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Comment by RyEgswuCsn | Hacker News Reader

So it sounds like it's Simpson's paradox [1] at work. I had always wondered why many people are slow to accept self-driving cars despite the claims of them being statistically safer. I think that explains it --- to make consumers confident about the self-driving technologies, it is not enough for them to be able to handle the "easy" kind of driving (e.g. on highway and under relatively good visibility conditions) better than humans; they need to demonstrate that they can drive better than humans in the most challenging driving environments too.

I guess this is the classic scenario where human intuition is defeated by carefully presented statistics.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

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The thing is, you don't even need Tesla "self driving" for that.

Adaptive cruise control, tech we've had for what, 20+ years? is more than enough for most highways, it takes out ~80% of the stress/boredom of driving, especially since lane changes are minimal and curves are gentle.

The hard parts of driving (aka not highways) are the real problem, as expected. We solved the easy parts in 2000 and who knows if we'll solve the hard parts by 2050.

I have a car with adaptive cruise control and lane assist, and most of my morning commute (on days when I go into the office) is driven on the highway. Most of the time I don't turn it on because I'm in a self-perceived hurry to get to work, so I forget.

You know what would be really nice? Something that detects when it's safe and reasonable to suggest turning on adaptive cruise control so I use it more. Maybe something like detecting I've driven a few miles at a consistent rate of speed above a certain threshold.

The hard parts are definitely the problem, but there are lots of easy wins left on the table too.

Isn't it just 1 button on the steering wheel to turn it on?

I definitely hope your car doesn't put it in some hidden menus on the central screen.

I would personally hate for that to be on but I can see your point. Maybe a simple hardware switch for on / off and adaptive cruise control turns on once you are over 65mph for more than 1 minute and will only adapt +-15mph total?

GP doesn't suggest having the car turn on cruise control on its own (nightmare!), but instead to remind the driver that this may be a good opportunity to switch it on themselves.

My 2015 Tesla S 70D (AP1.5) does just this for Autosteer by adding an icon in the instrument cluster to say that the car thinks it could do it. I wish it had an optional chime for it though as I really don't want to spend much time looking at the instrument cluster.

i am thankful to turn autopilot on as soon as i reach a highway entry ramp. Even if i'm in no rush and fully capable, i want the assistance merging onto the highway. I don't want to constantly look over my shoulder for a window to get into the fast lane, I want one selected when it becomes available.

The hard parts are the whole point of autonomy.. the parts so hard that humans still fuck up and kill people. that's the ideal of autonomy imo and short of that its missing the point.

For sure. Though even non-tech people are well aware that adaptive cruise control cannot get us to true self driving but "AI" allegedly can.

What they really need is a blockchain. In Rust.

I like the idea. Introducing teslacoin, also crypto-powered climate control, and also real-time right of way auctioning.

In the interest of openness and accountability you need a transaction to turn the engine on, or to activate the brakes. They say that it takes a few milliseconds but never really tested it so who knows. Gives a new meaning to “gas fees”.

All other people need non fungible cars.

When it approaches singularity levels. Until then, it will be only hyped-up robot-vacuum logic.

I think traditional auto makers have done a much better job of communicating to consumers what the tech can actually do. We don’t have self driving cars (which implies that they can drive in those harder conditions). We have cars that are good at lane keeping on freeways.

I wish Tesla would celebrate that victory rather than double down on lies.

> it is not enough for them to be able to handle the "easy" kind of driving (e.g. on highway and under relatively good visibility conditions) better than humans

Is there any evidence that they actually do the easy stuff better than humans? I would want to see it compared with cars of similar age and cost driving on similar roads with similar aged people in control of the vehicle. I'm pretty skeptical that such a comparison would in fact be favourable to Tesla.

robots are better at reaction times, spatial awareness, impulse control. There are obvious advantages that are capable of making up for the short-comings of the NN implementation. Essentially, a lot of hard decision making is avoidable with proper awareness and caution.

I don't know what else to advise people who want evidence. The cars are real things you can experience...

People are slow to "accept" self-driving cars because they don't exist in a form that anyone can actually buy. Regardless of safety or lack thereof, I can't purchase a real SAE level 4+ vehicle today at any price.

Can you explain how Simpsons paradox applies here?

"Simpson's paradox, which also goes by several other names, is a phenomenon in probability and statistics in which a trend appears in several groups of data but disappears or reverses when the groups are combined. "

In this case, the effect when the data is separated out is that AP is only marginally safer. When they are combined, it appears to be significantly safer.

I'd say this isn't a case of simpsons paradox at all.

It's more traditional sampling bias than Simpsons paradox

The performance appears to be superior due to a large proportion of the driving is done on easy environment.

The groups aren’t segmented by freeway vs. non-freeway use, but it’s an important omitted lurking variable. After conditioning on the variable, the takeaway changes.

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