. It's a case of poorly designed and implemented software. These navigation units market themselves not as providing 'suggestions' but as providing 'directions'. Failing to supply what is advertised is the direct fault of the developer and manufacturer.
This has nothing to do with the GPS being 'off by a bit' - to direct someone down an unmarked dirt road takes a little more than that.
Sorry, but putting a steaming mug of coffee between your thighs in a moving car is just plain and simply dumb. No matter how hot the coffee, not matter how severe the burns. It is dumb. You simply don't do that if you are a sane person. The least thing that will surely happen is that you get coffee stains on your clothing. Because liquids follow drag and thus are prone to exiting their container if said container is not sealed. And even with those cute plastic caps on top, McD cups are NOT what constitutes a sealed container.
Now, the law (unfortunately) does not punish stupidity. But I'm firmly against getting even worse and rewarding it. It was dumb to put the mug there, so you got the coffee on you. That the coffee was searing hot must have been obvious to her, because I do know the McD cups well, it's not really known for its perfect insulating properties. In other words, if you fill something HOT into them, you KNOW instantly when you TOUCH them!
When you now go ahead and put that so effing HOT cup right between your legs and hit the throttle, you act just plain and simply stupidly. Even if you don't have the foggiest idea what coffee is, you should know, at least that's what I expect from people who want to operate potentially lethal machines like a car, that a liquid in a not sealed container which is frigging HOT will follow the laws of gravity and drag. And thus WILL spill when exposed to relevant force.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The best mechanism is just not to have a gun.
Naw. People blame being wrong (or STUPID) on *anything*. Technology is just handy. Take it away, and they'll blame it on something else.
Take one dude I know. He started accusing people of hiding his smokes because he couldn't find them. When everyone told him "Nobody hid your smokes, man.", he got pissed, through a tantrum, and said "Well, I guess that God must not want me to smoke, because HE must have hid my cigarettes!"
That was while he was sober. You should have seen him on the sauce.
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
The coffee as-poured by McDonalds is ~82 degrees C. I boil a kettle, immediately pour the water into the cup, add creamer and server. It's likely to be far hotter (close to 100 degrees C) than the coffee at McDonalds. I drink (well, sip) it pretty much straight-away as well. So does everyone I know.
THIRD DEGREE BURNS oughtn't be the issue. Did you know that if you put your hand into a fully-operational blender, your hands will turn into LIQUIDISED FLESH. It's such an unbelievably stupid act that no-one would have much sympathy for you though. As no-one has much sympathy for the woman who puts not-even-boiling-hot coffee between her thighs and (get this!) does so while she's driving.
- From an earlier post on Digg -
I'm sorry, I guess I'm just sick of this "defence" of stupidity, in the case of the McDonald's coffee case.
Coffee is *made* with boiling-hot water. It is *supposed* to be scalding-hot. I don't care whether it's plus or minus a few degrees of the average scalding-hot water that coffee is usually made with - that shouldn't be the issue, it'll still hurt like hell. The issue ought to be "did the defendent do something unbelievably stupid or was the company negligent". The answer is that *yes*, she did something stupid; she put a frail paper-cup of scalding-hot water between her thighs and then (presumably involuntarily) squeezed her legs together.
Yes, she was hurt, badly. Yes, McDonalds could have made the coffee at a lower temperature, and they were making it hotter for commercial reasons. Both of those are true and neither ought to be relevant. The decision ought to have been based on whether what she did was a reasonable thing to do with *any* fresh cup of coffee - basically whether she should have expected to have been able to pour said cup of coffee over her without injury. I invite anyone defending her to make *themselves* a cup of coffee and pour it over their thighs (at your own risk, of course) - it'll scald you just as badly.
That is in fact what the McDonalds lawyer ought to have done. Simply made a fresh cup of coffee in the court, and asked for volunteers (judge, jury if it was a jury trial ?) to have scalding-hot coffee poured over them. Anyone defending her case would presumably consider *normal* scalding-hot coffee to be non-injurious to human skin.
McDonalds only have a "reasonable" burden of care - if the coffee-cup had dissolved and the contents scalded her, I think we'd all be behind her, but it didn't. People have too little sense of personal responsibility these days, it's easier to sue and "donate" the blame to someone else. It's a sad day for society in general when gross stupidity is defended against common sense.
None of this means I don't feel sorry for her, by the way - I do. I just also think it was her fault, and given that she's become the poster-child for incongruous lawsuits, I think a lot of other people feel the same way. I also think it's a travesty when the courts are overflowing with cases, and innocent people rot in jail awaiting their trial while stupid things like this waste court time; I think there'd be a lot less cases like this if the loser-pays-costs model was adopted, as in the UK, but that's another issue.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
When you have sat-nav, or point-to-point directions, you're SOL if you make a mistake or things aren't clear. If you have a MAP and some basic skills you can always know "i'm here, and i need to be there, so I need to generally be going X direction."
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Now you can blame electricity, computers, and needing to meet deadlines for international customers. You can roll out a new excuse every day and never get to the end.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In a article about people's irrational dependancy on technology, you write that you cannot make coffee without an coffee maker?
How deliciously ironic...
Anyways, coffee has been used for over a thounsand years. Coffee makers and electricity have not.
It'll work as long as whoever wrote the expression you're looking at used the same convention.
Maybe I'm just cynical, but that's probably how they got into such trouble.
People are stupid.
People's instincts will win a Darwin Award.
Common sense, isn't.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
(Hint: look at the color of her hands. If there's any makeup left in the barrel, she should put some on there, too!)
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
Experienced GPS navigators telling us to make U-turns in the middle of freeways, to turn right where there's no sign of any road on the right hand side and so on?
One thing is that people are stupid enough to follow such directions, another is that the map technology clearly isn't up to par. Imagine a car with 'auto-drive' that blindly follows directions just like people do, but without the little bit of sanity that made those ambulance drivers stop after 200 miles and realize that they were a bit off course... A computerized driver would just have kept on going, possibly attempting to reach the goal going 'the other way', i.e. around the globe, which includes a fair amount of undersea driving...
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --