I still don't get why anyone would want to drive around sounding like that.
Evidence from game behavior suggests ~30% of people are willing to experience some cost to themselves in order to inflict a greater one on other people. People like this don't feel they are winning unless someone else is losing. If true, this explains a great deal.
Outright malice probably only explains a small fraction of it. Partly it's just fun to make a lot of noise, and if you have little/no respect for other people then why not?
A less malicious part of it also arises from the fact that the cheaper the modification, the worse it sounds.
You can make a car sound excellent with no drone with a $5,000 factory quality upgrade... or you can pay some bozo $100 to cut out your muffler and weld in a straight line pipe.
That may not entitle them, but it represents how people might make this choice without intentionally being a nuance in mind
I'd say a less mentioned guideline is "Please don't leave insubstantial comments playing psuedo-mod" but it's actually addressed right there in the rules you linked.
I have a 23 year old civic with little to no rust (yay California) except for a huge rust hole on the exhaust just before the muffler. So the modification is free!
I was looking into some kind of fix to wrap around the pipe but instead I had a very good deal on a 13 year old prius fall in my lap so now the civic is parked up while I decide what to do with it.
The key difference is even loud factory exhaust setups leave room for relatively quiet operation depending on how you drive.
That Elantra driver was an idiot: he went in a town and drove in sport mode and drove in a way that forces extra loud pops
If he hadn't been forcing it the car was perfectly capable of not making excessive noise.
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The $100 bozo special on the other hand has none of that: it's always loud and obnoxious.
In fact it gets more obnoxious at cruising RPM because of drone.
There are aftermarket exhausts that try to match the factory-style "not loud by default", but they're expensive because it takes careful engineering and integrating things like valves and Helmholtz resonators.
That is a good study, and it does explain one of the behaviors.
But do not discount the importance of powerlessness in these behaviors. People who have relatively less power in their work, their surroundings, their relationships, there ability to influence their own econonmic situation, etc, still need a way to express power. It is easy to couch it merely in terms of winning/losing in the moment, but without context it is hard to see what the right solution is.
If it is merely winning/losing/greater cost, with no particular motivation, then banning any particular annoying activity is as good a regulation as any other.
But when you take away a dimension of power over an area that a person strongly associates with "basic freedoms" such as owning a camaro/civic/harley/gixxer and tuning it to their liking, including making it incredibly and illegally loud, you are making a more fundamental policy decision than you might realize.
My take is that these make for bad county/state/federal laws. They are fine for city laws that are associated with modest fines, because that is the kind of law that continues to enable some expression of control and personal power-- an important part of dignity.
They annoy me. The people and their exhausts branded "Neighbor Haters." But so do the pedestrians who choose to enter the intersection when the red hand is up and the countdown timer is at 3 seconds, and they feign feebleness in order to take nearly a minute to cross the street while 500 people in gridlock wait in all directions. But I see it for what it is and choose to respect their dignity, probably when they need it most.
This is an extremely depressing statistic to read. I hope that it's something we can modify culturally rather than being a hard-wired part of our brains.
Troublingly, the study suggests otherwise, noting that consistent preferences seem to be established by age 6 (and citing some other research documenting as such). While it's not definitive or replicated, I do find the large n, multinational sampling, and experimental elegance of this own persuasive; it's had a significant effect on my worldview.
This does not explain it, qnd trying to do so through biology is the wrong angle.
This issue is purely a cultural one, not a biological one, but this is not popular to investigate because 1. it's considered impossible to solve and 2. brings up difficult questions regarding cultural relativity that aren't appreciated in the modern academic Anglosphere.
I'm continuously surprised that even on HN this comes up so often. A phenomenon is presented which is orders of magnitude more common in one culture than another, yet what is reached for is a biological, tech, or otherwise "hard science" explanation.
In this case, the phenomenon is one of publically inflicting harm on others at a cost and no gain to themselves.
I guess it has to do with the community (understandably!) having a strong tendency to approach everything from a STEM PoV when it comes to all but a small number of (mostly US-specific, policy or economic) topics.
Just to prevent misunderstandings here, culture here doesn't mean the culture of a nation but of (much smaller) communities, in 2023.
Evidence from game behavior suggests ~30% of people are willing to experience some cost to themselves in order to inflict a greater one on other people. People like this don't feel they are winning unless someone else is losing. If true, this explains a great deal.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451 - see figure 3 if you want to get right to it.