Going off on a tangent here, but thanks for posting a reality check for the comment the gp made (that's no offense to gp; I get their thought process and why they would think Tokyo was more mass-transit friendly (it still could be more non-auto friendly on some other dimension (e.g., more pedestrians and therefore less auto-reliance but I'm not making that claim)).
Re the reality check, though, I wonder if this is going to be one of the no-questions-asked positives from AI. If, every time someone makes a claim that's not, but can be quantified, similar to what you just did with these ridership and population stats, an AI umpire would cite the stats behind the claim to better-educate the audience about the reality. Of course this assumes a non-biased "AI," but it seems like something that could become a reality sooner than later. I experience this multiple times per day, on HN a lot, where people make claims and I'm like "is that really true?" And I'm not being an ass; I'm always genuinely asking the question to make sure I'm getting properly educated.
P.s. I just typed "is Tokyo more transit friendly than New York City?" into 3.5 (yes, I'm still on 3.5. Some of us HN folks are actually tech laggards!). I won't paste the answer here since no one will read the comment given its absurd length, but your human answer is better, and more to the point, than 3.5 (+1 for humanity, I guess).
I genuinely enjoy fact checking. Not because I like calling people out – I'm not a jerk – but because I get satisfaction from doing the research to verify a claim. I end up learning a lot along the way too.
I fact check myself all the time too, often when I realize a "fact" in my brain isn't really a fact, it's just an intuition, or when I can't remember where I learned something and I question its validity. My wife and I both frequently pause conversations with "Hang on, let me fact check myself on that [because it might be BS and I don't want to spread misinformation]".
So I can't help but verify it when I read something that sounds true, intuitively, but I'm not certain.
Re the reality check, though, I wonder if this is going to be one of the no-questions-asked positives from AI. If, every time someone makes a claim that's not, but can be quantified, similar to what you just did with these ridership and population stats, an AI umpire would cite the stats behind the claim to better-educate the audience about the reality. Of course this assumes a non-biased "AI," but it seems like something that could become a reality sooner than later. I experience this multiple times per day, on HN a lot, where people make claims and I'm like "is that really true?" And I'm not being an ass; I'm always genuinely asking the question to make sure I'm getting properly educated.
P.s. I just typed "is Tokyo more transit friendly than New York City?" into 3.5 (yes, I'm still on 3.5. Some of us HN folks are actually tech laggards!). I won't paste the answer here since no one will read the comment given its absurd length, but your human answer is better, and more to the point, than 3.5 (+1 for humanity, I guess).