Anything other than "normalish" tends to be a failure in driving. I.e. stopping and throwing your hazards on when you're in the intersection isn't success just because there were even worse options to have picked. It's nice they were able to pull the fleet back and get the cars out of the roads during the problem though.
I think this was a failure. The gold standard should be that the if every human driver was replaced with an AI how well could the system function. This makes it look like things would be catastrophic. Thus, showing how humans continue to be much more versatile and capable than AI.
I suppose if you lower the standards for what you hope AI can accomplish it wouldn't be considered a failure.
I'd say yes. The goal of a self-driving car is to emulate humans. If the car is panicking and reverting to "extreme safety mode" in situations where a normal human is going to be fine, then that's a failure.
Using that math it would be better if they were faster even if they killed somebody.
That's a repulsive argument... Just because some argument is logically sound doesn't mean it's rational or reasonable.
Also, when attempting that math, make sure you account for the buffer that everyone already builds into their life. No sense in double counting the extra 10m I'm angry in traffic, instead of angry sitting at home because I'm doom scrolling some media feed with that extra 10m I saved because the robotaxi was faster.
I mean, we would all save lives if we just never used a car outside of medical emergencies, but we do, so clearly there's some time/risk tradeoff that's happening.
Your naive feel good attitude (and you're not alone in it, that crap permeates white collar western society) is exactly the problem and being all emotional about it only worsens your ability to reason about it.
Whenever we do something "good" at societal scale be it build ADA ramps or engage in international trade of consumer goods or in this case, have transportation infrastructure, there is always some tradeoff like this. We can either do the thing in a safer to life and limb manner, but that almost always has tradeoffs that make the thing less accessible or worse performing. We could have absurdly low maximum vehicle speeds, that would save lives, but the time and wealth (which are convertible to each other on some level) renders the tradeoff not worth it (to the public at large).
You can value a whole life loss higher than man hours. You can value a child more than the elderly. You can make all sorts of adjustments like that but they do not change the fundamental math of the problem.
> Your naive feel good attitude (and you're not alone in it, that crap permeates white collar western society) is exactly the problem and being all emotional about it only worsens your ability to reason about it.
It's not a feel good attitude. I'm only objecting to your shallow take arguing that the commoditization of human life is reasonable. (i.e. touch grass) Similar to how you're concerned, exclusively, with the numbers you think you can count. That attitude of dehumanization has never resulted in good things things for society and humanity. That's the trade off I'm suggesting is important to consider when trying to make up numbers as you are. I'm not arguing that an absurdly low max speed is better. I'm arguing that it's small minded to try to count like that.
> You can value a whole life loss higher than man hours. You can value a child more than the elderly. You can make all sorts of adjustments like that but they do not change the fundamental math of the problem.
I wouldn't make any adjustments like that. The value or importance that exists with a human life, the case example, being a person that cares for others, and is cared about by others. Can't be reduced into a value that's translatable to man hours. I'd trade hours with some people for minutes with others. Just because time is something you can quantify, and you like that you can count it. Doesn't make it more better or important.
To be clear, I'm not saying your math is wrong, I'm saying you're wrong to believe it applies. (in such a simplistic manner.) You can use the math to decide how you're going to make tradeoffs given known input values; how much can my city pay for safety equipment to protect people. But you can't make up some adjacent math and say, this car's design is wrong because it didn't kill the correct number of people... err I mean, the correct number of man hours.
I had to look up what this was a reference to. Several months ago a cat ran underneath a Waymo and the vehicle's rear tire ran over it while pulling away from the curb. The NYT has a video [1] of the incident.
I’d bet you already have a mode that would’ve prevented what happened to the cat. From NYT reporting on the actual incident:
A human driver, she believes, would have stopped and asked if everything was OK after seeing a concerned person kneeling in front of their car and peering underneath.
“I didn’t know if I should reach out and hit one of the cameras or scream,” she said of the perilous moment. “I sort of froze, honestly. It was disorienting that Waymo was pulling away with me so close to it.”
I watched the video and read the article. (I wish I didn't; I love cats. I've known some wonderful bodega cats myself.)
But I'll bet I already have a mode that makes me want to drive away from people I don't know who are acting weird around my car.
I mean: I've got options. I can fight, flee, or hang out and investigate.
But I'm human -- I'm going to make what ultimately turn out to be poor decisions sometimes. I will have this condition until the day I die, and there isn't a single thing I can do about it (except to choose to die sooner, I guess).
So to posit an example: I'm already behind the wheel of my fleeing-machine with an already-decided intent to leave. And a stranger nearby is being weird.
I've now got a decision to make. It may be a very important decision, or it may instead be a nearly-meaningless decision.
Again, I've got options. I may very well decide that fighting isn't a good plan, and that joining them in exploring whatever mystery or ailment they may perceive is also not a great idea, and thereby decide that fleeing is the best option.
This may be a poor choice. It may also be the very best choice.
I don't know everything, and I can't see everything, and I do not get to use a time machine to gain hindsight for how this decision will play out.
(But I might speculate that if I stopped to investigate every time I saw a nearby stranger act weird at night in neighborhoods with prominent security gates that I might have fewer days remaining than if I just left them to their own devices.)
That’s an interesting perspective. The way I’ve always approached it is that if someone is looking at my car weird, I should probably ask what’s up. I’ve honked over several cars to let them know their tire is flat, flagged down drivers in parking lots because some dumbass let a ton of nails fall off their work truck, etc. When it comes to cars, someone checking out my car in a “weird” way is a prompt to me to investigate, not flee.
It's a perspective, prefaced with a speech about human error. I might get it wrong -- so might you, yourself.
There remains some reason for the businesses and residents of the neighborhood in which Kit Kat was run over to have spent money to install and maintain things like security gates and iron pickets in front of the glass and entryways of their buildings.
When I find myself in such a neighborhood at night and am already intent upon leaving, is not my intention to stick around and maybe find out what that reason might be.
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The point GP made was that Mossadegh was not democratically elected. There hadn't been representative democratic support for Mossadegh. Mossadegh was installed by the Shah and Majles, stopped an election that wasn't going his way, and then tried to dissolve parliament to concentrate power with himself.
"Iranian people voted in their beloved leader, who was then toppled by the mastermind West" is a cartoonish level of geopolitical understanding by those who have read the first couple paragraphs of wikipedia
There has been a release of archived official US diplomatic communications a few years ago that paint a rather mixed picture where the embassy was convinced the uprising had failed and the next days there were surprising marches in support of the shah that succeeded in the end.
To be fair, the entire chain of this thread is lacking any sources. Wikipedia at least contains sources, despite its relative inaccuracies and questionable authenticity of those sources. "in conflict with wikipedia" seems somewhat reasonable at this junction until someone rises above that bar.
This is sort of a bad and inaccurate summary of a much more complicated situation. Mossadegh was trying to dissolve parliament and was in conflict with the Shah before the British got involved. The Shah was already planning to try by constitutional means (which he had legal power to do) to remove Mossadegh. Would he have done it without British and US backing, is a debate for historians.
I don’t think any serious post WWII historians would agree with you. There was a concentrated effort by the UK and US to displace Mossadegh, who was democratically elected by the way. At the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems when it’s been proven that the most powerful intelligence agencies on the planet were actively destabilizing their society so that oil revenue would continue flowing into western pockets.
Mossadegh was elected but was also illegally trying to dissolve parliament.
>at the very least it disproves your unspoken assertion that the Iranians are primarily to blame for their problems
I'm very clearly stating that the Shah in particular was highly likely to have removed Mossadegh either way due to a multi-decade power struggle between the Pahlavi dynasty and the parliament /prime minister. The Majlis as a rival power center was largely a result of the Anglo-Soviet invasion which deposed Reza Shah, prior to that the Majlis had functioned in more of an advisory capacity, and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi was always lookign for ways to push back against the Majlis.
It is also important to note that the constitution in place in the early 1950s gave the power to appoint and remove the prime minister to the shah, Mossadegh was recommended to the shah by the Majlis who appointed him prime minister. That is factually how the government worked. It is also important to note that in 1952 Mossadegh stopped the counting of an election that it looked like he was going to lose. In 1953 Mossadegh organized a referendum to dissolve the parliament and vest sole power in the prime minister. This gave the shah the excuse he needed to remove Mossadegh and triggered Anglo-American support for the Shah and Iranian army to remove Mossadegh.
The CIA certainly helped the Shah get generals on side and plan the coup, this is not in dispute. However the idea that Mossadegh was democratically elected is not really true, and the idea that the coup was entirely carried out for external reasons is entirely false.
Ray Takeyh a professor of Near East studies who wrote The Last Shah: America, Iran, and the Fall of the Pahlavi Dynasty (Yale University Press, 2021) holds the position that the coup was internally driven. We also know from declassified document that the CIA thought the coup had failed and that their part was rather insignificant, but Iranian on the ground under their own direction carried out the coup.[1]
I think it’s just a super complicated story. My post above doesn’t even touch the rural urban divide or the role of the Mullahs or Tudeh and the communists. The whole thing was a second from exploding for years.
Well the vote was a sham with no secret ballots and separate voting tents for yes and no votes. Armed members of Tudeh were at almost every poling station, there were wide spread reports of members of Mossadegh's party voting multiple times, and the vote count came out to 99.99% "yes'. On top of being illegal it was obviously fraudulent. It is at times called a coup by Mossadegh.
>The ballot was not a secret one. Separate polling places were provided for those voters favoring dissolution and those against, and the vote had to give his name, his address and the number and place of issuance of his identity card.
Time Magazine from the same month in 1953 [2]:
> Da’s in 1946. Last week Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, the man in the iron cot, topped them all with 99.93%.
> This is the way he did it. Having unconstitutionally dissolved the Majlis, Mossadegh ordered a national referendum to judge his act, crying: “The will of the people is above law.” The 1906 Iranian constitution (which Mossadegh as a young revolutionary helped put across) requires a secret ballot.
From a 1953 article in The Middle East Journal [3]:
>Two days after the bloody confrontation of Tudeh mobs and security forces on
August 11, 1953, Mosaddeq’s government arrested a large number of its opponents
again.
So here we see Tudeh thugs attacking his opponents, and the man himself jailing the opposition.
> Two of Mosaddeq’s closest associates, Dr.Karim Sanjabi, a founder of the National Front and Minister of Education and Dr. Ghol-am-Hossein Sadiqi, the Minister of the Interior advised against dissolving the Majlis and holding a referendum. Both argued that the Majlis had supported Mosaddeq and that it had been the King who had appointed Prime Ministers since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 subject to parliamentary approval. Without the Majlis, the Shah would be free to oust the Prime Minister and appoint another. Mosaddeq’s reply to both had been the same: Shah jor’at-e in kar ra nadarad [The Shah would not dare].
We also see that Mossadegh's own advisors were cautioning him against trying to dissolve the Majlis, and reminding him that it would allow the Shah to constitutionally remove him. We clearly see a picture of a man, Mossadegh trying to become a dictator.
It would be too much to unpack here but the role of Ayatollah Kashani is also relevant in the story.
Did you just referenced an article by Kenneth Love? I’m sure you already know but for anyone else who might see this, a U.S. District Judge Michael B. Mukasey in Love v. Kwitny (1989) suggests that he played a role in the coup himself! Love even admits it later! [1]
The link from TIME is an op-ed? Who’s the writer? That’s not a source, credible or otherwise.
He was everything but democratically elected. He was installed. The Iranian people did not elect Mosaddegh. He was put there by a Shah and the elites of the Majlis, neither of which ever represented the people of Iran. At no point in the past century has Iran had representative government.
For the absurd 'democratically elected' premise to be true, there would have to be actual representative government. There wasn't, there isn't.
He was as democratically elected as the system at the time allowed and spent basically his entire political career on increasing the power of the majlis and getting rid of colonial interests.
The UK spent a lot of resources conspiring against this project, which ultimately failed, to a large extent because he did not have a solution to the blockade that followed nationalisation of the oil production. Perhaps he also did not expect as many members of the majlis to join the foreign conspiracy as did when the blockade got inconvenient.
It's also not like democratisation followed under the shah, rather the opposite, like the establishment of rather nasty security services and a nuclear program that the later revolutionaries inherited.
Right up until he was about to lose an election, then he suspended counting votes and tried to dissolve the Majlis in alliance with the communist party.
Not sure what you mean. In the -52 election he stopped the vote counting when enough of the majlis was filled that it could legally do work, and then tried to form a government which the shah blocked. This is what led to the proposal that the majlis give him six months of emergency powers.
I don’t have the book I’m looking for handy but the consensus opinion of historians of Iran is that it was an illegitimate move, as explained by Ervand Abrahamian in “ Evolving Iran: An Introduction to Politics and Problems in the Islamic Republic”.
Tellingly his first act after seating a half empty Majlis was to have them grant him emergency powers that allowed him to dictate laws. This is not a democratic system.
Whatever happened due to the British, it’s still fact they Iran was doing pretty well before the current revolution. I don’t think anyone would argue the population at large are better off today than they were under the previous regime.
That's a matter of values. Some would argue that appeasement of and being subdued by colonial powers is a much to high price to pay for whatever material wealth you're referring to.
US influence in Europe would be a much better comparison than indirection between positions and elections in the EU. As you surely know we've had a lot of interference in what parties are allowed and who can get elected and financing of organised crime coming from that direction.
> Most Europeans seem to be fine being under the EU where they don’t get to vote those bureaucrats in.
The political power in the EU comes from the national governments (directly and via the European commission) and the EU parliament. The members of parliament are elected. The national governments are also formed out of elected parliaments. There's also a body of administration and bureaucracy that comes out of these power structures, just like there is, by necessity, in any government ever, democratic or not.
Insinuating that this somehow equates to authoritarian forms of government appears deeply ignorant or dishonest to me.
I didn’t say authoritarian rather there is a supra national body that dictates policy down to sovereign countries whether the countries agree or not. It has similarities to colonial powers. You have local laws and customs but the colonial power can overrule and supersede those.
This is a similarly bizarre claim, for the same reasons as before. You have not really thought about how representative democracy works, or you misunderstand or wilfully misrepresent it.
In the end, your argument can be used against the other levels of government. National governments of not directly elected officials and bureaucrats and remote parliaments dictating to whole regions, who lord it over cities and communities, who oppress individual people, who should not have to cede a bit of their sovereignty to anybody else to decide or act on their behalf.
Nothing is perfect, nor is the EU, but with your line of thinking, you effectively deligitimize every practical way of organizing government as "colonial".
Maybe that's what you want, maybe you misunderstand and don't care if you do. There are many reasons good and bad to dislike the EU. Yours just appears to be nonsensical.
Nationalizing resources simply gives the capitalist west a legitimate casus beli to “liberate” all the assets that were stolen.
Venezuela is about to be turned into another Vietnam. Iran is next. I remember invading them in a mission in BF3. The USA itches to implement what its media anticipated.
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