Thread by @SwiftOnSecurity

On TikTok there is AdjusterTok, where work from home insurance agents video their side of calls explaining how car insurance works to irritated people, and it’s quite sobering stuff. People don’t really know what insurance is, it’s just some magical thing to make stuff better.

Constant asks to add people to insurance coverage retroactively is indicative of someone where none of this is a market product, where there is no concept of the role of insurance, it’s an ethereal “thing” that will give you a new car and reimburse you for feeling bad.

Another downstream of lack of parental involvement and cognition maybe. Because car insurance is a somewhat specialized instrument that many will just pick up to some degree. Like that insurance requirements are for the OTHER person’s car not yours. Thats a whole other thing.

There’s a really delicate area of public policy and societal design where… you can’t just tell some people to conceive of things they can’t or deduce things they don’t want to. Yeah it’s not fair you owe 30k on a car that doesn’t exist anymore. You didn’t understand the stakes.

I mean, the entire architecture of every human expected to be acquiring and financing and maintaining and insuring and operating safely a $50k deadly weapon that randomly gets destroyed – really exposes some… problems.

Really go search TikTok insurance adjuster. I’ve watched like 3 hours of this stuff. People will call insurance after their car gets repossessed and expect a new car. It’s incredibly sobering and interesting because you have to imagine the other side of the call and mental state.

There was a meme recently about mental acquity where people can’t imagine hypothetical scenarios, I think a better idea might be “why you don’t get your insurance money back if you don’t crash” and “why you can’t add someone to a policy after a crash.” This is really incredible.

Then there are calls where you can tell the other person has ALWAYS gotten their way through being a bully, but there is absolutely nothing in the world you can do to to an insurance adjuster if you hadn’t been paying for 9 months. But they’ll sit there and expect the world.

There was a call where someone dropped off a damaged vehicle to a mechanic, gave the mechanic the insurance company name and asked to be fixed, but they’ve never even had a policy - they never even reported an accident. Living these peoples lives must be eternal suffering.

There was a call where someone was complaining why the insurance denied replacing their starter motor. The adjuster had to explain insurance is not a car servicing warranty and no there’s no possible way to change that. Insurance isn’t a maintenance butler. That’s you.

Again the theme of many calls is that car insurance is a *literally magical* unknowable service that reduces the immense responsibility of owning and operating a car to zero and further operates solely to lose money like a government welfare program. That’s why you have it.

And constantly people asking why they didn’t have coverage or why someone in their household was excluded (they did it to save money). You literally chose those options! You chose not to have collision! Or rental coverage! Those were options they wanted to sell! You chose this!

Again, the immensity of finance consequences for owning a car are completely unreal unless you are extremely diligent and conceive of the risk. Yes you are out $60,000 on a Maserati your son rammed into a fire hydrant. You excluded him. Who’s going to fix that? Nobody.

I’m just enthralled with this exposure to people having terrible things happen (often their fault) and finding out magic is not real and they need to argue with their past selves not some person on a phone with a complete log of everything they’ve said and investigation notes.

There are multiple categories of TikTok videos of people running into rigid systems they cannot make submit. There is a car dealership financing manager who records with sales agents what people on floor want, their financial reality, their trade in – it’s completely delusional.

You begin to understand the utter resentment this must generate, this magical world constantly making you the victim. Where your unacknowledged mistakes should be excusable and yourself made whole and the universe fixed through mechanisms that cannot withstand a moment’s thought.

So it seems I’ve found a new nootropic stack that works extremely well.

I am not an insurance expert but I asked a personal injury attorney who replied to give some short advice on what your car coverage should be at minimum. This maps with other advice I’ve seen. I’m 100/300. You will get screws without this stuff so many ppl don’t have insurance:

Man told car is a potential total loss, but it needs to be verified. Man calls days later, during update mentions he has bought a new car. However, after inspection, his damaged car is NOT a total loss. He then argues to make them change to a total loss for 7 minutes. Fails.

Woman reports accident - they were backing up to avoid a garbage truck coming out of a narrow street. However, other driver says there was no garbage truck, they were honking to get them to stop. Didn't realize insurance does their own investigation. Yells at agent for minutes.

Man is passenger in friends car when hit&run happens. He calls his insurance instead of friends. He doesn't have coverage. Shoulder hurt and blood pressure. Demands agent call someone. She explains there is nobody to call if it's a hit&run. He demands they call friends insurance.

Man plows through two cars, which are covered, his car ends up in tow yard, which isn't. Leaves it there for two weeks. Call insurance demanding they pay for it since they own it(?). Asks what tow charges will be. Yells at agent for 15 minutes, asks her what she expects him to do

This is a great example of a point someone else made - people who think there's just a System and People In Control. There is The Corporation of unknowing breadth, who conspire to keep him down, not autonomous organizations a citizen has to interact with absent a guiding hand.

This thread is partly a circus show, and may read as just simply denigrative – but ultimately the society we build cannot outstrip the function of the humans within it. As people have commented even insurance lawyers and other highly credentialed people are sometimes at a loss.

I wrote this because I work in cybersecurity. Which may be reputed with some intelligence, but ultimately must design systems where blaming the user doesn't work. You have 29k of them, and making them all perfect and with your knowledge is delusional. Empathy must play a part.

Person gets into solo accident, takes pictures, then reports it later after they add full car coverage. What they didn't realize: The JPEG metadata in EXIF format they sent show the photos were timestamped before adding coverage for the loss. That's GPS-synced time it's not wrong

(Yes phone dates can be manually adjusted but nobody doing minor insurance fraud is that smart let's be ffr. They can't use clock drift to explain what happened.)