Sounds like what she did was help refine the mathematical model of the earth, known as the geoid. It is roughly spherical, but only roughly. The biggest source of earth's deviation from spherical is its rotation about the N-S axis, which causes the radius from earth center to a point on the equator to be significantly larger than the radius from earth center to either the North Pole or the South Pole.
I think that even if they do end up being safer statistically, they will fail differently than humans, so that people learning of Waymo accidents will correctly say, "I NEVER would have done something that stupid!"
This being HN, I was expecting this to be about LLM-related hallucinations. I didn't read the whole thing, but it appears to be about actual human hallucinations.
"Always give your real reason for not doing something."
For example, a friend wants you to join a fiction book group, but you just don't like reading novels. Don't say, "I'm sorry, I don't have a car on Thursday nights" -- your friend may figure out how to get you a ride, or perhaps offer to switch the group meeting to a different night. In which case, you either end up doing something you don't want or coming off as a jerk for not giving your real reason in the first place.
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