Item — HN Reader

I agree. There was an article recently about the new mayor of NYC being caught eating fish even though he’s claimed many times to be vegan. He was complaining that the “food police” was harassing him over something trivial.

My reaction was the same as to this news. I don’t care if Tesla made a small change, and I don’t care what Adams eats. I care about transparency and honesty.

2 comments

Hilarious considering the 2 things are completely different.

I'm not paying Adams many thousands of dollars to be Vegan.

People are paying Tesla many tens of thousands of dollars to do stuff they claim they will do, haven't yet done, and by these actions are even more unlikely to be able to do.

If your criteria are "people paid thousands of dollars", I bet you could find two donors of $2,000 or more to Adams who did so because they wanted a vegan mayor.

Now, I agree they are not the same severity. But the line you drew doesn't make sense.

Would you want Tesla to publish _every_ small change they make, or just this one because you read about it? Because absolutely no company in the world anywhere will publish all changes they make to their product or production line.

What we're seeing here is a rather pesky bias called "Isolated Demand for Rigor". You shouldn't feel bad: it's quite common, very hard to figure out if you don't know about it, and almost impossible if it mixes with confirmation bias. For a fun post about it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...

Well. For certain values of fun. I always thought Scott was so pissed at this bias he was in a very "fuck you" mood when he wrote it.