this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
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I have a friend who moved to the US from India. He says when he first got here he was frequently bumping into people in hallways and sidewalks, because his instinct was to move to the left, and as he eventually figured out, the US instinct was to move to the right.
The only reason we could come up with was driving sides and the India/British left side vs. US right side. Because he wasn't constantly bumping into people in India, lol.
Heh, an interesting suggestion to link these two.
I don’t understand how these could not be connected. In a question of which way people go to avoid collisions, it only makes sense to look at which way people go to avoid collisions.
But how are they connected? My country drives on the left, so should I move left to avoid oncoming traffic and to the right to overtake? If the connection was so strong then we should have different instincts depending on the context, not one single direction we always choose.
I am not convinced by this argument at all. For me, anyway, it depends on the the space available, where they are, which way I'm headed, which way they're headed, etc.
Consider computational efficiency though.
You can consider all those variables you mentioned, but it takes more memory and processing cycles to do so.
The benefit of an automatic go-left rule, a standard in the same way USB, the keyboard layout, and the alphabet song are also standards, is that it doesn’t take computational resources to decide on a solution. As long as the standard describes a working system, the inefficiency of its match to the myriad situations in terms of execution, is made up for in terms of efficiency of the process of deciding on that solution for that given situation.
USB as standard pays for itself by allowing us to buy computers and peripherals without having to think about connectors. Both of those things can be designed without effort spent on those decisions.
Always going the same way works well enough in almost all 2D navigation contexts that it creates a reliable way to avoid collisions at a societal level. In the ethernet standard , where there is no right or left because it’s a 1D context, they’re forced into a different anti-collision strategy: wait a random amount of time then try again to send. It’s less efficient than “take one step left, then proceed”.
I’m rambling. I hope you get the point. Standards save computational resources by loosely fitting a simple line to a complex data set, but in design space. There’s error, but it’s within acceptable range and has benefits in a different dimension.
My computer gives me notification pop-ups but it doesn't do it when I'm sharing my screen because context matters.
Some things are easy to standardise. But walking into a wall, or a lamp post, or into the road or a parked car, or barging into someone else, or going a long way around because there's a big group of them mostly on the side you've decided to robotically choose, or any number of other complications, really aren't worth it for the almost non-existent computational expense involved in choosing the best path forwards, like we all do all the time almost every single day of our lives.
I had this experience in Japan. Just walking around, I would unconsciously start drifting to the right. My friend had to yank me back into position a few times to avoid collision. He was so mad at me, like: "how can you not remember?"
But it was completely unconscious, especially since I was also looking around at something.