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"Certainty" appears in the abstract! But yes, the article is talking about the work required to derive a 95%-confident result of a specific improvement. But that's backwards, and not how one does statistics. You measure an effect, and then compute its confidence.

And it's spun anyway, since most of those "trillions of miles!" numbers reflect things like proving 95% confidence of 100%+ improvements in safety. When all we really want to know to release this to the public is 95% confidence of 0% improvement (i.e. "is it not worse?").




>> But that's backwards, and not how one does statistics.

Are you saying one cannot use statistics to make predictions about future events?


I'm saying that to make good decisions, you need to make predictions about the right future events. And Rand is pontificating about the wrong ones.


Where is it that they are "pontificating"? They're calculating how long and how far self-driving cars need to drive before we can accept they're safe.




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