I was going to say they should only be comparing them under the same driving areas, since I know they aren’t allowed in many areas.
But you’re right, it’s even tighter than that.
Comment on After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers
theluddite@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
I am once again begging journalists to be more critical of tech companies.
But as this happens, it’s crucial to keep the denominator in mind. Since 2020, Waymo has reported roughly 60 crashes serious enough to trigger an airbag or cause an injury. But those crashes occurred over more than 50 million miles of driverless operations. If you randomly selected 50 million miles of human driving—that’s roughly 70 lifetimes behind the wheel—you would likely see far more serious crashes than Waymo has experienced to date.
[…] Waymo knows exactly how many times its vehicles have crashed. What’s tricky is figuring out the appropriate human baseline, since human drivers don’t necessarily report every crash. Waymo has tried to address this by estimating human crash rates in its two biggest markets—Phoenix and San Francisco. Waymo’s analysis focused on the 44 million miles Waymo had driven in these cities through December, ignoring its smaller operations in Los Angeles and Austin.
This is the wrong comparison. These are taxis, which means they’re driving taxi miles. They should be compared to taxis, not normal people who drive almost exclusively during their commutes (which is probably the most dangerous time to drive since it’s precisely when they’re all driving).
wccrawford@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
theluddite@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
These articles frustrate the shit out of me. They accept both the company’s own framing and its selectively-released data at face value. If you get to pick your own framing and selectively release the data that suits you, you can justify anything.
nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Journalist aren’t even critical of police press releases anymore, most simply print whatever they’re told verbatim. It may as well just be advertisement.
theluddite@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
I agree with you so strongly that I went ahead and updated my comment. The problem is general and out of control. Orwell said it best: “Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”
TrojanRoomCoffeePot@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The meat of the true issue right here. Journalism and investigative journalism aren’t just dead, their corpses has been feeding a palm tree like a pod of beached whales for decades. It’s a bizarre state of affairs to read news coverage and come out the other side less informed, without reading literal disinformation. It somehow seems so much worse that they’re not just off-target, but that they don’t even understand why or how they’re fucking it up.