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Comment by rurp | Hacker News Reader

> It also raises questions about companies producing their own stats

Companies saying "trust us, we have the data to prove it" while keeping that data secret should be ignored. Especially if their CEO has a long history of blatant dishonesty! I'm most annoyed that people gave any weight to Tesla's safety statistics claims in the first place.

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> I'm most annoyed that people gave any weight to Tesla's safety statistics claims in the first place.

TSLA stock consistently made gains for a lot of people who otherwise wouldn't be paying attention let alone putting their weight in anything Tesla related.

> Companies saying "trust us, we have the data to prove it" while keeping that data secret should be ignored.

While true, I do not think this is a great heuristic. How would the average person know whether the "data" is available? Most people don't even know what "data" really is. They have never heard of CSVs or SQL. We need a better signal for consumers to know what they can and can't trust.

An average person doesn't need to directly access the data. As long as journalists or researchers can, an avg person could rely on their analysis/opinion instead.

I would certainly not rely on journalists' to actually have a look at the data, let alone to have the technical skills to analyze and report on it. As it is, reporters don't bother mentioning / linking to the data, or mentioning the lack of publicly available data.

It's OK to expect better from both journalists and companies.

Data-journalism is actually a thing, and bigger organizations like the New York Times have done some pretty impressive work building tools and training programs for their reporters.

https://open.nytimes.com/how-we-helped-our-reporters-learn-t...

Here we are in the comment thread of an article of a journalist reporting this very analysis.

A good journalist will include that context in a story. I know I read at least one article that included these safety claims while also noting that the data was private and unverifiable.

I think it's a good default to assume any self-beneficial corporate message is false, absent evidence to the contrary.

Companies dont validate their claims, only provide data and statistics to back up marketing angles. There's no point to it either since it would still be a conflict of interest when you've researched your own product and found no errors in it.

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