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Yeah, I don't think they're literally meaning "hurt" here.

Maybe a better analogy is where you're having a conversation with someone, and they throw in a double-negative. It's not like you're literally unable to work it out, but you need to engage with it consciously for a second. In a high-stakes conversation, that's just something that's good to avoid.

A memorable example of this for me (if a bit of a tangent) was when Felix Baumgartner was doing his mega parachute jump, and they kept screwing up the comms for which direction the wind was coming from / going in: https://youtu.be/rNhmYaWiPEk?t=4200 (by convention, people talk about wind in terms of the direction they come from).

I think the whole thing here is that driving involves a lot of modelling other drivers and their intentions, so our tolerance for bad UX that requires conscious thought should be really low.




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