I’m not so sure mocking is really that on point, a tool used to understand avalanche safety should be safe. The product copy highlights safety and the value of providing a recommendation instead of having to collate and synthesize different data yourself.
Avalanche risk and its management are unknown to me, but not to ski patrols, experienced backcountry trekkers, scientists, and national weather services of many countries, etc. I saw no evidence of trials to test to see how the technology performs against real conditions.
If you can’t trust this product’s recommendations within some margin of safety then it’s value proposition disappears.
Why not market it instead as an experiment and seek some way of collecting data to improve the process or develop a model fine tuned to the inputs?
Yeah, the app "tells you...whether today is a go", which is completely responsible and I'm not sure how HN could be able to miss it!
Jokes aside, couple changes come to mind:
- pitch more carefully as "may indicate when danger may be elevated"
- in app, on calm days insist "while prelim scan found nothing anomalous, click these links to find the original forecasts"
As of today, with this tech for this use case, the warnings should be the lede. Otherwise you're even more likely to have a "'Full' Self Driving" situation where we're lured into a false sense of safety.
Avalanche risk and its management are unknown to me, but not to ski patrols, experienced backcountry trekkers, scientists, and national weather services of many countries, etc. I saw no evidence of trials to test to see how the technology performs against real conditions.
If you can’t trust this product’s recommendations within some margin of safety then it’s value proposition disappears.
Why not market it instead as an experiment and seek some way of collecting data to improve the process or develop a model fine tuned to the inputs?