4 ms·
Wasn't it just last week that the Financial Times had to walk back the breathless $1.4 billion story about Tesla accounting fraud? https://www.ft.com/content/d
by floxy 2y ago
Wasn't it just last week that the Financial Times had to walk back the breathless $1.4 billion story about Tesla accounting fraud?
https://www.ft.com/content/d2711678-af23-4b71-852b-1ef2e932e14b https://www.ft.com/content/d2711678-af23-4b71-852b-1ef2e932e...
This is like a textbook case outlined in E.T. Jaynes, "Probability Theory -- The Logic of Science", section 5.3:
https://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/bios601/GaussianModel/JaynesProbabilityTheory.pdf https://www.med.mcgill.ca/epidemiology/hanley/bios601/Gaussi...
...from my life experience with accounting departments and auditors at largish publicly traded companies, my priors for financial fraud of a company like Tesla at the corporate level is something like a probability of 0.001 (1 in a thousand companies). At the branch office level, something higher, say 0.01. Maybe double or triple that with Musk in charge. Someone reporting on an emotionally-charged topic in an effort to collect clicks? Especially when relying on second or third hand reported information? My prior for them misunderstanding or misrepresenting the numbers (like the time frames involved, etc.) is closer to 0.50. Other people's mileage may vary.