3 ms·
It's an interesting problem. If I am an accident oracle -- say I know with certainty where, say, 50% of accidents will occur (the other 50% are truly stochasti
by notafraudster 5y ago
It's an interesting problem.
If I am an accident oracle -- say I know with certainty where, say, 50% of accidents will occur (the other 50% are truly stochastic with no structural component at all) -- and the city believes me, then surely when I tell them an accident will occur at Intersection X, they will take measures that prevent accidents at Intersection X.
But this also means any measure of my ability to predict accidents is confounded, because the equilibrium behaviour would be that I never predict an accident and plenty of other accidents occur. Moreover, because of all the other confounders, it's actually unclear whether we should expect accidents to go down or up or stay the same or what, and to the extent year to year variability was already quite high the problem will be even larger, so even high level numbers before and after hiring my services aren't easily interpretable.
Which is fine, you just need to convince decision makers of this particular inferential fallacy and then hopefully they keep listening even though the KPI is wrong. Except what if the type of accidents change and I'm no longer an accident oracle? Then the mitigation efforts are wasted, and also the money they pay me.
One solution would be to basically engage in some kind of RCT where some of my predictions are held out for assessing my model while others are acted on and where the strength of the prior about my effect decays. Good luck telling voters and lawyers that justification, though.
Fun stuff.
- simion314 5y agoThe real solution is not only to predict but to explain why the accidents happen, there are always some reasons why some places/location have more accidents then normal.
- theshadowknows 5y agoRight? Say if you know there will be a 2% chance to have a 1% increase over the yearly average at LocationX on Thursday…what can you do? Add police and first responders? Reroute traffic? Tell people to stay home? I feel like nothing that can be done will be able to solve the problem but just move it somewhere else
- mjmahone17 5y agoThat’s a bit defeatist. The Dutch took the approach of treating car crashes similarly to how the FAA treats plane crashes: do a deep analysis of what occurred, what the root structural issues were (for instance, is it difficult for a car turning left to see oncoming traffic?) and then change the environment to improve the structural issues. Knowing where incident hot spots are likely to be should help you redesign the areas most likely to cause issues. There’s a reason the Netherlands has around 1/3 as many traffic fatalities per capita as the US: in the US, it seems like we throw up our hands at problems like road crashes, whereas with problems like plane safety we take an incremental and root-cause analysis approach to improve safety over time.
- marcosdumay 5y agoIf the city does something to reduce the risk of some of the pointed areas, does your oracle reclassify it as lower risk? If you make an oracle that simply points that some necessary geometries accumulate the risks, don't be surprised when every authority not only ignores you, but also becomes very annoyed if you insist on it.