What trend in the comments is bothering you? It's a little unclear from your comment.
It is as if HN users expect the news headline to be: "an event occurs which is statistically speaking non-anomalous".
If one doesn't feel we have enough data to draw conclusions yet, then sure, fine. But a person just died. This is a newsworthy story and it deserves our best attention and discussion, not repetition of something obvious ad nauseam.
When the sensational-to-informational ratio is so large, we always get this.
Is there a term for this tendency? Curious to read the research on it.
Alan Kay pointed out that Kahnemann's slow-system vs. fast-system also applies here.
The fact that Uber's self-driving car program has a worse deaths-per-miles-driven metric than human drivers is anything but obvious to me.
After an incident like this, it's natural to question whether anything needs to be done policy-wise. And, I don't see any reason why that discussion can't take place here in the comments section.
It seems like you want HN users to use the comments section to express condolences? Or, to just have an empty comments section?
Do I understand you correctly that you'd be okay with the comments if the were just prefixed with some "thoughts-and-prayers" genuflection? And if so, why not say it directly?
It's not the lack of compassion, it's the lack of substance.
And I suppose it strikes me as lacking compassion and/or humility to come and use HN as a platform to recycle the same obvious idea, when the story is about a death. It would be different if it were about a tire blowing out.
Everyone knows how these statistics work on a macro level. That's not worth commenting here on HN, and especially not on this story.
I just think we could do better.
>Everyone knows how these statistics work on a macro level. That's not worth commenting here on HN, and especially not on this story.
If statistical comparisons were obvious, and people didn't overreact with unjustifiable countermeasures, then indeed it wouldn't be important to make the point. But the world we live in is one where nuclear deaths are scarier than heart disease deaths, and shark attacks more than auto collisions.
I think you're committing the fallacy of "my social circle doesn't make that mistake, therefore it's not worth pointing out."
I can agree that users should be more careful about making the common point when others have made it, though -- I had a reply on this thread about "Uber flouted the $150 license" that I deleted when I saw others made a more informed response to the same point.
I haven't even read any of the comments on this story yet, and this type of pro-self-driving-car response is what I expect to be in the majority. That and anything anti-Uber :)