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MPG & UFollow

#52 Sep 12 2013 at 7:27 AM Rating: Good
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Smasharoo wrote:
I mean some of these idiots still pay for paper checks and use them for small transactions.
Luckily most of them are triple digits and dying off every day.
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#53 Sep 13 2013 at 4:07 PM Rating: Good
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Smasharoo wrote:
It's the same thing either way.

What isn't the same is the non linear relationship between comparisons using the two ratios.


Um... At the risk of being the math geek here, it is the same.

Quote:
The point of MPG, aside from economy standards is to allow comparison for consumers. The non-linear progression of, say, a 15 MPG difference between vehicles completely undermines that.


And a 1L/100km difference between vehicles has the same problem, doesn't it?

Quote:
If American consumers could use math...


Way to be the example of a typical American consumer there Smash. Smiley: grin

Edited, Sep 13th 2013 3:07pm by gbaji
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#54 Sep 13 2013 at 4:16 PM Rating: Decent
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Finally something relevant to my lurker interests that hasn't already been said by someone much more witty than I.

It's slow, heavy, and carries tons of groceries, so basically perfect for my 1-5 mile trips about town. Also has the benefit of being easily seen by cars so I always get a wide berth by people passing me.

My Electra Amsterdam Bike

#55 Sep 13 2013 at 5:18 PM Rating: Good
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Hmm, a white basket. Isn't that a ***** to keep clean?
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#56 Sep 13 2013 at 5:31 PM Rating: Decent
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Elinda wrote:
Hmm, a white basket. Isn't that a ***** to keep clean?


The vinyl used seems to repel the dirt pretty well. It's not perfectly sparkly white anymore but a quick swipe with a soapy dishcloth and some water and it is almost good as new. It does tend to get dirty on the inside and since it is a horror to unstrap from the rack, it tends to stay dirty.
#57 Sep 13 2013 at 5:52 PM Rating: Decent
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gbaji wrote:
Smasharoo wrote:
It's the same thing either way.

What isn't the same is the non linear relationship between comparisons using the two ratios.


Um... At the risk of being the math geek here, it is the same.

Quote:
The point of MPG, aside from economy standards is to allow comparison for consumers. The non-linear progression of, say, a 15 MPG difference between vehicles completely undermines that.


And a 1L/100km difference between vehicles has the same problem, doesn't it?

Quote:
If American consumers could use math...


Way to be the example of a typical American consumer there Smash. Smiley: grin

Add high school level math to the long list of things you are terrible at.
#58 Sep 13 2013 at 7:04 PM Rating: Good
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trickybeck wrote:

Add high school level math to the long list of things you are terrible at.


Fun to hate on Gbaji and all, but what he's saying is not false. Units make no difference in a person's inability to grasp percent increases (or decreases).
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#59 Sep 13 2013 at 7:20 PM Rating: Decent
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TirithRR wrote:
trickybeck wrote:

Add high school level math to the long list of things you are terrible at.


Fun to hate on Gbaji and all, but what he's saying is not false. Units make no difference in a person's inability to grasp percent increases (or decreases).

We're talking about the reciprocal ratio, not the unit swap.
#60 Sep 13 2013 at 7:31 PM Rating: Decent
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trickybeck wrote:
Add high school level math to the long list of things you are terrible at.


That would really hurt, if it wasn't for the fact that I'm absolutely correct. Smash should have stuck to the perception effects of using the different expressions rather than trying to argue that one creates a perception effect while the other does not. They both do. What they do (and which he started out talking about until he went off into the weeds) is do so in opposite directions. We can debate that perception difference in terms of consumer choices, but that's not where he went with it.
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#61 Sep 13 2013 at 8:02 PM Rating: Good
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trickybeck wrote:
TirithRR wrote:
trickybeck wrote:

Add high school level math to the long list of things you are terrible at.


Fun to hate on Gbaji and all, but what he's saying is not false. Units make no difference in a person's inability to grasp percent increases (or decreases).

We're talking about the reciprocal ratio, not the unit swap.


No. Smash was arguing that people perceive linear differences in one value as "the same" regardless of the effect on the actual ratio. So the difference between 15MPG and 20MPG versus 35MPG and 40MPG are going to be seen by consumers as the same because they're all a 5MPG difference even though the relative improvement is much better in the first case rather than the second.

The problem is that, assuming we accept his premise (and I'm willing to for the sake of argument), we run into the same problem either way (well, except going in the opposite direction). If we assume that someone will perceive a 5MPG improvement as equally valuable, then they'll also perceive the same linear improvement in fuel consumption over distance as equally valuable. But this is where his argument goes off the rails:

If we take the same values, but flip them around, then we have one case (15MPG to 20MPG) where we go from 6.66G/100M to 5G/100M. That's a 1.66G/100M improvement. But in the second case (35MPG to 40MPG) we go from 2.86G/100M to 2.5G/100M. That's only a .36G/100M improvement. Put another way, assuming Smash's premise is correct, in order for people to have as much perceived fuel efficiency value in the second case, we'd need to be able to drop the fuel usage rate from 2.86G/100M to 1.2G/100M (cause that's 1.6G/100M improvement, right?). That's a problem though, since that would require a much bigger actual fuel improvement increase.


I agree with what Smash started to say, I just disagree with the direction he was going with it. If your goal is to encourage people to keep buying more fuel efficient cars, you want to use a measurement that makes even relatively small improvements appear large enough to be worth it. The linear fallacy angle applies in both cases, but IMO it creates a disincentive for consumers to buy more fuel efficient cars as the fuel efficiency increases if you represent it as G/100M versus MPG. It's relatively easy and cheap to increase relative fuel efficiency when you first start caring about such things, but it becomes increasingly difficult and costly as you improve. We have to accept that we can only get marginal increases over time going forward, but if we assume that every bit helps, then we want to express those small improvements in a way that actually makes people think they're getting something more.


MPG is a better way of doing this precisely because of the false perception Smash was talking about. You want them to continue to place similar value on incremental fuel improvements as fuel efficiency increases as they did when fuel efficiency was relatively low. MPG does this quite well if we assume the perception problem Smash talked about. And if we don't, then it doesn't matter since both represent a ratio. As Smash correctly pointed out, a linear increase in MPG results in successively smaller ratio improvements as fuel efficiency improves, while the opposite is true with G/100M (or the same in metric). Where I think he's wrong is which is actually 'better'.

Edited, Sep 13th 2013 7:05pm by gbaji
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#62 Sep 13 2013 at 9:39 PM Rating: Good
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Smasharoo wrote:
The point of MPG, aside from economy standards is to allow comparison for consumers. The non-linear progression of, say, a 15 MPG difference between vehicles completely undermines that. If American consumers could use math, we'd be using the metric system, so I'm not going to bother going down that road.

Yeah, because the typical person understands logarithmic units better than they do linear ones.
#63 Sep 13 2013 at 9:46 PM Rating: Good
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Also I don't know what the rest of you are on about, but gbaji is right about the equivalent non-linear progression of mpg versus gpm (well, equivalently reciprocated). Smash is bad at math, also Tricky.

Edited, Sep 13th 2013 10:55pm by Allegory
#64 Sep 14 2013 at 6:06 AM Rating: Good
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My 2003 Hyundai Elantra still averages around 29 MPG, and most of my driving is city driving. On road trips, it bumps up to around 32 MPG.
#65 Sep 14 2013 at 12:42 PM Rating: Decent
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Allegory wrote:
Also I don't know what the rest of you are on about, but gbaji is right about the equivalent non-linear progression of mpg versus gpm (well, equivalently reciprocated). Smash is bad at math, also Tricky.

No, gbaji was pretty much confused about the math, but has since changed his story to make it about people's perception. His argument is something about the fact that people just want to know the range of their cars, and not the relative gas consumption...I guess? I didn't really bother to read much of it.

Here's something he should take to heart when it comes to his evaluation of the average person's perception: He's got 10 solid years of data in the form of hundreds and hundreds of forum users here who have disagreed with him on pretty much every topic he discusses, versus about 3 that have agreed with him. Maybe he still thinks he knows everything about science and math and art and economics and computers, but the evidence shows that he knows nothing about how a normal person thinks, feels, or behaves. (And it's just humorous that he thinks sociology is fake, yet claims to be an expert in all fields of sociology.)

#66 Sep 14 2013 at 2:13 PM Rating: Decent
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And a 1L/100km difference between vehicles has the same problem, doesn't it?


Sort of. Ideally you'd want to offer a measure that relates to how a consumer uses the device. Since the amount of people who once a year throw a gallon of gas in the car and drive it as far it will go is likely fairly low, a more useful measurement would represent a more usual use case. Gallons/10k miles or whatever the mean use case actually is. Obviously the efficiency doesn't change based on the measure, but the *usefulness of that information* does. We could measure fuel economy in inches per deciliter, too, but you can see how that wouldn't make sense, correct? "Hey this one gets 100 more!" What you'd ideally like is a way to represent the difference in ideal terms of how much gas the vehicle would use over the lifetime use case for each consumer, as then the judgement would be straightforward in a 1 to 1 representation of the use case. Since that's fairly difficult, there are more and less useful measure. Rods per lb at sea level and 1 millibar at 111 kelvin is less useful than gallons per year. MPG is less useful than GP10000kM. It's not complicated. The closer to linear you can make the comparison measurement to the use case, the more useful it is. Consumers absolutely do see going from 35 MPG to 50 MPG as "better" than going from 20 MPG to 30 MPG. As stated previously as cars become more efficient it becomes more of an issue.
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#67 Sep 14 2013 at 4:22 PM Rating: Good
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The estimated cost of ownership, WRT fuel costs especially seem like a good consumer metric.
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#68 Sep 15 2013 at 12:11 AM Rating: Good
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trickybeck wrote:
No, gbaji was pretty much confused about the math, but has since changed his story to make it about people's perception. His argument is something about the fact that people just want to know the range of their cars, and not the relative gas consumption...I guess? I didn't really bother to read much of it.

Gbaji was never wrong about the math. His argument was always that mpg was cognitively easier for people to deal with than gpm. I don't particularly care about that argument, but he used it consistently.
trickybeck wrote:
Here's something he should take to heart when it comes to his evaluation of the average person's perception

What a sophisticated and mature argument. He was wrong all those other times, so he should just always assume he's wrong when you disagree with him. Except that his math was right. So how does it feel to be worse at math than the guy who is apparently wrong about everything else.
Smasharoo wrote:
MPG is less useful than GP10000kM. It's not complicated. The closer to linear you can make the comparison measurement to the use case, the more useful it is.

You really don't have any idea what you're talking about do you? Reciprocating the unit doesn't change the linearity of the relationship. Yeah, going from 25 mpg to 50 mpg isn't the same efficiency gain as 50 mpg to 75 mpg. The same issue results when you go from 75 gpm to 50 gpm in comparison to 50 gpm to 25 gpm. To do what you want requires logarithmic units, which I think is silly to suggest joe smhoe understands better than linear units.

Edited, Sep 15th 2013 1:12am by Allegory
#69 Sep 15 2013 at 8:17 AM Rating: Excellent
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That's not what smash is actually saying, perhaps reread the post. It's about the use case, or the useful range, not about the linearity of the relationship overall.
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#70 Sep 15 2013 at 1:07 PM Rating: Decent
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Allegory wrote:
trickybeck wrote:
No, gbaji was pretty much confused about the math, but has since changed his story to make it about people's perception. His argument is something about the fact that people just want to know the range of their cars, and not the relative gas consumption...I guess? I didn't really bother to read much of it.

Gbaji was never wrong about the math. His argument was always that mpg was cognitively easier for people to deal with than gpm. I don't particularly care about that argument, but he used it consistently.

Nah.

Quote:
trickybeck wrote:
Here's something he should take to heart when it comes to his evaluation of the average person's perception

What a sophisticated and mature argument. He was wrong all those other times, so he should just always assume he's wrong when you disagree with him. Except that his math was right. So how does it feel to be worse at math than the guy who is apparently wrong about everything else.

No, he should just always assume he's wrong when he's arguing about the average person's motivations, cognitive perception, behavior of groups, etc. He exists completely outside normal human behavior, yet all his opinions on it come solely from his own intuition (the intuition of a non-normal person) because he doesn't trust any actual scientific research on the subject.
#71 Sep 15 2013 at 6:29 PM Rating: Decent
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Reciprocating the unit doesn't change the linearity of the relationship. Yeah, going from 25 mpg to 50 mpg isn't the same efficiency gain as 50 mpg to 75 mpg. The same issue results when you go from 75 gpm to 50 gpm in comparison to 50 gpm to 25 gpm. To do what you want requires logarithmic units, which I think is silly to suggest joe smhoe understands better than linear units.

You are correct, I phrased it poorly.

You really don't have any idea what you're talking about do you?

If you like. Or, I poorly communicated something I understand very well. I suppose you'll have to judge that on your own. I imagine it feels more satisfying to assume I'd fail High School Algebra. You should probably go with that.
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To make a long story short, I don't take any responsibility for anything I post here. It's not news, it's not truth, it's not serious. It's parody. It's satire. It's bitter. It's angsty. Your mother's a *****. You like to jack off dogs. That's right, you heard me. You like to grab that dog by the bone and rub it like a ski pole. Your dad? Gay. Your priest? Straight. **** off and let me post. It's not true, it's all in good fun. Now go away.

#72 Sep 15 2013 at 7:46 PM Rating: Good
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I suppose. What runs through your mind is a mystery to me. If you're going to take the time to give gbaji **** about it though, I'd like to think you'd expend enough care to not phrase it so poorly as to be unambiguously false.
#73 Sep 16 2013 at 7:11 AM Rating: Good
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I think mass should be added into the equation in the form of numbers of bodies.

Moving 4 people 35 miles on one gallon of gas is more efficient than moving 1 person 35 miles on 1/2 gallon of gas.
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#74 Sep 16 2013 at 7:13 AM Rating: Good
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#75 Sep 16 2013 at 7:40 AM Rating: Good
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By the time I get home today, I'll have combusted about 1.25 gallons of gas. Smiley: frown
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#76 Sep 16 2013 at 8:40 AM Rating: Good
Getting 25 mpg city in a 16 year old car. Closer to 30 on the highway.

So I'm doing much better than expected, simply because most cars that age are ready to be retired and mine is still doing just fine.
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