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Necessary mistakes isn't a blank check to put pre-alpha software and hardware on public roads, then dare regulators to act. There's likely a lot of survivorshi

Necessary mistakes isn't a blank check to put pre-alpha software and hardware on public roads, then dare regulators to act. There's likely a lot of survivorship bias in your analysis. I'd wager most of those examples are success in spite of assholeness, not because of it.

jiggawatts 4y ago
Your comment is the epitome of the faulty thinking mentioned in the article. The essence of your post is: "Mistakes shouldn't be made, because there may be consequences.", which is the exact thing the article is warning against. How many people died because of Tesla auto-pilot over the last decade, across hundreds of thousands of cars on the road? Half a dozen? A dozen? This must be stopped or at least regulated, that's your argument. To put some perspective on things: About the same number of people were killed by gun violence in Texas alone just yesterday. According to half the voters in the United States, regulation can never be justified as a solution to this carnage. Never. Literally "any" regulation is "too much" regulation in their minds. Systems thinking is about rising above these primitive self-interested, myopic decisions. It's using numbers and facts at a global scale instead of an individual scale. If Tesla develops a working self-driving AI, they'll save tens of thousands of lives annually, if not hundreds of thousands. Killing a few people due to imperfect intermediate stages on the way there is worth it. Not to the dead people and their families, of course, but to the overall population. It's uncomfortable locally but optimal globally. That's literally what systems thinking is about: forcing people out of their local optimums, against their will, to achieve a global optimum. That optimum might actually be preferred by everyone, but local gradient descent by individuals will never get over the hump to achieve it. Just look at the people suing the FAA for allowing the Starship launch. There are people that would rather that we remain stuck on Earth forever than take the slightest risk, like a few chunks of concrete being thrown around. It's absurd, but its the exact behaviour I see in large organisations at every level.
- redhale 4y ago
  Gross. I hope this is parody. You seem to have taken the article's point of taking FINANCIAL risks to a company's bottom line, and perverted it to justify killing a few of your customers for the sake of a beta test. Why not go for human medical testing without consent, while we're at it? Taking risks MUST have limits, especially when it comes to human life.
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    Have you not seen Fight Club, or watched the news about the 777 MAX crashes caused by MCAS? Big corporations take risks with their customers lives all the time. There's an entire area study dedicated to calculating how many dollars people are "worth" when making such risk calculations. Virtually nothing is risk free. Anything that involves anything you ingest, anything that can catch fire, anything that involves driving, and anything that involves mains voltage can and does kill "customers". Virtually nothing of import done at an industrial scale has a perfect safety record. Consider power generation: Wind mills kill people. Workmen fall off them all the time. They catch fire while people are in them, and they burn to death: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1q0sca/last_week_two_engineers_died_when_the_windmill/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1q0sca/last_week_two_... Solar panels kill people: again, workmen fall off roofs while installing them and break their necks. Should we stop all progress on green energy because it is totally unacceptable for any corporation to ever risk anyone's life, ever? Is that a net benefit? Should endless studies be done, for centuries if need be, to make sure no windmill ever kills a worker, ever again? Or should we grow up and weigh the pros and cons?
    - davidf18 4y ago
      [dead]
- vaidhy 4y ago
  hmm... So, ethics panels are not needed? What is a few lives in ways of progress? FAA and spaceX circumvented existing process - there was a larger article that this is going to be an ecological disaster before the launch that was posted here [0]. You are willing to sacrifice what is in your hand now for an nebulous future promise and that seems to be equally faulty bias on the other side. Almost all fraud happens with a vague promise of future gains, if only you can sacrifice a little now. What differentiates false promises from true hope? How much would be risk on a too unbelievable outcome? These kind of "looking from hindsight" articles are pretty useless. Every idea that has to be funded also needs to have a realistic chance of success at that point in time. [0] - https://blog.esghound.com/p/spacexs-texas-rocket-is-going-to https://blog.esghound.com/p/spacexs-texas-rocket-is-going-to
  - jiggawatts 4y ago
    That blog your linked is packed with emotional speech and hyperbole. "Noise bomb" is one of the literal headings. It's a rocket launch pad, what did they expect, a gentle susurration whispering through the reeds of the uninhabited wetlands!? This anonymous "ESG Hound" character posts virtually nothing but rabid anti-SpaceX rhetoric. I bet he doesn't even live in Texas. (For reference, the locals, when interviewed, said they welcome the huge uptick in business SpaceX brought.) This particular unhinged rant is about the sound levels, saying that "110 decibels" can cause structural damage in nearby towns, etc... First of all: no, it can't. That's absurd. I live 2.5 miles from a sports stadium where they semi-regularly host rock concerts that go up to 120 dB. At that distance, that's louder than when my neighbour turns his stereo up to 11. This insanely loud sound goes on for hours on end, but it is perfectly legal, and that stadium has apartment blocks a mere few hundred yards away from it! Second, whatever "ecological impact" SpaceX had on the area, it pales in comparison to everyday, ordinary industrial activities. Building demolitions, mine blasting, road works, F1 races, etc... Elon rightly pointed out in an interview afterwards that the area is prone to tornadoes and hurricanes, which do vastly more damage. No human activity can even hope to match what nature can do, short of nuclear weapons testing. What actually happened is that a few chunks of concrete were strewn about, an activity accompanied by a noise so awesome that people flew there to get the chance to experience it! > What differentiates false promises from true hope? Who said everything had to be certain? So what if SpaceX fails and we have nothing to show for it except some deafened seagulls and concrete littering a beach? Should we never strive for the stars just because to get there we might make a mess? Who are you to nail humanity's feet to the ground?
- Veserv 4y ago
  No, the risk landscape is not binary. The choice is not, take no risk or take any risk. There are literally factors of millions if not billions between the low risk and high risk activities. The people arguing that the status quo level of risk tolerance are too low almost always mischaracterize how wide the gap is or do not know how safe the “risky” activities they point to as evidence that risky activitys should and can be tolerated. Yes, you should weigh the pros and cons, but that requires actually quantifying them. For instance, you pointed to the 737 MAX in a different comment as evidence that corporations take risks with their customers all the time. First of all, they were roundly criticized for their laxness, so that is actually evidence that too many risks were taken and we should stricter. Second, the fatality rate of the 737 MAX right after the second crash (while it was defective) was on the order of 1 fatality per 100,000,000 miles which is still safer than driving. Third, the reason it is viewed so negatively is because that level of safety is around 1,000x worse than the average in commercial airliners. Arguing that we accept corporations taking risks because we accept the 737 MAX (we do not), so we should increase our risk tolerance to the level of the 737 MAX (everything except other airplanes is already more dangerous, so this would actually be decreasing risk tolerance) and generally accept greater levels of risk than the status quo (which has been rejected in the 737 MAX case as we find the increase in risk relative to the status quo unacceptable). The entire argument is literally completely wrong in every conceivable facet. To then dig into your other specific argument, the Tesla argument is that they are taking greater risks to develop faster. A pro and a con. However, by all objective measures, Tesla will not develop a self-driving system first. Their systems are thousands of times worse than their competitors such as Waymo and Cruise. Their approach is so far behind their competitors that there is little reason to believe that anything it is doing will be incorporated into working solutions. So, every single person their human experimentation program kills, of which there are at least 31 documented deaths (no thanks to Tesla who deliberately obscures reporting), is being killed for no reason. From a systems thinking perspective, there is exactly zero benefit and immense costs to supporting Tesla’s regressive development process relative to others who are both more safe and more effective.
Cpoll 4y ago
Nobody brought up Tesla, except obliquely by way of Musk. And arguably Tesla is another good example (electric cars, not self-driving). Do you have a response to the other names listed (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs)? You can invoke survivorship bias on any entrepreneurial anecdote, so it doesn't contribute much to the discussion. Also, the "asshole" was in quotes, and that's significant. No-one's discussing their social graces.

jiggawatts 4y ago

Your comment is the epitome of the faulty thinking mentioned in the article. The essence of your post is: "Mistakes shouldn't be made, because there may be consequences.", which is the exact thing the article is warning against. How many people died because of Tesla auto-pilot over the last decade, across hundreds of thousands of cars on the road? Half a dozen? A dozen? This must be stopped or at least regulated, that's your argument. To put some perspective on things: About the same number of people were killed by gun violence in Texas alone just yesterday. According to half the voters in the United States, regulation can never be justified as a solution to this carnage. Never. Literally "any" regulation is "too much" regulation in their minds. Systems thinking is about rising above these primitive self-interested, myopic decisions. It's using numbers and facts at a global scale instead of an individual scale. If Tesla develops a working self-driving AI, they'll save tens of thousands of lives annually, if not hundreds of thousands. Killing a few people due to imperfect intermediate stages on the way there is worth it. Not to the dead people and their families, of course, but to the overall population. It's uncomfortable locally but optimal globally. That's literally what systems thinking is about: forcing people out of their local optimums, against their will, to achieve a global optimum. That optimum might actually be preferred by everyone, but local gradient descent by individuals will never get over the hump to achieve it. Just look at the people suing the FAA for allowing the Starship launch. There are people that would rather that we remain stuck on Earth forever than take the slightest risk, like a few chunks of concrete being thrown around. It's absurd, but its the exact behaviour I see in large organisations at every level.

redhale 4y ago
Gross. I hope this is parody. You seem to have taken the article's point of taking FINANCIAL risks to a company's bottom line, and perverted it to justify killing a few of your customers for the sake of a beta test. Why not go for human medical testing without consent, while we're at it? Taking risks MUST have limits, especially when it comes to human life.
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  Have you not seen Fight Club, or watched the news about the 777 MAX crashes caused by MCAS? Big corporations take risks with their customers lives all the time. There's an entire area study dedicated to calculating how many dollars people are "worth" when making such risk calculations. Virtually nothing is risk free. Anything that involves anything you ingest, anything that can catch fire, anything that involves driving, and anything that involves mains voltage can and does kill "customers". Virtually nothing of import done at an industrial scale has a perfect safety record. Consider power generation: Wind mills kill people. Workmen fall off them all the time. They catch fire while people are in them, and they burn to death: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1q0sca/last_week_two_engineers_died_when_the_windmill/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1q0sca/last_week_two_... Solar panels kill people: again, workmen fall off roofs while installing them and break their necks. Should we stop all progress on green energy because it is totally unacceptable for any corporation to ever risk anyone's life, ever? Is that a net benefit? Should endless studies be done, for centuries if need be, to make sure no windmill ever kills a worker, ever again? Or should we grow up and weigh the pros and cons?
  - davidf18 4y ago
    [dead]
vaidhy 4y ago
hmm... So, ethics panels are not needed? What is a few lives in ways of progress? FAA and spaceX circumvented existing process - there was a larger article that this is going to be an ecological disaster before the launch that was posted here [0]. You are willing to sacrifice what is in your hand now for an nebulous future promise and that seems to be equally faulty bias on the other side. Almost all fraud happens with a vague promise of future gains, if only you can sacrifice a little now. What differentiates false promises from true hope? How much would be risk on a too unbelievable outcome? These kind of "looking from hindsight" articles are pretty useless. Every idea that has to be funded also needs to have a realistic chance of success at that point in time. [0] - https://blog.esghound.com/p/spacexs-texas-rocket-is-going-to https://blog.esghound.com/p/spacexs-texas-rocket-is-going-to
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  That blog your linked is packed with emotional speech and hyperbole. "Noise bomb" is one of the literal headings. It's a rocket launch pad, what did they expect, a gentle susurration whispering through the reeds of the uninhabited wetlands!? This anonymous "ESG Hound" character posts virtually nothing but rabid anti-SpaceX rhetoric. I bet he doesn't even live in Texas. (For reference, the locals, when interviewed, said they welcome the huge uptick in business SpaceX brought.) This particular unhinged rant is about the sound levels, saying that "110 decibels" can cause structural damage in nearby towns, etc... First of all: no, it can't. That's absurd. I live 2.5 miles from a sports stadium where they semi-regularly host rock concerts that go up to 120 dB. At that distance, that's louder than when my neighbour turns his stereo up to 11. This insanely loud sound goes on for hours on end, but it is perfectly legal, and that stadium has apartment blocks a mere few hundred yards away from it! Second, whatever "ecological impact" SpaceX had on the area, it pales in comparison to everyday, ordinary industrial activities. Building demolitions, mine blasting, road works, F1 races, etc... Elon rightly pointed out in an interview afterwards that the area is prone to tornadoes and hurricanes, which do vastly more damage. No human activity can even hope to match what nature can do, short of nuclear weapons testing. What actually happened is that a few chunks of concrete were strewn about, an activity accompanied by a noise so awesome that people flew there to get the chance to experience it! > What differentiates false promises from true hope? Who said everything had to be certain? So what if SpaceX fails and we have nothing to show for it except some deafened seagulls and concrete littering a beach? Should we never strive for the stars just because to get there we might make a mess? Who are you to nail humanity's feet to the ground?
Veserv 4y ago
No, the risk landscape is not binary. The choice is not, take no risk or take any risk. There are literally factors of millions if not billions between the low risk and high risk activities. The people arguing that the status quo level of risk tolerance are too low almost always mischaracterize how wide the gap is or do not know how safe the “risky” activities they point to as evidence that risky activitys should and can be tolerated. Yes, you should weigh the pros and cons, but that requires actually quantifying them. For instance, you pointed to the 737 MAX in a different comment as evidence that corporations take risks with their customers all the time. First of all, they were roundly criticized for their laxness, so that is actually evidence that too many risks were taken and we should stricter. Second, the fatality rate of the 737 MAX right after the second crash (while it was defective) was on the order of 1 fatality per 100,000,000 miles which is still safer than driving. Third, the reason it is viewed so negatively is because that level of safety is around 1,000x worse than the average in commercial airliners. Arguing that we accept corporations taking risks because we accept the 737 MAX (we do not), so we should increase our risk tolerance to the level of the 737 MAX (everything except other airplanes is already more dangerous, so this would actually be decreasing risk tolerance) and generally accept greater levels of risk than the status quo (which has been rejected in the 737 MAX case as we find the increase in risk relative to the status quo unacceptable). The entire argument is literally completely wrong in every conceivable facet. To then dig into your other specific argument, the Tesla argument is that they are taking greater risks to develop faster. A pro and a con. However, by all objective measures, Tesla will not develop a self-driving system first. Their systems are thousands of times worse than their competitors such as Waymo and Cruise. Their approach is so far behind their competitors that there is little reason to believe that anything it is doing will be incorporated into working solutions. So, every single person their human experimentation program kills, of which there are at least 31 documented deaths (no thanks to Tesla who deliberately obscures reporting), is being killed for no reason. From a systems thinking perspective, there is exactly zero benefit and immense costs to supporting Tesla’s regressive development process relative to others who are both more safe and more effective.

Cpoll 4y ago

Nobody brought up Tesla, except obliquely by way of Musk. And arguably Tesla is another good example (electric cars, not self-driving). Do you have a response to the other names listed (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs)? You can invoke survivorship bias on any entrepreneurial anecdote, so it doesn't contribute much to the discussion. Also, the "asshole" was in quotes, and that's significant. No-one's discussing their social graces.