I was part of a project to measure reaction times in a primitive driving simulator. Accelerator, brake, steering wheel from a gaming setup. You drove down a straight road, some roadside scenery went by. Every so often you went through a gate. The gate would sometimes close just as you got there. Measured whether you hit the brake in time. Simple, a little challenging. The idea was, for drivers to self-measure if they were still able to drive safely. Tried to pitch it to an insurance company that rhymes with Slate Charm.
They acted like it was poison. They didn't want to even appear to be trying to select out older customers. The legal trouble they'd have, discriminating according to age (or even appearing to try) would have brought a landslide down on them.
Huh, if they can legally justify explicitly discriminating based on sex and age (younger men generally pay more than younger women, while older women generally pay more than older men) I’m surprised they couldn’t figure out a way to discriminate based on age alone.
Edit: here [0] is a breakdown of car insurance costs, stratified by age/sex. Young people pay by far the most, with premiums steadily declining until age 50 and then rising again. So I’m not sure what their objection might have been, since they already do charge old people more (presumably at a level accurately reflecting their relative risk).
Wouldn’t a driving sim be the exact opposite of that?
“To make our premiums accurately reflect your driving habits and avoid lumping you into crude demographics like the other insurers, we offer all our customers an opportunity to take a spin in our driving sim and get a truly personalized rate reflecting your excellent driving habits.”
I looked into getting one of those once, figuring I’m a safe driver and therefore would only benefit from it.
What I found on the Internet were (self selected, admittedly) stories of the presence of the device making your driving less safe. Since it’s basically an accelerometer, sometimes it’s “safer” to take a curve fast than to brake for it. Or fly through a yellow rather than stop at it.
I have no doubt there’s correlation between those devices’ scores and accident proclivity; but I’m confident my driving is safe as-is and would rather let premiums go down after accident-free miles than on the say-so of a nanny device.
So I bought a dashcam instead, hopefully to avoid being ruled 50/50 at fault if someone hits me.
Those trackers see if you can drive calmly most of the time, which I imagine isn't nearly as age-dependent as a sim that tests emergency reaction time.
Which is interesting, paired with technology in cars that add additional braking force when they detect an emergency braking situation (quick lift off the throttle and immediate application of the brakes). Apparently studies have found that people don't brake hard enough before an accident.
Good thing we're encouraging people to be even MORE afraid of the controls in their vehicles, lest their insurance companies ding them for hurting the accelerometer's feelings.
In the US, it is legal (in a hiring context) to discriminate against young people, but not against old people. For better or for worse, it's not parallel.
Sounds like they don't want to base cost on actual driving ability so that they can keep using the models that make it seem like 7 years of increased rates are justified when it's pretty well known that reaction time peaks early in life - many professional F1 drivers go pro before age 20. Therefore, your program would call attention to the fact that young drivers with no accidents who are competent are heavily overpaying and they weren't interested because it would prove that they are discriminating against the young.
Reaction times aren't everything when it comes to driving. You also have to factor in tendency to speed, tail-gate, drive drunk, or other dangerous driving habits. There may be correlation between those habits and age.
The variance overlaps from age 20-59 so you can't statistically differentiate anything conclusive about the difference between those groups. An alternative conclusion is that retired people (65+) don't drive as much and are able to avoid rush hour / high risk times to drive.
Variance overlapping isn't a reason to discount this analysis. Also note that the variance narrows substantially for older age groups. So effectively what the variance says is that some younger people are vastly more responsible drivers than other young people but older people tend to be more responsible in general.
There could be a number of factors that have nothing to do with responsibility, that's a narrative that gets added to explain the data. You need to do ANOVA test to verify any significant difference in data sets, not look at avg - esp when its not a controlled experiment.
What’s the argument against this exactly?
Your doctor measures your healthiness and if you try to get insured, it’s priced accordingly.
Older driver feel like they’re being discriminated against? Just take a simulation like this and prove your reflexes are within their defined spectrum of acceptability.
That doesn't test reaction speed or driving skill. A slow elderly driver who is inattentive/has poor vision and pulls out in front of people would receive lower rates than someone who drives with traffic, but maintains proper following distance and is forced to brake quickly to avoid the inattentive elderly man who just pulled out in front of them.
A word of caution about machine learning models in academia. The advertised predictive ability or AUC is often inflated, sometimes by a lot. I am not sure why, but I imagine it comes down to the usual p-hacking incentives. Maybe it is because you only need to apply your model to more than one "independent" dataset before you publish a paper. Or simply that academics in diverse fields often lack the nuanced knowledge to realise their model is predicting based on some experimental artifact in their data.
Digital phenotyping has a lot of promise. But considering the unusually conservative old boys club that seems to dominate alzheimers research I would be particularly suspicious of any research on the disease.
Fantastic point. Another thing about academic ml models is that they're commonly evaluated on in-sample data. For example, medical AI devices are commonly evaluated on data coming from the same source/hospital that the training data comes from (see https://www-cdn.law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/...). This leads to over-confidence in the performance because of overfitting of batch effects.
Sure, there's a bit of a phenonemon where a small group of labs come to dominate a field of research through a positive feedback loop. They have some initial success, and then can get funding, they then have increased resources to effectively lobby for more funding, squeezing out other groups. Often leading scientists have a lot of influence over the grant funding bodies, but my understanding of these politics is murky. Often this isn't too problematic, but the Alzheimer's field seems really hell bent on the beta-amyloid thing which looks good on the surface but every drug they have tried (and many have been tried) hasn't worked in practice. Here's a nature news article [0] discussing the beta-amyloid failed drugs story. You will note quotes from leading researchers from Harvard and other prestigious institutes still defending drugs against beta-amyloid despite the history of failure.
These leading labs should be looking at different tactics, but the quotes seem to suggest that as of 2018 these groups were still intent on the same strategy despite the failures.
>Regarding the credit scores study, this may not have to do with forgetting payments as a precursor to dementia,
or my ADHD regularly costing me late fees. I'm ok with it until some company turns out to be just as disorganized as me, because they never have to pay for their foibles.
As someone with no relevant diagnosis but who considers their memory and attention to be occasionally questionable, I find a solution (not always attainable, but I try) in mustering up the energy to create [recurring, if applicable] calendar entries with reminders. Anything to streamline and reduce the friction associated with doing so, such as using voice assistants as much as possible, is super helpful. The slightest bit of thought along the lines of "I'll probably remember" to get out of documenting the reminder is a major catalyst for failure.
Therefore, I'd consider the quantity/frequency of such reminders (detectable by cloud calendar/reminder providers) to be an early indicator of such issues.
My wife and I have a paper calendar and we have a meeting every Wednesday where we check in and record bills and make payments. We get 15-20 bills a month for reasons.
We also moved all bills back to paper, as it’s easier to track that than various email based accounts.
I don't get how this is useful. All of my bill pay are automated and have been for at least a decade. I get paid once a month the total cost of my bills goes to one account and from the rest a portion goes to savings and a portion to a spending account. As my bills get paid the bills account gradually decreases to near zero and at the beginning of each month it's refilled automatically with my direct deposit. I never have to think about paying bills late and have infact never missed a payment.
That’s great. The system that works for you is the best one.
In my case, the cadence ensures that my wife and I communicate about money stuff and are on the same page. This “meeting” takes about 20 minutes. Certain aspects of money coming in and going out are variable for us, so we cannot set and forget. Someday I’m sure we will, but not today!
>I don't get how this is useful. All of my bill pay are automated and have been for at least a decade.
I have an anecdote, that would be central to my article on the ADHD organization if I ever get around to writing it (an ADHD organization is my term for any organization that is less organized than I am, they generally really get on my nerves because as unorganized as they are they like to contact me and complain about my lack of organization skills as being a form of immorality), anyway enough preamble - on to the anecdote:
About 5-6 years ago I got a message from the local power company - please go down and read the meter and tell us what it says if you don't we will come by and read the meter and charge you for us coming by. So of course I didn't read the meter, they said they would come by and charge me a small fee for it, win-win I call that.
The next year they sent me the same message, again I didn't go read because they told me they would do it for a small fee (I think it comes out to between $30-50).
A few months later it's Christmas, I am in Berlin to celebrate with family I get a message from the power company. You owe $15000 extra for the last couple years in extra power usage (this is approximate as I don't know what the rate of exchange was then, it was in Danish kroner, and I don't remember the exact amount). Then they sent another message a couple hours later, you owe $15500, the next day $17000, the next day somewhere around $19000. They just couldn't make up their mind, the power company was going through some monetary issues at the time and a coworker of mine suggested they saw me as the solution.
So I called them up and they said it was because I hadn't done the check in the last two years and so they had to finally come out and check and told me I was morally obligated to do the check and this was what happened when you don't do the check sometimes you end up paying more.
I said so you thought my yearly power consumption for a family of 3 was $2-3000, which is actually a bit high in Denmark (I have an old house, should fix up some stuff) but it turns out to have been more than 3 times as much. Doesn't that sound weird to you?
Argued back and forth. Sent it forward to their investigation department. They asked me to please go look at the meter, I did. Turned out they had read my downstairs neighbor's meter, not mine. My meter is described as being inside the garage in their system, which it is, my neighbor's is directly outside the garage (by the front door)
At any rate - I don't trust giving companies the right to bill me automatically and to pay bills automatically because there are a lot of disorganized organizations out there. Perhaps this particular issue would not have been automatically billed and paid, but I'm glad I didn't have to find out.
I've long used paper with tracking as one of the reasons, but due to the pandemic's effects one actually wound up a month late (and other attempts to keep track also missed it).
I have ADHD and I don’t think I have a single bill that is not on autopay. The only exception was the property tax on my house, until the time I made the expensive mistake of forgetting to pay it. Now the bank pays that
automatically out of escrow (from my mortgage which is also on autopay). I’m pretty sure I could fall off the face of the earth and none of my creditors would notice until my job stopped paying me and my checking account ran dry.
One thing I've found profoundly useful is not thinking of the world as set up against me, but more so that I'm my own worst enemy. I'm set up against myself.
Nothing external will change, so there's no sense fretting about my environment naturally suiting my psychology, because that'll never happen. That's a fantasy. I'd code til 3am too (and have, far too many times) but I've come to believe my job in the present is all about setting up future me for success. Present me tends to have shitty ideas about what to do in the present, but plenty of great ideas about what I should have done in the past or should do in the future. Without being critical of present me, I'm likely to fuck things up properly. I need to focus on the scaffolding for those great ideas for future me and less on the shitty ones for present me. That guy is already a lost cause.
My strategy is one of delayed gratification, which my brain hates. I lay down with a book at 9 or 10pm because it'll put me to sleep in a hurry even though my brain is typically WIRED when I lay down. Yeah it doesn't feel like bed time, but it sure as shit is bed time. I'll do other things like keep shitty food out of my home, because otherwise I'll find really good reasons to eat (too much) of it. I put EVERYTHING in my calendar because although present me is positive future me will remember, that's totally incorrect and I actually do need frequent reminders of pretty much everything I'm not immediately focused on or interested in. I leave my phone behind because even though I'm sure I won't use it too much, yeah, I definitely will. Expect the worst from yourself and prepare accordingly.
So, the world isn't my problem, I am! I'm my worst enemy. The path to defeating myself is doing a lot of stuff I don't feel like doing. I like this approach because rather than being mad at the world for my failures, I'm forced to do something about it.
Decades of activism disagree. One example: people in wheelchairs used to be called "invalids" and pretty much couldn't get anywhere in public. Then the ADA was signed, and public spaces are much more accessible as a result.
A healthy balance between stoic acceptance and dutiful activism is the optimal approach, I think.
I can’t expect my environment to change in any meaningful scope of time. I can try to enact positive changes (especially for my son with ADHD) but for all practical purposes, I need to change me first if I want improvements right now.
>One example: people in wheelchairs used to be called "invalids" and pretty much couldn't get anywhere in public.
I suppose all the photographs of President Franklin Roosevelt traveling all across the world, entering the governor's office and ultimately the whitehouse were fakes since these all happened before the ADA.
The fact one of our very active presidents was confined to a wheelchair really puts a hole in your ADA theory of invalids.
Is your counterpoint really that FDR was able to go places in public?
He notoriously hid his disability with a combination of canes, braces, and family members to hold him upright and even simulate walking.
He also had a tremendous amount of power and money to force or provide his own special accommodations. Like having an army of secret service agents to help him deal with stairs.
"People pretty much couldn't go to space"
"Well actually Richard Branson went to space. That puts a big hole in your people pretty much couldn't go to space argument now doesn't it!?"
The example of a single person with nearly endless resources accomplishing something does nothing to refute a point about the masses. Heck, the "pretty much" qualifier is an acknowledgement that some people got around despite their condition.
I assert that you are not discussing this in good faith and won't be engaging with you further.
Wow, pretty much anything can be refuted when you operate entirely against a wondrous straw man. I didn't say a word about space. It would be pretty dumb to say people couldn't pretty much go to space.
I also don't understand your fixation that just because Roosevelt was able to do something, that no one else was able to. In fact you should know employment of the disabled has actually gone DOWN since the ADA was passed, and in fact over half of the worknig age disabled worked before passsing of the ADA -- which usually involves going out at some point in public.
You've made abundantly clear that your "good faith" worries about others are in fact a projection of your own problem with keeping the good faith.
> It would be pretty dumb to say people couldn't pretty much go to space.
I'm not convinced you're reading the posts of the person you're arguing with, or really putting much effort at all into understanding what they're trying to say.
I'm not trying to convince someone who lacks the ability to be reasoned with.
At first it was that the disabled pretty much couldn't go out in public. That I showed an example of that being incorrect.
Then it was yeah, but that didn't apply to the common person. In fact I showed before the ADA, over half the disabled were employed (which typically, but not always, involves going in public at some point). And I pointed out after the ADA their employment (a key part of being integrated in public) went down.
No one refutes that fact either, but now it's merely I haven't "convinced" you. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. The ADA is completely unconvincing in terms of effectiveness in actually integrating the disabled in public; and the argument the disabled were pretty much not in public before the ADA is equally un"convincing."
> > I'm not convinced you're reading the posts of the person you're arguing with, or really putting much effort at all into understanding what they're trying to say.
> I'm not trying to convince someone who lacks the ability to be reasoned with.
> ...
> No one refutes that fact either, but now it's merely I haven't "convinced" you.
That you think I'm the one who was arguing with you despite me saying "the posts of the person you're arguing with" instead of "my posts" confirms what I was saying.
You don't seem to care about actually understanding the other person's meaning. You're very clearly looking for a way to continue the argument and prove how smart you are, but I assure you as a (former) bystander that you're not succeeding.
Read the two quotes at the top of this post, really read them, and you'll hopefully see what I mean.
I tell you this because I've been there and it's not a good way to live, nor is it a good way to impress people.
>You don't seem to care about actually understanding the other person's meaning. You're very clearly looking for a way to continue the argument and prove how smart you are, but I assure you as a (former) bystander that you're not succeeding.
That's an interesting, but inaccurate thought. How will you go about proving what is going inside my mind when I engage in discourse? Go ahead, I await your proof that is my goal. In reality, I have no interest in how smart you think I am.
>I tell you this because I've been there and it's not a good way to live, nor is it a good way to impress people.
You don't know about the way I live, or who I've impressed or in what way I may have done it. I never claimed to be charismatic and I don't care about impressing you. It's very rich of you to make presumptions about the way I live my life.
I haven't made any presumptions that you lead a life in "not a good way" because of our difference of opinion or presentation made in good faith on HackerNews, and I frankly find I'm quite taken back someone would be as foolish to make such an assertion. You opinion is duly noted, though I find it unconvincing.
In fact, despite struggles I am very happy with the way I live my life. I find the way I'm living it to be good, and it doesn't require your approval. You are free to pursue your own happiness, and if you don't enjoy my discourse I am not forcing you to engage in it.
I might add, you haven't added a single fact to this discussion, merely your ad hominem attacks on my character. I consider discourse purely driven in ad hominem (living life in "not a good way", wanting to "prove how smart") the hallmark of a weak mind.
>I tell you this because I've been there
You haven't been "here" with me. I'm not like you, and I never want to be, nor will be.
>Read the two quotes at the top of this post, really read them, and you'll hopefully see what I mean.
I hope you'll do the same, and understand what I really meant when I said I wasn't trying to convince someone who couldn't be reasoned with.
Ten years ago that could have been my response when someone called me out. I typed the exact same kinds of things to the exact same kinds of callouts. Until one day when instead of arguing further I actually did sit down, reflect, and become incredibly embarrassed with my behavior.
I wondered why no one else had told me how it looked or what it made me look like, but then I realized they had been. So that's all I'm trying to do now for you.
I'm glad you were able to look back on your behavior and realize what an embarrassment you have been.
Here's my opportunity to tell you what you so wished to hear: I think in 10 years, you will look back, and realize your history and your embarrassment has repeated itself, and that you've not learned from your mistake. I'm definitely not "convinced" you've learned to read what others are saying, or really put much effort at all into understanding what they've said.
I also hope someday you understand that it is indeed dumb to suggest people pretty much can't go to space, or to suggest that those in wheelchairs pretty much couldn't go in public before the ADA.
Other users take note: this commenter frequently makes arguments that are so off-base, that I'm convinced they're either a bad-faith troll, or unwilling to actually think about the discussion at hand.
By the commenter, you must be referring to yourself.
Over half of the working age disabled were employed before the passing of the ADA and that number went down after the passing of the ADA. Seeing as being employed often (but not always) involves going into public, and is a key measure of integration with the public, I'd say the disabled were far from "pretty much" not going anywhere in public before passing of the ADA.
In fact one could argue the ADA harmed integration in public of the disabled by the side effect that it lowered their employment.
And yet instead of leading with that, you led the argument with "well the President of the country was able to get around so you're wrong."
And anyway, employment rate alone is one tiny sliver of the puzzle. A thousand factors influence employment rates, and general quality of life factors such as "I can navigate public spaces without someone lifting my chair up the stairs" are not measured by employment.
Further, the ADA was one example of activism making at least a slight improvement in the physical public conditions that people have to put up with. That was my point. All I'm saying is you don't have to just bow your head and accept the conditions that normative society thrusts upon you if you're atypical in some way. Activism can move the needle in a more accessible direction. Perhaps you can think of some better examples of this than the ADA.
The world is too dynamic, complex, contextual, and varied to really nail down any facet of it as problematic and then resolve that problem. The world largely is what it is and it’s more my job to find a way to thrive in it than it is the world’s job to accommodate me. That’s how I see it.
I don’t blame myself - I don’t even blame myself for blaming the world in the past either. I suppose there really is no blame to place by any practical means to any practical effect.
The most relevant question is "What do I have the power to improve?"
Sometimes, via activism and organization, it's the state of the world. Sometimes, via discipline and planning, it's one's own interface on to the world,
When I was a teenager I was really hoping that when I grew up I would stop being sleepy in the morning and then becoming wide awake around 11pm.
Hasn’t changed at all. Everyone’s got some way that society doesn’t work for them though. Being left handed, too short, too tall, a minority, wheelchair-bound etc. All things considered I have it pretty good.
Yeah, 100% - my dull brain has somehow managed to give me a relatively comfortable life. Plenty of problems crop up but I've got food, a family, a job. I used to resent this brain quite a bit but I've come to like it a lot. It could have been worse.
The notion that morning people are virtuous and evening people are lazy should have been shot in the back of the head and buried in a shallow grave the instant that the electric light bulb was invented, rendering forever moot any practical relevance of what hours the sun happens to rise to when people should work.
I also have ADHD, and worse still, I'm all out of medication until mid-September.
The reality is we have to be in control of our lives despite our condition. If you can't remember things, write them down. If you have a hard time focusing, try to remove distractions from your environment. If your day is unstructured, plan tomorrow out tonight. If you are constantly awake at 3am, set your bedtime earlier and use whatever tools you need to make sure you are asleep at 10pm.
I'm convinced there's just no other way to handle life. The world won't wait for us to be ready, so we have to ready ourselves. It's unfair, but that's life.
Regarding the credit scores study, this may not have to do with forgetting payments as a precursor to dementia, it may have to do with costly medical issues that was the precursor to dementia which caused the financial stress
My grandmother had very serious dementia. I remember a year or so before we were aware of it that she almost ran a cyclist off the road which was very uncharacteristic.
One of the early signs that foreshadowed my mother's decline was the deterioration of her driving skills, and this preceded almost all other noticeable symptoms.
Driving is a complex skill that requires rapid, continuous sensory integration to perform well. It makes sense to me that it is something that would first show a deficit.
One of the early signs in both my mother’s and grandmother’s Alzheimer’s was forgetting to pay (UK) road tax. Somehow both of them managed to get away with being on the road for the next six months, before the rest of the family found out and intervened.
At least in my mother’s case, this was far from the only thing that suddenly became wrong with her driving; she also developed a fear of going over about 50 mph and using gears above third, and one sign we only recognised in retrospect was that she forgot how maps worked.
I had a commanding officer in the military who was showing signs of dementia.
He was making… let’s say, very bad tactical decisions. In the game way past his prime. But this was a whole different level.
We were going to let his family know but it turns out it was becoming obvious in other areas. He was doing weird things like leaving doors open, eating a lot of sweets, and being paranoid about washing his hands all the time.
Not a good scenario, really crazy condition. Sad for the people that got left to deal with him.
What procedures does the military have in place for when a high-ranking officer's mental acuity takes a steep dive? I'm curious about how that plays out.
Formally, the Disability Evaluation System. In my case, it was immediately obvious that this guy was falling apart. In about one month things went from fine, to amazingly bad. Everyone saw it, even the people that didn't want to had to admit something was up.
This other article about writing style risks is interesting. If it's accurate, then I will probably have early onset alzheimer's. I miss articles, misspell, and repeat words. I'm only in my 30s...
Oh wow that is helpful for me. My grandfather had Alzheimers, and my mother (his daughter) had frontotemperal dementia. So I know I'm at risk. This was a good article towards maybe helping out some research even if it doesn't help me specifically.
I'm curious if driving in particular could predict other things, like ADHD / bipolar. Having had a few friends on the spectrum, it definitely felt like their driving patterns were quite different than other people on the road.
I am curious. There may very well be patterns. Like that recent article where an algorithm could guess the ethnicity of patients from X-rays, such patterns may very well be present in driving
Eg for bipolar, during the manic phase (or what I assume was the manic phase) the driving was more erratic while during depressive phase it was pretty calm.
In general it felt like three things swung wildly between manic/depressive: sleep (more sleep when depressive), driving (more erratic during manic), and weight (higher weight when depressive).
Very small sample size and I'm in no way qualified in this topic, it's just observation.
My mother had Fronto-temporal dementia, and her father (my grandfather) had Alzheimers. So after she passed for it, the fact I might get it has been heavily weighing on my mind. I've looked for various things to "test" myself, and notice things about me that might be nothing but also might be something. To be able to get a risk factor would at least either let me worry less, or have an answer that it is in a percent of likelihood.
