Comment on The Cybertruck Appears to Be More Deadly Than the Infamous Ford Pinto, According to a New Analysis
DrBob@lemmy.ca 3 weeks agoAnd 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.
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.