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A comment on San Francisco raises Tesla 'self-driving' safety concerns as public test nears. Parent comment

Re:San Francisco raises Tesla 'self-driving' safety concerns... by YeGoblynQueenne on Sunday September 26, 2021 @10:01AM (#28660957)
The Rand study is not about "certainty", but about determining the safety of self-driving cars and the number of miles needed to do it. Are you confusing the colloquial meaning of "certainty" (as in "I'm sure about it") with the meaning of "certainty", and particulary uncertainty in probabilities and statistics?

Is there some other published work that you prefer over the Rand study?

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Re:San Francisco raises Tesla 'self-driving' safety concerns... by ajross on Sunday September 26, 2021 @10:27AM (#28661143)
"Certainty" appears in the abstract! But yes, the article is talking about the work required to derive a 95%-confident result of a specific improvement. But that's backwards, and not how one does statistics. You measure an effect, and then compute its confidence.

And it's spun anyway, since most of those "trillions of miles!" numbers reflect things like proving 95% confidence of 100%+ improvements in safety. When all we really want to know to release this to the public is 95% confidence of 0% improvement (i.e. "is it not worse?").

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Re:San Francisco raises Tesla 'self-driving' safety concerns... by YeGoblynQueenne on Sunday September 26, 2021 @10:37AM (#28661202)
>> But that's backwards, and not how one does statistics.

Are you saying one cannot use statistics to make predictions about future events?

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Re:San Francisco raises Tesla 'self-driving' safety concerns... by ajross on Sunday September 26, 2021 @11:05AM (#28661427)
I'm saying that to make good decisions, you need to make predictions about the right future events. And Rand is pontificating about the wrong ones.
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Re:San Francisco raises Tesla 'self-driving' safety concerns... by YeGoblynQueenne on Sunday September 26, 2021 @03:26PM (#28663807)
Where is it that they are "pontificating"? They're calculating how long and how far self-driving cars need to drive before we can accept they're safe.
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