Hal forwarded from a Nature article trying to explain why the other lane
seems faster by appealing to various illusions. I have an alternative
explanation: The other lane *is* faster.
A lane is slow because there are more cars in it. But that means that most
observers are in slow lanes. Most of the time, "the other" lane should thus
be genuinely faster.
Hal writes:
>I have in fact found that if I keep a running count, plus
or minus, as
>cars pass me and I pass them back, I do find that the
actual progress
>of the other line relative to my own is much less
discouraging than my
>instincts suggest. This has helped me stay calmer while
driving.
Well, obviously on average that must hold, since overtaking one car (+1)
means that exactly one car is overtaken (-1). But most of the *time* you
would be in the process of being overtaken rather than overtaking. This is
related to the point that the Nature article makes, that a driver overtakes
many cars in a short time, since the slower moving cars are packed closer
together, while those same cars will take a longer time to overtake the
drive, since they are then moving faster and are spread out over a longer
interval.
Nick Bostrom
Dept. Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method
London School of Economics
Email: n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk <mailto:n.bostrom@lse.ac.uk>
Homepage http://www.hedweb.com/nickb <http://www.hedweb.com/nickb>
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