[ebg13]

So they _intentionally_ set themselves up to lie to regulatory agencies and consumers about real world efficiency. That honestly sounds basically the same to me. In both cases the tests are poor approximations, and in both cases someone could accidentally optimize the test, and in both cases someone did it intentionally to deceive people.

[henryfjordan]

Imagine the water heater company didn't know they were gaming the test. They first design a water heater and it gets a B- on the test. Being overachievers, they work hard and submit a second design that gets an A+. They might not realize that both heaters are basically the same with the only difference being some heating element spacing that works better for the test. Both times they submitted a legit design that was the same they'd provide to consumers. Sure, we know the engineers knew what was happening, but we can see how one might innocently arrive in the same scenario. I think it's safe to say the test is flawed.

The VW test is not like that. There's no way to innocently arrive in the scenario they did. They did not game a bad test, they literally lied to the test administrators. The car ran in "clean mode" only if it was in the test environment. If the car ran like it did on the road, they'd have failed (which is how they were caught, with a mobile testing setup).

One of the points in the article is that regulating for safety based on known testing conditions is going to result in over-fitting for the test. The water heater company is guilty of intentionally over-fitting. VW just straight up lied. I don't think those 2 actions are equal, VW is worse, but I agree that both are dishonest to a degree.

[ebg13]

> Imagine the water heater company didn't know they were gaming the test.

We don't have to. In this case we have clear admission of intent. The intent to deceive is what makes it fraud and not just being wrong.

[henryfjordan]

My point isn't that what the water heater designer did was perfectly ethical, just that it's clearly distinct from what VW did.

[ebg13]

It's distinct in technical detail, but not in the broken ethics rule against intent to deceive.

[chongli]

I think the ethics are still different. In the case of the water heater, they deceived the test to make their heater seem more efficient than it really was. However, the heater still does its job, it just costs a bit more to run (and emits some extra CO2).

What VW did was to take a clean-burning car and disable the pollution controls under normal driving conditions, for performance reasons. So while to the consumer it seems deceptive that VWs get better performance than they should, given how clean they’re supposed to be, in reality the cars are illegal and spewing toxins they were supposed to be removing from the exhaust. This makes the cars not only a pollution source but a health hazard to people living nearby.

To get on the same level of VW, the water heater would have to be doing something like emitting low levels of carbon monoxide into the home while having a feature that avoids doing that in the laboratory. In other words, reckless and willful disregard for human health and life.

[dmurray]

There's no intent to deceive necessary in the water heater example. The water heater company could have sent it in with a note to the regulator saying "we moved the second element up, because we believe it will perform better on your test" and the regulator would likely just accept it instead of redesigning the test.

Also, for the water heating one, there's a plausible reason for the regulator to care about the discrete measurements rather than the total amount of thermal energy in the water. Hot water at the top of the tank is more valuable, because it's used first and less likely to be wasted, so you could wait it more heavily in a test. There's no parallel for the VW test cheating. No indication that's what happened here, of course.

[Spooky23]

There is no deception and no ethical issue. The nature of the test is known.

What placement of components would be ethical? Should engineers required to be separated from the test parameters by a Chinese wall? Do they need to build the system for the worst result? Some middle ground? If the engineers are unethical, where is the line?

The obvious answer to optimizations like this are for the testing body to tweak the test procedure based on what manufacturers do over time. That provides an incentive to be more conservative or accurate.

[cortesoft]

The key legal difference is that VW literally behaved differently if a test was running. If they had simply designed a system that tested better than it actually performed (by optimizing the factors tested for), they would not have gotten in trouble.

If the water heater manufacturer had special heating elements that only ran during the test, it would be equivalent.

[Bartweiss]

> in both cases someone could accidentally optimize the test

I think this is what I disagree with.

The water heater story is about a viable-for-market design which also optimized for the test. The equivalent for a car emissions test might be optimizing the transmission to reduce emissions at the specific speeds which will be tested. Those speeds could be sweet spots of the engine curve by accident, or they could be planned that way. I don't think that's necessarily right, but it's within the bounds of "natural" design for the product.

Instead of doing that, VW submitted something for testing which was fundamentally different from what went to market. Rather than being misleading, the test results were fundamentally irrelevant. Creating two completely different modes of behavior isn't something you could do by chance, and it means there's no real limit on how badly they could cheat.

[SkyBelow]

There is a difference between memorizing enough information to ace a test and sneaking in notes that aren't allowed to ace a test. And people would also say it is wrong to steal a copy of a test and then memorize the answers to it to ace a test. But what if a professor uses the same test every year (maybe changing a few numbers but in a way that only impacts the calculations, not the way to solve it) and people study just the information needed to answer the test. Is that cheating?

[tialaramex]

If you cheat in most such tests it just means you miss out on actually learning what you were supposed to. If it wasn't your intention to learn anyway I guess that's fine.

Rarely the purpose of tests is to assure the public of your fitness (e.g. a driving test) and cheating those might be a problem, but if you cheat my CS 101 course and then struggle because you needed remedial classes but the cheated test means you don't get them that's your problem.

[bravoetch]

Another aspect is the incentives. Most discussion here is about the cheating itself, and not the reasons for it. I may not learn much from just writing about a degree I don't really have on my resume, or roles I never worked at, and experience I don't have. But I can get paid a lot more by doing so.

[SkyBelow]

There are a few other issues with cheating, such as devaluing a degree for all others who didn't cheat to earn it.

[kube-system]

Morally, they both seem to fall in the same category. Legally, it might be a complicated question.