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Comment by tomnipotent | Hacker News Reader

The average of something cannot be more than the average of... itself. Thus, "Humans are much safer than people on average" is nonsensical.

> Why do you believe that Autopilot outperforms humans in comparable conditions?

Because they have the data that proves it?

> I'm extremely prejudiced against them

And I've chosen to take them at face value with a grain of salt, and to believe that for the data they've collected from the hundreds of thousands of Tesla's with millions of hours of data using Autopilot, it's fair to say they have a large enough sample to draw conclusions about the safety of their cars vs. any incident rates from pretty much any other distribution.

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"Thus, "Humans are much safer than people on average" is nonsensical."

Does it make more sense as "Humans, when driving in conditions suitable for Autopilot, are much safer than people on average"?

"I've chosen to take them at face value with a grain of salt, and to believe that for the data they've collected from the hundreds of thousands of Tesla's with millions of hours of data using Autopilot, it's fair to say they have a large enough sample to draw conclusions about the safety of their cars vs. any incident rates from pretty much any other distribution"

You seem to be saying that if you have a lot of data it doesn't matter what you compare it to. That seems wrong to me. Also, I don't have this data, and you are not bothering to help me find it.

> Humans, when driving in conditions suitable for Autopilot, are much safer than people on average

The immaterial distinction between "humans" and "people" still makes that sentence confusing. I take it that you mean "driving a mile (either as human or autopilot) is safer in conditions that are good for autopilot than driving a mile in average conditions"? Or more directly, isn't your question really "are the conditions the same for the averaged human drivers and the averaged autopilots"?.

"isn't your question really "are the conditions the same for the averaged human drivers and the averaged autopilots"?"

My implication is that I severely doubt the conditions are the same, when somebody touts a comparison, and I would need clear and convincing evidence otherwise to change my mind. As well as strong evidence of good intent and trustworthiness by the source of the information.

It's not just about being intentionally deceitful, but about the fact that it's hard to do the right comparison, so people feel justified in giving up on it.

"Our secret telemetry dataset gives us reason to believe that the cars produced by us are not safe."

Would a statement like this be a surprise for you?

Only because you made it up to spread FUD. Good job.

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