>The WHO and other international organizations are not legitimate sources of information; they take direction from their host countries and report numbers as directed.
Yes, they get their data from each country.
How else could they realistically get that information?
Isn't this normal and understood?
Since the data is only possible from the government of the country and you believe it's fraudulent there's no legitimate source of information.
since people may need that information and there's only the single source what's the issue with WHO?
You also claim that anytime a country provides data
, the country believes they will benefit if the data has a some value, and they can't get caught then they will lie.
Shouldn't you just be suspicious of any data like that and investigate?
Since there's a big difference between fake numbers (intentional) and inaccurate (unintentional) numbers we should state they are inaccurate unless evidence states overwise. The reason is that it's practically impossible to get a 100% correct count, probably not even 90% accurate.
1. This means every population count is inaccurate
2. It's not realistically possible to determine how inaccurate the amount is
>If the numbers are approximations to the nearest ten million (or worse), it's a form of scientific fraud to provide a number like "94.9 million"
Doesn't this simply mean if their count is 94.9 the population's true amount is anywhere from 90 to 100 million?
I think the issue in this thread is that you replied to a person asking a question by quoting the article.
It's implied that it's your position because you argued using the article. Otherwise you're just helping the other by showing them the relevant part the article.
Imagine there was a discussion about a 911 conspiracy article and a person comments
"Yeah but wouldn't the fuel burning collapse the building"
If I replied with a quote from the article
"..jet fuel doesn't burn at a high enough temperature to melt steel"
Wouldn't you think that's my view as well since the point of the comments are to express opinions about the article and situation?
The recent massive increase in the US governments direct and indirect involvement in business decisions changes things.
Trump is pushing/forcing countries and companies to invest in the US. He's added more restrictions on who they can sell their products. New significant widespread tariffs also exist that forces businesses to decide on how they can handle it while being pressured not to raise prices.
Government involvement in business decisions, even if indirect, is not a market economy. In a true market economy supply and demand should determine prices and businesses and consumers make the decisions on their respective side.
There's also background pressure on businesses to avoid angering Trump and this affects their decision making process.
>attracting talent, innovation,
Trump raised the fee for H1Bs, blocked student visas from 19 countries, and revoked 100k visas for people who were here as students, business reasons, vacation, and other. He also is removing legal status from many groups.
His inflammatory rhetoric and actions have harmed the international reputation of the US. There's also a prevalent anti-immigrant mood in the US and a much smaller
This decreases the pool of people who can choose to come here and for that smaller amount it increases the probability that smart and innovative people may look elsewhere to either study or start a company.
There are also those that had legal status, lost it, and must leave. These are another set of groups that could have contained some talented and innovative people.
Talented immigrants have done so much for our economy and standing in the world.
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He cut government funding for many scientific research endeavors and government programs. These may or may not be replaced by private industry. It's justified to cut waste as government spending is a problem but speed and extent of the cuts makes it questionable if a proper assessment was done.
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I'm sure you can point to similar actions in the past but I believe the quantity, speed, and intensity are significantly different than in recent times.
I'm also not arguing that some changes weren't justified. I just believe it's a clear change in the ingredients for the worse.
> Government involvement in business decisions, even if indirect, is not a market economy. In a true market economy supply and demand should determine prices and businesses and consumers make the decisions on their respective side.
This is true but not a novelty. The US has been doing all kinds of things to harm its markets for decades, e.g. artificially constraining the housing supply, using tax incentives and manipulating interest rates to goose consumer spending and in the process drive up consumer debt, and let's not even get into all the ways it molests the healthcare market.
That isn't to say that they're good -- those markets are very messed up -- but things like this are bad, not new.
> Trump raised the fee for H1Bs, blocked student visas from 19 countries, and revoked 100k visas for people who were here as students, business reasons, vacation, and other.
The H1B program has been widely abused for a while now and in general the US is in need of significant immigration reform. Many of the things Trump does are stupid, because of course they are, but the general premise of "hey wasn't this supposed to be for researchers and scientists rather than mechanic-level IT work" seems to have something to it here.
You can't say we're importing the best and brightest while also doing everything possible to make it so that someone who is a doctor in another country with a world-class medical system has to basically start over from scratch in order to be a doctor in the US.
And then people will have much to criticize about what Trump is doing. But okay then, so do something better instead of all the doing nothing that was happening before.
> It's justified to cut waste as government spending is a problem but speed and extent of the cuts makes it questionable if a proper assessment was done.
It clearly wasn't. The problem is we need some kind of structural reform -- a system that doesn't allow wasteful programs to accumulate and increase in number over time -- but that would require a functioning Congress, which has instead been doing everything it can for decades to abdicate their role to the executive branch. Which has term limits and therefore the attention span of a goldfish for those kinds of structural problems, and then we end up back in the situation where either no attempt is made to fix it or the attempt is amateur hour because it's attempting a contextual fix to a structural problem.
No but they could have easily created the culture that massively increased the probability of such mishaps... we have all seen how not OK work environment negatively affects deliveries right, or read about boeing fiasco(s).
Not an insider just to be clear here so maybe just really bad luck. But no benefit of doubt for the third strike.
>If you pick any country and look at proxies that have significant cost associated with them, at relative population levels of verified locations, the population of the world differs pretty radically from the claims most countries put out.
Can you provide an example that shows a radically different population count?
>If you don't have independent verification free from censorial pressures and legal repercussions, then you get propaganda
Always?
How would you perform a census without massive amounts of money and cooperation from the government?
China is the best example, its estimated that their population is off by entire countries in some statisitics, either through disppeared girls, hidden covid deaths, local economic fraud. There is also no independently verifiable group in China and is actually explicitly banned to use non-government methods.
> China is the best example, its estimated that their population is off by entire countries in some statisitics
“entire countries” of population spans a range from single-digit hundreds to over a billion, so this could describe anything from an imperceptible error to an enormous one in China’s case.
I'm sure the various high-end intelligence agencies have a much better view on this than the public does. All kinds of ways of cross-checking the numbers, all by doing things they'll be doing in their normal course of events.
A normal person could probably do a decent job with an AI that isn't too biased in the direction of "trust gov numbers above all else" and tracking down and correlating some statistics too obscure and too difficult to fake. (Example: Using statistical population sampling methodology on some popular internet service or something.) The main problem there being literally no matter what they do and how careful they are, they'd never be able to convince anyone of their numbers.
Some intelligence agencies endeavor to maintain a profile of every identifiable person on the planet with data acquired by many diverse means. They have enough data to build excellent models of population coverage such that I would be surprised if they could not estimate population with high confidence.
The problem with trying to measure this as a normal person is that you don't have enough access to different types of measurements to build good models of sample bias and selection artifacts.
Food supply is something I though about but the problem is that we put a lot of it in storage and it's never clear how much because sellers may want to wait until markets are more favorable.
With modern technology/knowledge, we have a lot of high-density calories lying around, in the form of grains, potatoes, oils, etc.
It might be possible to get a rough picture tracking the perishables that are often animal products but poor countries don't use a lot of it because, well, they are poor. So it makes everything very complicated.
> Some people claim that China's population is half of what the officials claim.
Some people claim that the Earth is flat. I’m rather more inclined to believe China’s official statistics than what ‘some people’ on the internet have to say.
Why is the default assumption "just trust them bro, why would they lie!"?
That's not scientific. There's no verification or validation of data.
Your default assumption should be to question authority, especially if authority claims sole dominion over claims of fact, like "this is our population, because we say so."
They are humans with power, therefore they lie. If you don't have accountability feedback, you can never, ever check those lies, so you rely on proxies and legitimate models.
I highly recommend researching proxies you understand and can trust, and developing an understanding of the models that exist, and how to estimate confidence over a bounded range of values.
I don't think China has only 500 million people - that's a little silly. But I also don't think they have 1.4 billion, either, especially since one of their main justifications for that is "hey, we have this many phone accounts!" - their population control policies, their population decline, their cultural preference for male children and infant femicide, and so on don't jive with simple models of population growth based on human population growth constraints. If there's a deviation between properly error bounded models of populations over time in the hundreds of millions over the highest reasonably bounded value, something is suspicious.
You can take your reasonably bounded model and correlate with proxies - if the verifiable evidence supports the model over the claims, you can be more confident in the model than the claims.
Reliable proxies that can't be faked are difficult, and better models are going to be needed in the future as we get into AI slopageddon territory, where you can trivially fabricate entire identities and histories for billions of nonexistent people, even establishing social webs and histories for all of them, statistically indistinguishable from real people.
To perform a census, you need models constructed from verifiable data and first principles reasoning, with Bayesian certainty attached to each and every contributing factor, and then you need to set probabilistic bounds based on known levels of variability in things like population growth rates. Once you have an upper and lower bound, you can assign a certainty measure to the official claims - something like "this has a .01% chance of being true" - that's a good indication that reality diverges from those claims. It's not proof, it doesn't give you 100% certainty that some other number is precisely the case, but it's evidence.
The US government varies wildly in population counts, too, depending on which party is in power, which locales are being counted, the intent of the count, such as census, or estimation of population of illegal immigrants versus legal immigrants, etc. This is why census laws in the US forbid estimations or models or extrapolations; you need firsthand, auditable data collection, or fuckery occurs. The 2020 census was corrupted and then this was discovered by media and third party verification, for example. If you don't have a free press, things like that don't ever get revealed and confirmed, and authority is never held to account (in theory. In principle. In practice, power is rarely held to account anyway.)
>Also I was told there is no voter fraud. Is that just because nobody’s looking?
I was told you haven't raped anyone, is that because we haven't looked into it?
Unless there's evidence that something happened when decisions need to be made we assume it didn't.
It's so sad an engineer like you believe there was widespread fraud in the 2020 election even after all the investigations. It speaks volumes to your abilities in all aspects of life.
Yes, they get their data from each country.
How else could they realistically get that information?
Isn't this normal and understood?
Since the data is only possible from the government of the country and you believe it's fraudulent there's no legitimate source of information.
since people may need that information and there's only the single source what's the issue with WHO?
You also claim that anytime a country provides data , the country believes they will benefit if the data has a some value, and they can't get caught then they will lie.
Shouldn't you just be suspicious of any data like that and investigate?
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