I’m sure the Tesla crowd will jump in to say this is driver error because Tesla has a disclaimer that the feature requires active driver supervision, but the problem has always been the marketing that causes users to over estimate the system’s capabilities. Musk says that autopilot is safer than human driven miles, but this is apples and oranges since the human driven miles include city driving and all models of car, which have much higher rates of accidents than luxury cars like Teslas.
Full Self Driving’s marketing has been criminal. Tesla is trying to solve self driving without lidar, which it’s competitors are using. Waymo is way ahead of Tesla, but they create the illusion of being ahead by releasing features that are clearly extremely dangerous.
> Tesla has a disclaimer that the feature requires active driver supervision
Tesla has also had, since 2017, a prominent page on the website that says "The driver is only in the seat for legal purposes. The vehicle doesn't need it." (Ironic, given the circumstances of this accident).
I went looking through the Wayback Machine's archive of that page to see if I could find a version of the text with those exact words. In none of the archives could I find a version; the biggest change to the text is in the description of regulatory status. Prior to ~March 2019, the text here used to read:
> Please note that Self-Driving functionality is dependent upon extensive software validation and regulatory approval, which may vary widely by jurisdiction. It is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality described above will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval. Please note also that using a self-driving Tesla for car sharing and ride hailing for friends and family is fine, but doing so for revenue purposes will only be permissible on the Tesla Network, details of which will be released next year.
(Hilariously, the "details of which will be released next year" was retained on the page for three years before being dropped.) The current text instead makes it more clear (although not by much) that the actual full-self driving capability of the car doesn't actually exist yet.
While those exact words may not be present in the text, the general whiplash theme of "this car can 100% drive itself!" and "you are totally required to supervise the car at all times, it cannot drive itself" was and is still present.
The revised words were absolutely present until today. Look at HN search, Reddit search - there are dozens of mentions of this with those exact words. There’s also in the linked video.
"The system is designed to be able to conduct short and long distance trips with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat."
I did find what you are referring to, however.
There is a video ( https://vimeo.com/192179726 ) embedded below "Future of Driving" section of the autopilot page. When you hit play the first message presented is:
"The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons. He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself"
That video with that statement is still on the autopilot page as of me writing this.
While a subtle nuance, I believe that wording is specific to the video demonstration ie. "what you are watching is completely automated, but if we filmed it without a person in the seat we would get in trouble" instead of "anyone can run Tesla without a driver, we just < wink wink > tell you to be in the driver's seat for legal reasons."
It's a little awkward when as of today (and has been for years), Tesla on its website has wording around FSD saying "The driver is only in the seat for legal purposes. The vehicle doesn't require it."
"The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions."[0]
"Currently neither Autopilot nor FSD Capability is an autonomous system, and currently no comprising feature, whether singularly or collectively, is autonomous or makes our vehicles autonomous"[1]
They might have been using the orange hack to make Tesla think someone was driving (orange wedged in the steering wheel causes enough weight/pressure for the sensor to think it's a hand)
>Musk says that autopilot is safer than human driven miles
Is there a breakdown for income with road safety? The best I could find is that poorer countries have higher road deaths / km, but I couldn't find any data on road safety within a country.
Here’s a report linking vehicle age to accident outcome and showing a correlation, I would assume higher incomes are associated with newer vehicles. I only took a quick look so not sure if they compare likelihood of an accident with vehicle age. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Have you ever driven a Tesla with full self driving?
If you engage self driving the car pops up with a giant alert to keep your hands on the wheel and the car doesn’t allow you to use full self driving unless you wiggle the steering wheel every few minutes. There is no mystery as to what is safe.
The driver... wasn’t in the seat. Yes I would say that’s driver error.
It's fine to point things out, but on HN please do so in a way that is (a) informative and (b) avoids inflammatory rhetoric.
Even assuming you have a good underlying point, the comment you posted was internet flamebait as well as pointing way off topic. We're trying to avoid that kind of thing here, not just because it's below the desired quality threshold but more importantly because it evokes worse from others. If you think of the value of a comment as the expected value of the subthread it will lead to, this may make more sense.
Name one short seller who has been backed by the oil industry. Tesla is worth 3 Exxons, 3 Chevrons, or 10 BPs. This is a tired excuse that gets the motivations of short sellers backward. They do not short a company and then find damaging information, they find damaging information and then short the company. None of that excuses Tesla’s complete disregard for human life, particularly here by not having the advanced driver monitoring capabilities that their competitors have and instead relying on easily bypassed measures like steering wheel torque that will clearly lead to predictable abuse. Elon Musk has never condemned the social media stunts where people recklessly test self driving by getting out of the driver’s seat, and even commented on the porn video without condemning the behavior it encourages.
Did you see that video? It's clearly a propaganda video with various obvious lies, biases and cherry-picking. It contains false statements like "Elon musk is not an engineer, he is a scam artist". It's very clearly produced by oil industry or someone who benefits from delaying electric cars. It's professionally made to have an emotional effect. It's very similar in style to all those anti-vax propaganda videos.
I don't see how autopilot was involved here. This was a tiny cul de sac (the address is in the article). Autopilot simply won't achieve the kind of speeds needed to cause that collision.
Frankly I agree with other posters here that the most likely scenario is that there was a human driver in the seemingly-undamaged drivers' seat who fled the scene. Absent that, you'd have to play games with launch mode or some kind of device to press the accellerator. You just can't do this with autopilot as I see it.
>> Frankly I agree with other posters here that the most likely scenario is that there was a human driver in the seemingly-undamaged drivers' seat who fled the scene.
Do we really need to imagine a third person, who left leaving behind no evidence of his or her existence, to explain this accident?
It would be far from the first time a car was found mysteriously crashed without a driver or with a passenger who swears up and down that they don't know who was driving.
When this happens to a non-Tesla (and it does happen) the usual assumption is a drunk driver. Why is that so hard to imagine here?
Because there is no evidence of such a third person.
If there was a third person, why not a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth? Or a dozen, or two? It would also be far from the first time that a troupe of clowns fit in a too-small car.
And what evidence usually exists of a third person in a non-Tesla missing-driver crash?
Look, all I'm saying is that if this was literally any other car, we would all see this evidence and say "Yup, looks like a drunk driver fled the scene of an accident". It would be an obvious conclusion. We wouldn't be scratching our heads saying "Well, gee whiz, maybe there's some other explanation we haven't thought of".
This is not the first time police have found a crashed car with no driver. The only difference this time is that it's a Tesla.
The difference is that there were two people in the car, one of which was the driver (and owner) of the car.
But you are right to suggest that the police are themselves jumping to conclusions. Just because the accident happened in a tesla, doesn't mean that self-driving was somehow involved.
I don't disagree about that. I disagree about the necessity of assuming a third person, when the two present suffice to have caused the accident and when there is nothing to indicate that a third person was involved.
Finally, assuming a third person introduces a new question: who was it?
The evidence of the third person is that otherwise you've got to explain how the people in the car tricked the autopilot into driving at crashable speeds in a tiny cul-de-sac, where normally it wouldn't even engage, even apart from tricking it that there was a driver in the seat.
At this point, it's an Occam's Razor question, though different people will argue about which was simplest.
If there had been a third person who fled the scene, though, you would expect any physical evidence to have been left behind after that fire.
>> The evidence of the third person is that otherwise you've got to explain how the people in the car tricked the autopilot into driving at crashable speeds in a tiny cul-de-sac, where normally it wouldn't even engage, even apart from tricking it that there was a driver in the seat.
But that's not "evidence". That's just an unanswered question.
As I said recently in another comment, if you find yourself at the point where you're thinking "I can't think of a better explanation", that's not the time to say "that must be the answer"; that's the time to think harder until you find a better explanation.
In this case, if you can't find a better explanation than "there must have been a third person that we don't know was there", then it's time to sit down and think harder about how the accident could have really happened.
Because if you start assuming things we have no evidence for, you might as well assume invisible space leprechauns, for all the good it will do.
We need a human driver or some other mechanism for the car to have propelled itself into the tree. A human driver seems the most likely solution but others are of course possible.
There were two people in the car. That's plenty to crash the car. The question is "how" but for that we don't need a third person, especially when we have no evidence of such a third person.
To be honest, I don't either, but if I understand correctly the OP thinks there must have been a third person because the driver's seat was "seemingly undamaged".
"Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Mark Herman told ABC News the two men who were found dead inside the car had dropped off their wives at a nearby home and told them they were going to take the 2019 Tesla S class for a test ride.
"The man, ages 59 and 69, had been talking about the features on the car before they left."
If so the investigators on the scene are wrong, from the article:
“Herman said authorities believe no one else was in the car and that it burst into flames immediately. He said it he believes it wasn’t being driven by a human.
Harris County Constable Precinct 4 deputies said the vehicle was traveling at a high speed when it failed to negotiate a cul-de-sac turn, ran off the road and hit the tree.”
Again, that scenario (taking a high speed turn in a cul-de-sac) just doesn't correspond to any known accessible autopilot behavior. Given the choice between "initial investigation was wrong" and "heretofore unseen high speed residential driving by autopilot" (also "non-autopilot driving from passenger seat" probably needs to be in the list), I know which way Occam points.
To be glib: if you could get the car to drive itself at 60mph+ on a residential street, that shit would be all over youtube.
Occam's Razor says: "entities should not be multiplied without necessity", but it's your explanation that is "multiplying entities", specifically the occupants of the car and certainly without necessity: two car occupants suffice to cause an accident.
If you look at it on a map, it is very odd. The address where happened is maybe 200 meters into the cul-de-sac, which requires a hard right turn to enter. The crash site isn't very close to the right turn. And the street itself isn't long, maybe 300 meters total.
Trying to imagine how it was going fast enough to cause this, well after a right turn, with nobody in the driver's seat...isn't easy. Occam's razor is hard to apply, because I don't see a simple explanation.
I don't think Occam's razor is hard to apply: there's no evidence of a third person in the car, there's no reason to assume a third person in the car.
Occam's razor cuts out unlikely explanations. It doesn't help you find a likely explanation, but at least it helps you avoid wasting time in considering unlikely ones.
Also, the modern interpretation of Occam's Razor, that "the simplest explanation is usually the right one" (see wikipedia) doesn't mean that the most likely explanation should be simple. For example, it can equivalently be restated as "the least complex explanation is usually the right one", which clarifies that the most likely explanation need not be simple, just less complex than others.
Occam's razor can be used to rule out "more complicated" explanations for the same evidence.
The problem is that I haven't seen any explanation for how else the car got up to that speed. Without a actual competing explanation, you can't use occam's razor at to rule out unlikely explanations.
There is a very simple explanation: the car crashed because of the actions
of the two people we know were in the car. Any explanation that requires a
third person is more complex than that.
What where the actions of the two people in the car that caused the crash? That
we can't know yet because we don't have enough information. So in that case,
Billy Occam would say "sit tight and wait until you know more".
"they did something and it caused them to crash" isn't really an explanation...so don't go ruling out other valid explanations as "too complicated" till you have enough information to create a proper alternative.
Otherwise you are mis-applying occam's razor. Occam's razor isn't a rule of logic, it is a heuristic to help you navigate complicated epistemic situations.
I think what you're saying is that if you don't have a good explanation, then everything goes, you're free to imagine anything you want. Until "you have enough information to create a propper alternative" you can "multiply entities" to your heart's content- and make any kind of assumption you like.
In saying that you are using Occam's Razor which is soley intended for distinguish two theories of identical explanatory value.
There are plenty of other epistemic tools to evaluate the likihood of various incomplete explanations with different levels of explanatory power.
Edit: Occam's Razor is like a tie breaker after you have brought out all your other epistemic tools and failed to break the tie. You are nowhere near that point.
>> In saying that you are using Occam's Razor which is soley intended for distinguish two theories of identical explanatory value.
Is it? The Razor says "entities should not be multiplied without necessity" (see wikipedia). Assuming a third person is "multiplying entities without necessity". Any explanation that assumes a third person is "multiplying entities without necessity". So it should be cut by the Razor, meaning we don't need to consider it. It doesn't matter if there is no better explanation yet. Any explanation that doesn't assume a third person in the car will always be better than any explanation that assumes a third person in the car. So the Razor can indeed help us distinguish between likely explanations even when we haven't yet formulated those explanations.
Also, I'm curious- do you really think that if we don't have a good explanation then we're free to imagine anything we want? That's an obvious error of reasoning that you would have tried to avoid if you were aware of it, yet it really seems to me that this is what you're doing. Would you like to go over that for a bit?
Edit: I've edited this comment repeatedly to make it less contentious, like HN guidelines advice. I suggest we refrain from discussion of technicalities and avoid veering off into technical language, otherwise we'll just make this conversation even more tedious than it already is.
I explained to you what kind of epistemic tool the Razor is. There are plenty of other tools that let you make arguments about the likihood that there was an additional person present. You can't make that argument with that Razor.
If you would like a more detailed understanding of why the Razor is limited to this use, you'll have to out more effort into learning epistemology than perusing wikipedia. It is an interesting topic and worth your time and attention.
The sort version is that this is the only way to use the razor that increases the reliability of your epistemic process.
See, when I said that we should refrain from discussion of technicalities, the reason was to avoid the tactic you're employing now, of trying to "win" the conversation by saying I don't understand the Razor etc. This is an underhanded tactic that does not honour you and demeans me as your interlocutor.
You suggest I lack a detailed understanding of why the Razor is limited to a particular use. I pointed to wikipedia because it's a resource that is easy to access. According to wikipedia, then, the Razor says:
"Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity".
I wasn't trying to win, I was trying to offer you an honest suggestion.
You do lack an understanding of Occam's Razor and I encourage you to go learn more about it. It simply cannot be used to rule out explanations like you are saying. It only provides a heuristic preference between explanations that make identical predictions.
Occam's Razor is an epistemic guideline that was originally formulated in the terms you specify, it is however a concept that has been widely discussed and refined beyond that original formulation.
If you aren't interested in going past reading on wikipedia, the article there does touch on the Razor's limitations even if it doesn't delve deeply into the reasoning behind them.
Even if you stretch Occam's Razor past it's limit and use it to establish preference between two theories that make different predictions but only about phenomenon that you personally can't practically check (i.e. a case such as this one), then you are still only establishing a preference for the "simpler" explanation and cannot actually rule out the other explanation without checking the difference in predictions (i.e. an investigation into the crash.)
Bite what? I'm not proposing any explanations. I'm pointing out that it doesn't make sense to assume a third person, for whom we have no evidence, was in the car.
My understanding is that you use Occam's razor on a list of possible answers. A third person isn't less likely unless there is some more likely choice. I don't know what that would be.
Edit: You're sort of glossing over that "nobody in the driver's seat" is unusual by itself. All explanations I can think of for how this happened are unlikely.
You don't need to have a "list" of explanations. Any explanation would either assume there were more than two people in the car (why stop at three?) or it would assume there were no more than two people in the car. Any explanation that assumed there were more than two people in the car would "multiply entities" more than any explanation that assumed there were only two people in the car, so the Razor would always cut out the former in favour of the latter.
>> Edit: You're sort of glossing over that "nobody in the driver's seat" is unusual by itself. All explanations I can think of for how this happened are unlikely.
That means you can't think of an explanation for it, not that there isn't one.
Again as I said in other comments, if you find yourself thinking "I can't think of a better explanation", that's a sign you need to sit down and think of a better explanation.
The Razor, as originally stated by William of Occam, is: "entities should not be
multiplied without necessity" (see wikipedia) [1].
Clearly, assuming a third person was in the car is "multiplying entities without
necessity". Note also that the original formulation of the Razor makes no
mention of hypotheses, competing or otherwise, or of any requirement for
comparisons.
Even going by the more modern interpetation of (stated informally) "prefer the
simplest hypothesis", a comparison can be made "on the fly": any hypothesis that
needs a third person in the car is less simple than a hypothesis that doesn't
need a third person in the car. So we can prune away the entire branch of the
hypothesis search tree that begins with "suppose there was a third person in the
car" without wasting any time considering those hypotheses even if we don't yet
have any competing hypotheses.
And, btw, we sure do: there were two people in the car and they caused the
crash. That's a competing hypothesis. I don't know why people keep saying
"there's no competing hypothesis". That you don't like that hypothesis makes no
difference.
You'll notice also that the more modern interpretation ends up agreeing with
the original: any hypothesis that needs a third person in the car is
"multiplying entities without necessity" (the entities being the people in the
car), whereas any hypothesis that doesn't need a third person is leaving the
number of entities (at least people in the car) well enough alone.
_____________
[1] No, please, really do see wikipedia. I think it will help clarify much confusion
about what the Razor is. For instance, there are five or six different
formulations of the Razor, each with its own, multiple, interpretations. But I
can't see any one that "requires a comparison". That sounds to me more like a
Calvinball rule. If you want to say I'm "using it wrong", then start by
clarifying which formulation and what interpetation of it you are using, as I
have done throughout this thread.
> Note also that the original formulation of the Razor makes no mention of hypotheses, competing or otherwise, or of any requirement for comparisons.
Well, the Wikipedia article states, in the very first line:
> ...or more simply, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.
and further down it defines what a "razor" even is:
> The term razor refers to distinguishing between two hypotheses either by "shaving away" unnecessary assumptions or cutting apart two similar conclusions.
So both of these do seem to directly relate to comparisons. It's not simply a misunderstanding of the term to say that Occam's Razor involves comparisons of competing hypotheses.
> any hypothesis that needs a third person in the car is less simple than a hypothesis that doesn't need a third person in the car.
The trouble is you need to define what you mean by "entities." Obviously this does not need to literally refer to bodies. It means facets and complications of the hypothesis.
So we need to decide which hypothesis requires more entities: one that supposes the possibility of a third person, or one that supposes the possibility of people tricking an autopilot to do what no one believes it ought to be able to do.
The point is, we need something beyond what we have been told. If it were simply "drunk man crashes into tree," we need no further explanations, no further entities. That story explains itself. But if the initial story isn't by itself sufficient -- "autopilot drove itself at high speed in a narrow cul-de-sac with no one in the driver's seat, against all programing and prior experience of Tesla cars" -- then we must hypothesize additional entities. Wonky programming. Hacked system. 160 lb weight on the driver's seat and fake hands on the steering wheel. Third person.
I don't know that the third person hypothesis is, in fact, simpler. But I don't think you can say that Occam's Razor suggests that that should not be a rational hypothesis. I don't know how many additional entities would be required to get a Tesla to do what was suggested in the article.
Yes, wikipedia gives different interpretations of the Razor that, as you say, "directly relate to comparisons". None of them requires a comparison. I mean, you won't find that rule anywhere: "to use the Razor, you must make a comparison, otherwise you can't use the Razor". That is Calvinball.
>> The trouble is you need to define what you mean by "entities."
I think this is splitting hairs. A person in the car is clearly an "entity". Assuming a third person in the car is "multiplying entities".
>> Wonky programming. Hacked system. 160 lb weight on the driver's seat and fake hands on the steering wheel. Third person.
... or a 160 lb bag of stones. Or three giant rabbits. Or a pair of labradors. Or... etc.
We really don't need to assume any of this. The two people in the car and sufficed to have caused an accident. Assuming more people, or anything else, is multiplying entities without necessity.
Stop with the condescension. The wikipedia article literally defines "razor" as "distinguishing between two hypotheses." If you disagree with that, edit the article, but don't tell me to read the article ("No, please, really do") and then dispute it.
> The two people in the car and sufficed to have caused an accident.
You keep saying that. I don't know it's true. Do you know it's true?
Like others have said said, this would go against every prior experience with Teslas, and our understanding of how the system works. It would be the first Tesla, ever, to have gotten into an accident on a narrow residential road with no one in the driver's seat.
You need something else in the explanation, even just "the system actually works in some other way." That is also multiplying entities. That was my point, which you missed.
You can't simply state, ipso facto, that the description given "sufficed to have caused an accident," when numerous people have disagreed with that.
There is a misunderstanding I'd like to clear up. By saying "Calvinball" I am
not being condescending. I am calling you out for trying to invalidate my entire
line of reasoning by introducting a new rule to Occam's Razor, that it must be
used in a comparison (between two hypotheses). This is a rule that is not there
in the original formulation of "entities should not be multiplied beyond
necessity". It is also not there in subsequent interpretations, including the
interpretation you quote from wikipedia. It's a rule that you came up with and
it is a rule that you came up with for the sole purpose of helping you win the
internet argument. So it's a Calvinball rule.
Besides which, as I said before, there do exist many hypotheses that we could be
making and the Razor is useful in prunning many of them away before we have to
waste our time formulating them and exploring them in detail. For example, all
the hypotheses that start with "Suppose there was a third person in the car"
need not be considered because "there was a third person in the car" is
"multiplying entities without necessity", and so hypotheses that make such an
assumption are less likely to be true than hypotheses that do not.
The misunderstanding I'm pointing out and that I advised you to read wikipedia
to clear up, is that you seem to understand the Razor as requiring at least two
competing hypotheses to be fully formed to the point that they could be written
down, perhaps even in a formal language. There is no such requirement. That's
your Calvinball rule, made up on the spot and for the sole purpose of winning
the internet argument. Or, perhaps, only for the purpose of forcing me to waste
my time by considering all the unnecessary hypotheses that start with "suppose
there was a third person in the car".
This is so frustrating, because you're not seeing my point that, without a simpler hypotheses, it doesn't make any sense to dismiss hypotheses on the basis of the Razor alone.
And, again, from what everyone understands of how cars and Teslas work, the initial description doesn't have enough elements to be a complete story.
This is honestly what this whole conversation sounds like to me: Suppose we find a baby stuck high up in a tree.
Me: "How do you suppose it got there?
You: "No idea. All I know is that there's a baby in a tree. The baby got there."
"Perhaps someone put him there?"
"Occam's Razor states you shouldn't multiply entities unnecessarily. Another person would be another entity."
"Ok... I mean, maybe there was a flood and-"
"And maybe a flying pig put him there! What don't you get about Occam's Razor???"
"So how do you think he got there?"
"I have no idea."
"Ok... So, I think that someone putting him there is the most likely -"
"How do you not understand that Occam's Razor doesn't require comparisons!"
"WTF?"
At this point, I don't give a damn about what Mr Occam said. This nitpicking over the original formulation is completely irrelevant. All I've been trying to think from the beginning is what the most likely explanation is.
A third person may well NOT be the most likely, or simplest explanation, but since you haven't provided one this conversation has been pretty useless.
Occam's Razor says you shouldn't multiply entities unnecessarily. That last word, "unnecessarily," I realize in retrospect, is the one I've been focussing on this entire time, while you've been talking about "entities."
If the initial story isn't sufficient -- and the fact that this would be the first Tesla ever to drive at high speed in a narrow cul-de-sac with no one in the driver's seat suggests it isn't -- them we MUST multiply entities. Bugs, trickery, GPS malfunction, whatever. We can then argue about which entities are reasonable and which aren't, if we like, but that's separate from the fact that we need to multiply them.
(And, indeed, it is this word "unnecessarily" in the original formulation that does require simplER hypotheses, which is why that wikipedia article that you told me to read all the way through is chock-full of reference to "simpler" or "competing hypotheses." Without another explanation, you have no idea if the additional entities are necessary or not. All explanations require at least one "entity," except perhaps the Big Bang. The particulars of the case determine how many entities are necessary and sufficient.)
I am seeing your point. You say that there needs to be a comparison between at least two hypotheses and then the Razor will help us choose one if it's simpler than the other.
There are many competing hypotheses to choose from in this case. They include all the hypotheses that assume there was a third person in the car; and all the hypotheses that do not assume there was a third person in the car. Any hypothesis that does not assume there was a third person in the car is "simplER" than any hypothesis that assumes there was a third person in the car. Assuming there was a third person in the car is to multiply entities beyond necessity, i.e. as you say "unnecessarily".
You can check my comments in this thread to verify that I've said this many times. The comments that wonder about what "entity" means are yours, not mine.
> Any hypothesis that does not assume there was a third person in the car is "simplER" than any hypothesis that assumes there was a third person in the car.
Nonsense.
A hypothesis that there was a third person in the car is simpler than a hypothesis that there were only two people in the car and an advanced animatronic ice sculpture in the driver's seat which melted after the crash. (I remember my minute-mystery solutions.)
A hypothesis that there was a third person in the car is simpler than a hypothesis that there was a rare combination of a bug in the software, a GPS malfunction, a solar flare, and a paint spill that looked like a painted lane marker.
There are an infinite number of hypotheses that don't contain a third person that are more complex than the hypothesis that there was a third person.
> You say that there needs to be a comparison between at least two hypotheses and then the Razor will help us choose one if it's simpler than the other.
If you think that was my point, you didn't read my comment above at all. That was not my point. It was that, IF the known facts of a story aren't sufficient cause to result in its conclusion, then there is required to be at least one more cause than has been explained.
>> There are an infinite number of hypotheses that don't contain a third person
that are more complex than the hypothesis that there was a third person.
Yes! You're right, and I'm very excited now because you seem to understand how
it works.
Note that all those hypotheses that you bring up also "multiply entities beyond
necessity" - so they are "more complex" than any hypotheses that don't, and we
don't need to examine them, we can just prune them out without even having to
state them.
So to correct what I've been saying above that was indeed too general, "any
hypothesis that does not assume there was something else in the car is simpler
than any hypothesis that assumes there was something else in the car"
("something else" meaning "something besides what was actually found in the
car"). Please correct me again if you think I'm still wrong.
I think we're getting to something we can agree on now, yes?
Yes, but you haven't accepted the central premise of all my posts yet, which is that entities should only not be multiplied "without necessity."
If the initial known facts of a story aren't sufficient to describe an event (a baby in a tree, a car doing something it never has before) then the actual cause must involve additional entities, whether a person or a solar flare.
>> Yes, but you haven't accepted the central premise of all my posts yet, which is
that entities should only not be multiplied "without necessity."
This is not the central premise of all your posts. For most of our interaction
the central premise of your posts was that I'm misunderstanding the intended use of
Occam's Razor. In recent posts you concluded that the reason I misunderstand it
is that I don't take into account the "necessity" part of the Razor's original
formulation.
Yet, I have constantly said that we don't need to assume that there is a third
person in the car because the two people we already know were in the car suffice
to explain the crash and that therefore assuming a third person in the car is
multiplying entities beyond necessity.
In fact, I keep repeating the "beyond necessity" part like a broken record, so
how come you're now insisting that I'm missing that particular point?
I think what you are saying is that you "need" to assume a third person in the
car, otherwise you can't explain what happened. Well, that is a "need" in the
same way that "I don't have an iPhone, therefore I need to get one" is a "need".
It's not so much a "need" as a "want". You can't think of anything better and
you want to explain what happenned, so you make up some entity that must be
responsible for what happened. So you have an explanation you're happy with and
your "need" for an explanation you're happy with is satisfied.
However, that's still "multiplying entities beyond necessity" because you may
"need" an explanation, but you don't need a third person in the car to explain the
crash.
I agree it doesn’t look like there’s much ramp up, I’d want to know why the people actually there sound so confident there was no 3rd party. Here’s the approximate location of the crash:
https://goo.gl/maps/4Rk3DPdtnnRQuGd69
"Village Of Carlton Woods neighborhood is located in SPRING (77382 zip code) in MONTGOMERY county. Woodlands - Village Of Carlton Woods has 437 single family properties with a median build year of 2006 and a median size of 6,371 Sqft., these home values range between $789 - $3045 K"https://www.har.com/pricetrends/woodlands---village-of-carlt...
You're saying that Autopilot cannot be blamed for this failure, because you take it as an axiom that Autopilot doesn't cause this kind of failure? That's just an empty tautology.
Failures are failures, you can't just assume they don't happen on such a complex system.
Autopilot has not been observed to behave like this. That's not an "axiom", it's "evidence". I'm not saying it can't happen, I'm saying that the data we have suggests alternatives as more likely.
KPRC 2 reporter Deven Clarke spoke to one man’s brother-in-law who said he was taking the car out for a spin with his best friend, so there were just two in the vehicle.
It happened entirely within the culdesac, and there were multiple witnesses.
Tesla Autopilot has killed two more people. (The entire rest of the self driving industry combined 1 pedestrian fatality at night).
Full Self Driving’s marketing has been criminal. Tesla is trying to solve self driving without lidar, which it’s competitors are using. Waymo is way ahead of Tesla, but they create the illusion of being ahead by releasing features that are clearly extremely dangerous.
This video is a little over the top but highlights the abuses of FSD marketing better than anything else I’ve seen: https://twitter.com/FinanceLancelot/status/13752898727562731...