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Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery

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Re: Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery

#211

Post by yk »

joe_the_user wrote: post #173
lawdawg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you (or 99% of HN) read the NYT article? "When I parked the car, its computer said I had 90 miles of range, twice the 46 miles back to Milford. It was a different story at 8:30 the next morning. The thermometer read 10 degrees and the display showed 25 miles of remaining range" "I called Tesla in California, and the official I woke up said I needed to “condition” the battery pack to restore the lost energy." Look…

Well, if Broder's headline was "Tesla Employee Let My Car Run Down", he'd have been telling the story you can extract out of the text. However, "Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway" somehow tells a story where blame is a lot more fuzzy. Broder told a complicated story and put a poetically negative spin on it. It is entirely understandable that Musk would want to simplify this down to negative claims he could refu…

I think "Stalled Out on Tesla’s Electric Highway" is actually a defendable claim, if we see the entire thing as a test of the current state of Tesla's recharging network. But claiming that their current recharging station network is not a drop in replacement for gas stations and gasoline fueled cars is of course a hugely unfair spin of a story about Tesla and electric cars in general.

Re: Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery

#212

Post by AlexeiSadeski »

jblow wrote: post #205
AlexeiSadeski wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you're familiar with the costs of battery attrition which accompany owning a pure electric car.

I am, and the answer is: not very much. I own a Roadster, and after 2.5 years of daily driving, my battery capacity is down by 6%. That's not 0%, but it's also not a big deal.

That sounds like an extraordinarily small amount of degradation. Sufficiently small, in fact, that I suspect that your capacity measurements may be off.

Capacity should decrease 5-10% per annum, from what I've read.

Re: Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery

#213

Post by achompas »

JPKab wrote: post #58
taligent wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> someone who has no education in comprehending quantitative You need to a degree to understand a pretty basic line graph ? Give me a break. People on here (and in the article's comments) need to stop acting like sanctimonious assholes. Electric cars are not some advanced technology that only the precious genius of Musk and IT nerds can comprehend. The fact is that the truth seems to lie somewhere in the middle here.…

I get why you're irritated, but when I say "education" I don't mean necessarily a degree. I mean just some fundamental, working knowledge, whether that's from a degree, course, autodidactic, whatever. I did sound sanctimonious, but you know what? I didn't write a critique of someone's data dependent analysis. And if I lacked quantitative analysis experience, I wouldn't try to. But to be fair, I have no way of knowing…

What mistakes? I work with data for a living, and I agreed with The Atlantic's points (having reached the same conclusions last night when the story broke).

The particular mistake you cite results from a lack of domain knowledge, not analysis skills. The chart says "rated range remaining." If you're not familiar with EVs, you'd think that means the car will not move anymore. That assumption has zero to do with chart-reading abilities.

Re: Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery

#214

Post by whyenot »

halviti wrote: post #109
lawdawg wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you (or 99% of HN) read the NYT article? "When I parked the car, its computer said I had 90 miles of range, twice the 46 miles back to Milford. It was a different story at 8:30 the next morning. The thermometer read 10 degrees and the display showed 25 miles of remaining range" "I called Tesla in California, and the official I woke up said I needed to “condition” the battery pack to restore the lost energy." Look…

Nobody is lying, but if you get in your car and it tells you that you can only you can only go 25 miles, do you really think it's ok to drive over twice that?

Maybe. It's an electric car. I don't have a lot of experience with electric cars and I already know that the range estimate can be off by a lot. I'd probably call up Tesla and ask them, which is exactly what Broder says he did.

"Tesla’s experts said that pumping in a little energy would help restore the power lost overnight as a result of the cold weather, and after an hour they cleared me to resume the trip to Milford."

Re: Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery

#215

Post by adastra »

danielweber wrote: post #200
adastra wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That all comes down to what Broder claims someone told him on a phone call. Except he doesn't quote them verbatim and never provides the name(s) of the people he was talking to. Given all that they had at stake, namely a disastrous NY Times review, how likely is it that Tesla would knowingly say "Oh, your reading says 30 miles, but you have more than twice that still to travel? Meh, it's probably just a computer glit…

Except he doesn't quote them verbatim and never provides the name(s) of the people he was talking to. Well, he can't provide all possible data all at once in the original article. Since your post, he has said who he was talking to: http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/that-tesla-data-w...

Interesting. Here's the relevant bit:

"[Quoting Elon]'The final leg of his trip was 61 miles and yet he disconnected the charge cable when the range display stated 32 miles. He did so expressly against the advice of Tesla personnel and in obvious violation of common sense.'

"The Tesla personnel whom I consulted over the phone – Ms. Ra and Mr. Merendino – told me to leave it connected for an hour, and after that the lost range would be restored. I did not ignore their advice."

If I had to guess, I'd bet they talked to him on the phone, saying "Try plugging it in for an hour, that should fix it", figuring after an hour he would call them back if it needed more charge. He didn't call them back, and instead set out knowing he was about to be stranded and have a great story, since he could always claim "Well I followed their advice to the letter! It's their fault!"

Re: Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery

#216

Post by lcc_tn »

rayiner wrote: post #206
lcc_tn wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you say resonates very much with my experiences too. Do you happen to have book recommendations maybe that talk about this at a greater length?

Argument and rhetoric is a whole field of study. Prof. David Zarefsky at Northwestern has a good set of lectures on the subject which are on Amazon. The outline is here: http://thefulldialectician.synthasite.com/resources/ZAREFSKY... My exposure to the subject has been in the legal context. This is a popular textbook on legal argumentation: Gardner, Legal Argument: The Structure and Language of Effective Advocacy. So…

Thanks very much! I'll definitely look into these.

Re: Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery

#217

Post by rz2k »

lawdawg wrote: post #106
halviti wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read all the arguments on both sides, and while both have made good points, there is one that stands out. This reporter clearly barely made any attempt at recharging his empty vehicle in Norwich, and then attempted a drive well beyond the car's capabilities, then made the "running out of fuel" his headline. If he would have done this on gasoline, the result would have been the same, and I think that is getting l…

Did you (or 99% of HN) read the NYT article? "When I parked the car, its computer said I had 90 miles of range, twice the 46 miles back to Milford. It was a different story at 8:30 the next morning. The thermometer read 10 degrees and the display showed 25 miles of remaining range" "I called Tesla in California, and the official I woke up said I needed to “condition” the battery pack to restore the lost energy." Look…

Just to be clear, there is a very reasonable case to be made about the miles that did not "magically" disappear. Unless the battery was giving off heat all night, where else did the energy go?

The "conditioning" sounds like a explanatory shortcut to explaining that ambient temperature affects measurements, and therefore also estimated range.

Without really understanding the details, I think two things: The NYT should have more sophisticated reviews, Tesla should have better QA over its support services to make sure fewer people are given unreasonably optimistic assessments about their range.

Re: Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery

#218

Post by fpgeek »

taligent wrote: post #48
grecy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that his job was to write an accurate review Why do you assume that? His job was to attract readership and hits for the NYT. Nothing does that better than controversy.

The New York Times is not some Murdoch trashy paper that deals with gossip and controversy. The integrity of their work is important because that is what is keeping the paper alive whilst the others are falling by the way side. Maybe you should actually try reading it sometime.

Correction: For the NYT's business, their reputation for integrity is what's important, not the actual integrity of their work. For example, it could be better (or just safer) for that reputation to make up a story that agrees with the conventional wisdom than to tell an unexpected truth that does not.

Re: Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery

#219

Post by hhw »

adnrw wrote: post #209
grecy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given that his job was to write an accurate review Why do you assume that? His job was to attract readership and hits for the NYT. Nothing does that better than controversy.

From the NYT Company's "Guidelines on Integrity" [1]: "... it is imperative that The Times and its staff maintain the highest possible standards to insure that we do nothing that might erode readers’ faith and confidence in our news columns. This means that staff members should be vigilant in avoiding any activity that might pose an actual or apparent conflict of interest and thus threaten the newspaper's ethical sta…

Shouldn't that be "ensure" rather than "insure"? You would expect better English, especially on the integrity guidelines page, from a highly regarded news publication like the New York Times.

Re: Elon Musk's Data Doesn't Back Up His Claims of New York Times Fakery

#220

Post by malandrew »

My bet is that John M. Broder made a call to James Bennet (the third person Broder ever followed on Twitter. They have published many things together. e.g. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/13/us/president-s-acquittal-w...), who is the Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic.

James hasn't tweeted since February 8th, but retweeted John Broder today about 9 hours ago (screenshotted for posterity in case someone following up to blog about this wants it later) https://twitter.com/JBennet

This now calls in question the integrity of James Bennet and Rebecca Greenfield. I haven't been able to determine a link between Rebecca and James other than that of subordinate. She's been at the Atlandic since July 2010 and he's been at the Atlantic since 2006. http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=43905376 https://www.facebook.com/pages/James-Bennet/112357645448306

I tried finding the Facebook profiles for these three people to confirm connections, but it doesn't look like their profiles are publicly discoverable.

Any journalists care to take on a story of examining the relationships within the third estate here? There's probably a story.

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