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Anatomy of a Deboonking: Why Debunking Stories So Often Fail to Persuade
So I'm looking at the Motortrend website looking for reviews as I'm shopping for a car for my wife. And I see this article purporting to independently test a "rigged" matchup used in Tesla marketing. Tesla posted this video claiming to show a Cybertruck Beast, towing a Porsche 911, defeating a Porsche 911 in a drag race. Right off the headline, where they state it isn't "rigged" this time, the implication is that Tesla (and that rascal Elon) lied to you! But upon actually reading the article, I'm left kinda cold. It seems to me like their effort to debunk the race just proved to me that the race was plausible!
Right off the bat, Motortrend admits:
That's crazy numbers. It's insane to build a pickup truck, or even some kind of weird SUV thingamajig since it's only kind-of a truck, that can do Corvette and McLaren numbers on a drag strip! That's a category destroyer! It also tells us that, unloaded, the four passenger plus mucho-cargo Cybertruck will stomp on a two passenger and a duffel bag 911 in most cases. That's a big advantage. But ok, that isn't winning while towing a 911, so let's test it. Motortrend says that...
At core, this meant that they picked a lightweight trailer, a lightweight 911 model to tow and removed all reasonable weight from the 911 being towed, the slowest 911 model to race against. Resulting in...
And the results come in and are instantly treated as conclusive!
Notice the implication that Tesla lied, "Here's what they didn't show you." The implication of deception is used throughout, that this video amounted to a deceitful lie, that Tesla was taking advantage of you, the gullible potential customer. And the conclusiveness: it wasn't particularly close, by drag racing conventions.
We then go into a series of potential alterations to the format. Does it matter if we put the Tesla's best run against the 911s worst? No. Actually, Tesla only ran an 1/8th mile rather than a quarter mile, does that change the result? No, it doesn't. There is just no honest way to get the Cybertruck in front for more than about ten feet. And at the end of the article, Motortrend, that pinnacle of journalistic excellence, comes down hard editorializing against Tesla:
The moralizing tone and catastrophizing language is kinda overwrought here, n'est pas? Tesla may have theoretically deceived "millions" of viewers, but they only shipped 12,000 Cybertrucks in 2024 as of July, while Porsche only sells around 1,000 911s a month. The people whose buying choices may be actually impacted by the comparison are negligible. And, at any rate, someone who can afford a $125k 911 or a $100k Cybertruck is (hopefully) likely to be a sophisticated consumer who will do more research than just watching a Youtube video about an irrelevant occurrence and making their decision based on that advertising video. No one is being seriously impacted by that rascal Musk's awful DECEIT and FAKE NEWS. So why treat it that way?
And in any case, I came away from the article, despite Motortrend's laudable efforts at technical rigor, thinking that Tesla's claim was more true than it was false anyway! It was maybe not literally true under laboratory conditions, but those very conditions explain why it would likely be true in day to day life for the average fuckboi who blows six figures on a Cybertruck. Right at the beginning of the article they admit:
Motortrend, of course, uses their own drivers. Who are presumably pretty fuckin' good at driving, pretty well educated in drag strip technique, and doing their damndest. Later in the article they note, when reviewing technical reasons for the result:
The vast majority of Mottizens, who by and large are smart and technically educated people who (should, by rights) eventually be in the market for something like this, might understand all those words, but haven't engaged in the practical activity of doing that activity. I've driven some bitchin' cars, but I've never clutch dropped a race-prepped 911! While in my imagination I'd like to think the average 911 driver has a greater degree of technical knowhow, I'm not even sure they'd pass the pop quiz of telling me exactly what all those words meant, and certainly wouldn't be able to execute it perfectly under pressure in a repeatable way. Even with a seasoned pro behind the wheel:
His first try wasn't ideal, his technique improved over time. While for the Tesla driver, it's plug and play:
So you put two randos off the street, or even two average purchasers, behind the wheel and there's a good chance the Cybertruck is able to get back that .2 seconds! All Tesla would have to do to "fake" the result is alter the skill level of the driver in the Porsche. No movie magic, no editing, not even having the guy pull his punches, just use a guy who isn't a seasoned drag strip driver experienced in getting the most out of a Porsche. Which is the average situation on the street!
What this tells me is that in the absurd, American Graffiti ass hypo that I was driving my Cybertruck towing my 911 to a racetrack, and a real-life 911 with a real-life guy who bought a Porsche behind the wheel pulled up next to me at a stoplight and we locked eyes and decided to race, there's a pretty good chance the Cybertruck would win unless the guy happened to be a top 1% talent. Most 911 owners are merely rich, and not talented drag racers. That's good odds! So it seems odd to me to say Tesla lied, more likely they just tested under conditions closer to reality. .2 seconds is a world on a dragstrip, but it's nothing in real life among real drivers.
But of course, why ask any of those questions when you have an opportunity to take a shot at public pinata Elon Musk?
The debunking industry so often follows this same track. Ideologically motivated, the definition of "true" and "false" are slippery, and determined more by political advantage than by reasonable interpretation. And here, as so often, if you dig into what the Deboonkers say they did, you come away from a "false" claim with more respect for the false claim than the one anointed true! I came away from this saying, the Cybertruck really is as fast or faster than a 911, even with a lot of cargo. And honestly, as I see more of them in real life, the Cybertruck is awesome. Idk that it's a practical choice, or that all the features are fully realized, or that I'd ever consider actually buying one. But fuck if they aren't distinctive, special, and as it turns out, nearly as fast as a 911 even when they're towing a 911. That's a much truthier point, in the Colbertian sense, than it is to say ELON LIED TO YOU.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider whether this is politics infecting car magazines, and how this dynamic impacts much thornier debunks that are so common in the liberal press.
People get so polarized about Elon, it's surreal. I think he's done a very good job on rockets and a pretty good job in electric cars, I think he clearly has excellent business and management skills. He must be very smart. But I don't worship the ground he walks on and dislike the weird antics he goes on, some of his political preferences, how he pumped dogecoin of all things. High INT, lower WIS and CHA.
It's like China-US or Russia-Ukraine. You only see the Arnaud Bertrands of this world, people who can't make a single tweet without bootlicking glorious utopian Chinese multilateralism in this late-imperial Amerikkkan hellscape. Or on the other side there are the people who go on and on about Social Credit, implying it's something that it isn't. Making fraudsters and sleazebags pay a deposit to borrow an e-bike is not the end of the world. There's an entire genre of youtube videos full of 'China is FINISHED' 'It's collapsing' 'It's over for Xi' 'DONE' - and it's completely detached from reality where everyone is worried about Chinese overproduction. They're not exactly collapsing.
With Elon, there's this huge community that seems to think he's a complete fraudster, a cartoonishly villainous Apartheid-enriched monster who somehow tricks Muskrats into giving him billions of dollars while he lies ad infinitum. Anything he does do is purely the result of his engineers. The logical conclusion of this worldview is that the reason NASA hasn't been making great strides despite vast funding is because their engineers are garbage - sack them all. But nobody ever says that!
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Great post. I think that’s what many “fact checkers” or “de bunkers” seem to miss: the world is complex. Frequently facts are hard to ascertain and untangled. Claims are conditional on certain contexts.
One can always set up something to get to the answer one wants when things are quite complex.
It not something they "miss", the complexity of the world and its associated uncertainty are what the "debunkers" are actively raging against.
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Absolutely, and one can point to several fact checking site examples that oversimplify an analysis in a misleading way, but most things left-leaning media/fact checkers deboonk are indeed just complete bullshit. You can throw examples of the press repeating things like "Trump said white supremacists at Charlottesville are very good people", and I'll scoff at them with the rest of you, but I find the dismissal of fact checkers disingenuous when one considers the big picture. They're much more right than they are wrong, given how much wrongness circulates.
Sure but they're not a Trump card that ends a conversation. They're a research bureau. A lot of times if you read the whole article, even the despised deboonkers know what is going on. It's the use of headlines I object to. Mostly true, mostly false. No you need to get into the nuance of it!
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For those of your following along at home, I never wound up buying myself a car. Originally I wanted to buy a new car for my wife, but she initially didn't really like the things she wanted to replace her Lexus Rx with, and wanted to keep it, so I considered buying myself a car to add something to the family fleet that wasn't approaching old age. But then her parents wanted her car, and we wanted to give it to them, so I bought her a car instead. After looking at things like the Subaru Outback, Crosstrek, Toyota Crown, etc she ultimately fell in love with the BMW 330xi. Which actually gets great marks on ConsumerReports for major reliability, and we were able to get a very low mileage lease return at the local dealer, a couple years old but in perfect condition. It's a tremendously fun car to drive for how practical it is, gets 40mpg on highway trips, and my wife loves it which is the most important thing. It's so easy to get a lot out of it, that it's turning her into more of a car enthusiast, which I love, she's taking backroads home to get to whip it around corners a bit.
And personally, I like the car a lot too, so if inshallah in a few years our kid situation is such that she wants to move to something bigger, I would have no objection whatever to driving it daily, it has a future in the family even if she moves on. Which is why i was looking at buying a car to begin with, to have one in the bank in case EVs get weird for a few years. I wish it was manual and had less complex computerization, but the paddles have come a long way so I'll live with it.
Didn't they stop making these in 2006?
No? I think my nomenclature was off though, it's 330i with xdrive, it used to be xi instead. The 30 stopped meaning a 3.0 a while ago though, it's 2.0 liter turbo mild hybrid.
Ah, okay. The 330xi seems to be a model of years past.
https://www.carfax.com/Used-BMW-3-Series-330xi_t1477
It's really just a model nomenclature, a 3er with a 3.0 liter engine and x drive used to be 330xi.
Now a car with x drive isn't in the model name, and the number is just ordinal 20<30<40 in power but not related directly to size.
It's still a 3er with appropriate power and all wheel drive, which is the core concept.
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