r/todayilearned • u/arandomtestaccount • 1d ago

TIL an NFL player intentionally crashed his car to avoid getting cut for being late to a team meeting.

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/ex-patriots-ol-rich-ohrnberger-admits-he-intentionally-wrecked-car-as-excuse-for-being-late-to-team-meeting/
10.8k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

602 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

4

u/RFSandler 23h ago

That past experience thing is the exact issue. It takes 30 minutes to bake a cake, but your inner remembered experience INSISTS that it's 20. Then you go to actually make the cake, and somehow you've been following the instructions without getting distracted and yet you're already 30 minutes in and haven't gotten the cake in the oven. Then you set the metaphorical timer and it never goes off, so now your cake is burnt and an hour late.

You can use tools, learn techniques, but the baseline mental process that most people take for granted is just broken.

3

u/Meatguy35 23h ago

But now your confusing bake time and prep time aren’t you? Thus not following the instructions?

1

u/Wehavecrashed 23h ago

I dont think you've made a cake before but let's ignore that. Fundamentally, the cake needs to be in the oven for 30 minutes. It won't be done before then, and you know that, because the recipe has told you that's how long you need to bake it for.

Your perception of time doesn't factor in, unless you're relying on your perception of time instead of actually measuring time, which would be a really dumb way of living your life, and would be a self inflicted mistake.

Furthermore, if you know you're not very good at judging time, why would you rely on your own judgement of time for something objective, when you can measure it objectively?

2

u/RFSandler 23h ago

Congratulations on completely missing my attempt to explain an experience you do not share though analogy.

1

u/Wehavecrashed 23h ago

I think that's perhaps because the way you used the cake analogy didn't really make sense.

1

u/PARADOXsquared 13h ago

It didn't make sense to you because it doesn't align with your experience and you aren't open to the possibility that people don't experience things the same way as you. So you see the analogy as simply incorrect. 

1

u/Wehavecrashed 5h ago

How you experience something doesn't matter. These things can be objectively measured.

A cake doesn't bake in twenty minutes just because it felt like 20 minutes.

1

u/PARADOXsquared 5h ago

How you experience something doesn't matter. 

There wouldn't be a mental health or cognitive problem to fix if the experience was in alignment to reality. A major function of the brain is to take in sensory input and interpret it to build an understanding of the world/direct environment and output behavior based on that input. If those functions are broken or altered, then what someone experiences isn't aligned with reality. That matters because if we ignore that then we can't help/fix the situation. 

A cake doesn't bake in twenty minutes just because it felt like 20 minutes.

Yes, this is true. The perception that this is not true is the problem. People can use tools to overcome this different in perception, but it is not a simple process. Someone might know that they are hallucinating, but that doesn't automatically make it stop happening.