On Sun, 16 Aug 2015 21:05:33 -0400, "(PeteCresswell)"
wrote:

Per ceg:
Overall accident statistics for the USA are very reliable, since they are
reported by police, insurance companies, and by individuals.

Am I the only one that sees a non-sequitur in that statement?

I'm thinking it's somewhere in he
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies

But I'm haven't drunk enough coffee lately to find it.


No non-sequitur. The statistics ARE reliable as a year to year
measure. That an individual report may have errors is unquestionably
true. But the only number of significance is simply the NUMBER of
REPROTED accidents, not the accuracy of the little details of the
reports. If Officer Odie is dyslexic and instead of Hwy 52 MP 429 he
puts Hwy 25 MP 249 the report will be off by perhaps hundreds of miles
but that ACCIDENT occurred and it is included as part of the Total
number of accidents that go into the rate. Unless you want to make an
argument that there is some systemic problem where the same accidents
are getting reported multiple times for almost every jurisdiction in a
state or that the dog is eating the reports before they are filed I
don't see any reason to challenge the basic accident rates as accurate
enough for this discussion.