Comment on The Cybertruck Appears to Be More Deadly Than the Infamous Ford Pinto, According to a New Analysis

• notsoshaihulud@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  No. Incidence is a measure of probability of events over time (or with cars alternatively over miles). If the number of events is low (and 4 is low), your confidence intervals are extremely wide (which is the statistical way to say, we have no idea what the real number may be). The comparison is striking, the pinto had 27 fires over 9 years in >3M vehicles. fuelarc.com/…/its-official-the-cybertruck-is-more…

  Let’s add that idiots buy cybertrucks who disproportionately think it’s bulletproof…

  Again, “analyses” like this make great clickbait but contribute very little to our understanding, and that will remain the case even regardless of you getting angry at me about it or not.

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  • DrBob@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    And the answer is"What is the Poisson Distribution" Alex.

    There is literally a distribution that describes the occurences of low probability events in large populations. It was developed to study deaths by horse kick in the Prussian army. So confidence intervals never come into it. You’re applying Stats for Communications Majors reasoning to an adult problem.

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    • notsoshaihulud@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Well, the problem is, even if I take the single case where this one guy exploded himself with his truck and compare it to the Pinto data, the poisson distribution difference will probably be statistically significant, yet the measure would be absolutely useless from a real-world perspective, because it has nothing to do with the vehicle’s design.

      I’d also argue that many of these events might not even be entirely occurring independently from each other when people do all sorts of stupid shit with these rolling garbage cans like shooting at them, submerging them, etc. in a meme-like fashion for Tiktok views. So 4 events might very well be influenced by non-design/human-based factors, which applied to other cars could generate similar results, and if the analysis were serious, they would have reviewed how these whopping 4 events happened.

      And I know the more condescending the responses the better, but seriously, you should understand these things as a stats teacher.

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  • Yprum@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    It’s so great to be able to find comments such as yours, unfortunately it feels uncommon in Lemmy specially when certain names are mentioned, the bias and willfulness to shit on those are making people a bit blindsided and easy to guide through bad data usage. My first thought reading the title was about the statistical value of the numbers given, which doesn’t detract from the actual quality or lack thereof of the vehicle. At the moment using elon musk or tesla in a title of an article will increase the traffic automatically. Which is why we constantly get every single shitty comment made by him reported with useless data.

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    • notsoshaihulud@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yeah it’s part of the enshitification process. This is why Lemmy appears superior to reddit thus far. On reddit, the quintessential early “are you stupid?” response is enough to shut down the conversation. I’m glad it didn’t happen here.

      And it’s not even that I disagree that Teslas have major safety design faults, you cannot put door opening mechanism on an electric actuator, because you’ll get trapped. I’d never buy a car that doesn’t have a mechanical door latch at hand (it’s hidden on teslas). Interestingly Teslas used to be considered one of the safest vehicles, but I think a lot of it is, the early EV adopter demographic is simply characterized by much safer driving, and as this demographic shifted, more and more reckless drivers obtained Teslas. (I’ve been driving EVs since 2017 and around 2022 the demographic shift, at least for Teslas, became very obvious)

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