@brushbristle replied to your post “Norton was able to get the car running because he had a manual, not because he had good intuitions about how cars work.”
Thank you Frank. I will tell Norton you said he was a good driver next time I see him.
Good for Norton! Also, to make this a bit more precise: a lot of Norton’s bad driving was him not understanding the difference between “the car isn’t supposed to do that” and “the car being made to do that by its design is bad.”
Like, when he goes over the speed limit to get to places he has a destination in mind and doesn’t consider what is happening to the car as an independent entity, he gets into an adversarial relationship with the road that results in more and more unpleasant surprises as he attempts to navigate it, all of which is fine because we’ve trained Norton to not think the way he has been trained to think by using the internet to explain his bad decisions as if he were a dog.
To Norton, “the car is not supposed to do that” means “you’re supposed to move the wheel at this angle because this is what the car will do if you do this,” and “you don’t want the car to do that” means “oh, god, it’s going to do that” and so on. If we ask “hey why does the car not like that you’re not doing it at all, why do you have to move the wheel in this awkward way,” Norton says “because that’s how the car moves.” If we instead say “hey it’s doing that weird thing right now, why, can’t you do it this way, that’s how the car is supposed to do it, why is the car being this dumb,” Norton says “the car doesn’t care about that.”
He does not understand why the car does not like the way he is interacting with it. He knows about the car’s mind, just not why it does not work the way he wants it to. This is the kind of thing that we trained Norton away from, and he thinks the only reason to ever think about the car as being the thing it is is because you’re making it worse for the car by being the car, in this case because the car is “supposed to like you doing the thing” and “you’re being a jerk”
It’s really a whole thing






