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Ask Slashdot: Can US Citizens Trust Government Data? (msn.com)
mmell writes: An editorial in the Washington Post and made publicly available via an MSN news feed has asked the question: "In the Trump administration era of 'alternative facts,' what happens to government data?" Given that Slashdot members (and readers) may represent a somewhat more in-the-know crowd on matters concerning data integrity and trustworthiness, I thought this would be a good place to ask: can we trust (or has anyone ever really trusted) government data? One might think government data would all be cut 'n' dried and not subject to manipulation, but I personally remember when government data back early in the Reagan presidency went from reporting nearly 15% unemployment nationwide to well under 6% by redefining what "unemployed" meant. So . . . has government data ever been trustworthy, and is it still so?
Have you ever been able to trust it? I doubt it, so nothing has really changed in this regard and the timing of this question seems partisan.
Only a koolaid drinking disingenuous douche-shill thought that the government was magically trustworthy with Obama but all of the sudden is magically not to be trusted anymore because there's a new president.
Especially because it's pseudo-intellectual bullshit since the cancerous unelected unaccountably bureaucracy that actually runs the government doesn't care about who is in charge.
The government is 100% as trustworthy today as it was the during your god and personal saviour Obama's reign. It is left as an exercise to those of us with more than two brain cells to determine what that trustworthiness level is.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
shows that you have always been successfully misled. Government data will always show what fits the current agenda.
We could never trust the government. Data or action. Look at the drug war. At the Iraq war. At McCarthyism. At Kent State. Look at congress, at the obvious incompetence (series of pipes, anyone?) and craziness of the representatives. Look at the superstition that they pander to. Look at what the supreme court does in the face of what they swore an oath to the constitution to do.
The government lies. Panders. Pushes entirely false and misleading agendas. The politicians and judges violate their oaths. Some of the agencies, such as the veterans administration, do incredibly bad jobs.
This shouldn't be the dawn of mistrust. Anyone who trusted the government was being, at the very least, gullible.
It sure as hell is full daylight of distrust, though. Good to see people waking up. Perhaps there is something to thank President Trump for, then.
I think it depends on the dept that your talking about. I wouldn't trust anything coming from Trumps office for shit... Places like NOAA, NASA, etc etc. I would probably trust more. It all depends how how horrible it gets under Trump.
Silly Partisan Slashdot Editors want to make this into a Trump Thing, but they are too young or uneducated to remember things like the (first, of many) Food Pyramid, job creation data scams, alternative energy revelations, and... the list is long. Google "erroneous government data." And stop contributing to the Fake News epidemic with these disingenuous strawman-centric pseudo-stories...
I rest my case.
The motto of the Royal Society is "Nullis in verba". The best of all of science says "take no persons word as truth".
Humans are terrible to each other. You can't trust the government, and you never could. It is not about party, it is about humanity. You can't trust the Chinese, or the Americans.
If you look at Italian culture, lying is part of their identity. Why? If you look at all of the oldest cultures in the world, lying is part of their identities. Why?
Humans will kill each other - that is why they need laws against murder. You can't trust them to not murder, and steal. You can't trust them.
If you are are honest, and a human, there have been a number of times you couldn't trust yourself. If you can't trust you without reservation, then the only one in the universe to trust is God.
There are tests that the government can pass to show a relative level of credibility or integrity. They work best if the government doesn't know it is being tested. Blind tests. They show both the evil, and the redeemingly stupid. Stupid is the place where evil really hasn't applied itself yet, when it comes to government.
Trump is about Truth. In fact, Trump is Truth itself (as opposed to Crooked Hilary).
So since Trump has won, there's only Truth!
(Captcha was "suspects". Perhaps Slashdot's AI has noticed something fishy. What could it be, what could it be?)
The amount of trust you should place in government facts and figures shouldn't vary from one Presidency to the next.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Trusting government data is an age old problem, and even though I might Godwin myself over this, Goebbel said things like:
A lie told once remains a lie but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth
and
The truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
That Trump is trying to channel Goebbels* is not surprising given who Trump is and his past utterances. (But I don't know which Emperor he was trying to channel when he proclaimed the "National Day of Patriotic Devotion" which coincided with his inauguration - seriously .. it's a real thing)
* The headline of TFA is "In the Trump administration era of ‘alternative facts,’ what happens to government data?", something that TFS should have taken into account.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Yes you can trus but mainly depends upon the reason that you are going for
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd...
Samsung took back my unlocked bootloader because Google wants me to rent movies. They're both evil.
Under Obama, we stopped counting people as unemployed if they gave up looking for a job. Such people are difficult to track is the argument. Oh really, that's a rational argument for moving the goal post? Controlling for some variables is really hard, so let's not? Well fuck me, I guess we're all Barbie now and "Math is hard!!!"
The inflation measurements have long been known to exclude food and fuel, the two most inflation-affected consumer goods. The food pyramid was laughably unscientific when it was created. Need I go on?
You got Trump in no small part because of this faux earnest, "we're just interested in the facts, sir." No, you're not. You're as fucking dishonest as Ellen DeGeneres when she said "8 years, no scandal." Please ignore Fast and Furious, the fact that Clinton intentionally lied about the known motivations for the attack on Benghazi, political appointees at the IRS targeting conservative groups, blowing up a 16 year old kid with drone and so much more.
If it's something being quoted by an administration to bring credit to their term, you can almost guarantee it's been heavily massaged.
For instance, our employment numbers are complete crap. The jobs people have today aren't nearly as good as what they were on average. There are far more people earning less than a living wage on a job they are working less than full time because the company doesn't want to pay for healthcare or other benefits.
We have the best data. The best. It is like no other data in the world!
"In the Trump administration era of 'alternative facts,' what happens to government data?"
The only thing that's changing here is what it's being called.
Alternative Facts / Propaganda / Fake News / Misleading Information / Stretching the Truth / Whatever
This is an issue with any administration, in any government around the world. They're going to twist things however they can to in order to ensure
you are thinking about a topic in a certain way.
Some examples:
The WMD debacle that led to the Iraq invasion.
The filtering of news coverage for the Iraq War. ( and any conflict since Vietnam for that matter )
Number of civilians killed as collateral damage in any military operation.
Unemployment numbers ( which conveniently leave out those who exhaust their unemployment benefits and aren't counted as unemployed )
Blaming Russia / Hackers for anything that happens these days
Some folks in control of the distribution of information are ALWAYS going to distort it in such a way to ensure it is of maximum value to whatever agenda
they're trying to push. This is certainly nothing new. As a result, the history you and I are familiar with may or may not actually be the full truth. ( a partial
one, or even anything close to the truth at all )
The moral of this story is this: I wouldn't trust any source of information one hundred percent, no matter where it comes from.
Before you go getting your panties all in a wad, the Bureau of Labor Standards (BLS) reports quite a few numbers on unemployment statistics. Unfortunately, too many people harp about the basic unemployment rate w/o taking the time to go look at the other numbers available...underemployment for example. The "redefinition" of unemployment removed people who weren't looking for work from the basic number. But, let's take a look at https://www.bls.gov/news.relea... and see what's actually being produced, and compare apples to apples instead of whining that someone changed (or refined depending upon what spin you'd like to put on it) the calculation.
Just another day in Paradise
Government data is a collective noun for reports from hundreds of different organisations, some run by people obsessed with clerical accuracy and some run by people obsessed with partisan propaganda who are happy to massage a number. All of them under two houses of congress and a white house which changes its stance on what numbers they wish were different and how on a biannual basis.
The result is that you simply cannot ANSWER the question "is government data reliable" - there's just no single answer. A lot of it is reliable and, in fact, the best data available on some topics. A lot of it is flagrant bullshit, or at least deliberately presented in a way to deceive. And then there is data where it's more ambiguous. A lot of Austrian economists disagree with the inflation rate - and claim it's much higher by doing a different calculation from the raw data to substantiate this - while a Keynesian mainstream economists generally agree that the official figure is a decent representation of the number. It may not always accurately reflect price shifts (and it's always a bit behind the times) but for economic policy decisions it gives the information that is needed to make decisions like "should we raise interest rates, are we in a liquidity trap that demands quantitative easing or are we in a boom-cycle where that will cause a disaster ?"
Who is right, will largely depend on whether you think Austrian economics is a cult divorced from any usefulness by it's refusal to accept empirical data as evidence and thus happy willingness to reject the constant failures of it's policies to have the right results as evidence against those policies... or see Keynesianism as a rampant scam designed to give government the power to decide what money is worth and control everybody's lives (I subscribe to the "The version of economics best supported by empirical data and historic ability of it's predictions to have expected outcomes is the most scientific" school - which is Keynesian through and through).
Some government data is the result of strenuous scientific study which is highly unlikely to be false, fabricated or manipulated (and almost impossible to apply to do this with), a lot are from softer human sciences which is more susceptible to this.
There is no answer to the question of "is government data reliable" - but you CAN answer "is *this piece* of government data reliable".
It's interesting how the Donald seems dead-set to pursue his agenda not by altering government data (particularly the scientific type) but by eradicating it - defunding or abolishing government research agencies that produce data on topics he would rather pretend is different or non-existent. As is climate change will stop happening if he defunds NASA's earth-science division so they can't tell us about it anymore. Sure this will weaken science over-all by removing a valuable source of data on how fast things are happening, but it won't make them stop happening. That gives you a clear view on the difference between easy-propaganda-data and scientific-data. Trump is well aware that he cannot pressure NASA to start reporting denier-friendly results, they are too well scrutinized by other scientists outside the agency, and if they suddenly stopped publishing raw data it would look too suspicious - so his best answer to keep his claims from being challenged by his own agency is to silence the agency.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
This is maybe not quite so much of a tinfoil-hat post as the title might make it seem, but any data published by any party which uses that data to support their argument has to be seen in the light that the data is a supporting argument for their point of view. /. users will not read the comment and 90% of those that do will not click on the citation links, and 100% of the people involved in writing the comment are too damned lazy to go and find the citations and link them, someone else can write the [citation needed] comment below.
Whether it is a scientist/politician/manager/slashdot poster tweaking their selection criteria to give more favourable results or just wholesale making up statistics by pulling them out of a dark hole, we are all human and we are all going to be tempted. Citation and open availability of the complete dataset for peer/independent review is the only way to avoid it.
And yes, I am sure that my post would benefit from some citations to confirm the described human behaviour. But as 95% of
At least in the case of the Reagan example.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
This claimed change in the unemployment calculation under Reagan did not happen. That is an outright lie. The unemployment rate was never 15%. During the Clinton administration a slight change was made to the way discouraged workers are counted, but that's all.
It doesn't have anything to do with the Trump administration. Government habitually lies and distorts data.
Does anyone really believe we have 4.7% unemployment or that price inflation was 2.1% for 2016?
What about the "deficit" for 2016? Government will tell you that it was $587 Billion. However "federal outlays - federal receipts" was $1417 Billion. The difference is "other borrowing".
http://usgovernmentspending.bl...
Not to mention the fact that they include SS taxes in "receipts", spend any surplus and do NOT count that as part of the deficit or national debt. They don't actually issue Treasury Securities(i.e. securities that can be sold on the open market) to cover the borrowing from SS. They just issue an IOU. An obligation to pay something back is, by definition, a "debt", but the federal government keeps it off the books.
"I have certain rules I live by. My first rule: I don't believe anything the government tells me."
-George Carlin
Unfortunately the data collected serves many masters but none of them is the public.
It's not just Trump's administration either, every political hack and self serving special interest generates data that suits their purposes.
As you pointed out, Reagan Admin started this fudging. It got worse when Newt and his Congress removed authority from the CBO. The CBO used to provide incredibly accurate information but it made Republican numbers look bad so they scuttled it. I expect Trump & friends will do the same to NASA and NOAA data because facts have a well-known liberal bias.
There were 1.5 million people at the Trump inauguration. It was the largest audience in history.
You can believe government data. Listen and Believe.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The issue is that the same leftists who implicitly trusted the Obama Administration are now, less than a week after he lost power, crying up a storm about the new administration.
Of course skepticism should be practiced regardless of who is in power.
The problem, which the GP actually made quite clear, is that leftists are hypocritical and inconsistent. They trust to an unreasonable extreme when somebody they support is in power, yet they'll become rabidly paranoid when somebody they dislike is in power. There is no balance with them. They are always at the extremes.
This probably derives from the naivety, paranoia and contradiction that underlie the leftist political mindset. When one's political system is built upon a shaky foundation, of course everything above this foundation will be unstable and unsound.
While those in the political center and the right will question all governments and their leaders, those on the left will obey with complete obedience those who they are told to support. That's exactly what we're seeing now: those on the center and the right have high hopes that President Trump will do the right things, and so far he has, but they aren't letting their guard down either. The leftists, however, are going absolutely crazy now, with an irrational fear of President Trump and his administration, to the point of having to fabricate nonsense about "pussy grabbing", false accusations of "racism", and all sorts of idiocy like that. Yet under the Obama Administration, leftists didn't even bother to employ any skepticism at all. Everything the Obama Administration did was deemed "correct", even when it clearly wasn't to the rest of the American populace.
Those on the political center and those on the political right are much more intelligent and aware of how government actually works. Those on the political left are much more naive when their preferred politicians are in power, but then go overboard when they must face a very reasonable and sensible political opponent.
I can't trust government data because it is manipulated to favor their agenda.
I can't trust corporate data because it is warped in a way to maximize profit.
I can't trust data higher education because they are in cohorts with the top two and if they have something too far off the norm they won't get their phd.
Scientists tend to form cliche and will discredit anyone who tries to break their world view. By rejecting a hypothesis without even studying its aspects.
I can't trust my own data because it is nearly impossible to get a good sample size,bypass my own ego, and preconceptions.
Now we need to do the best that we can. When we are facing conflicting info we need to try to figure what makes the most sense and fits the most simplistic model. Will it always be correct? No but it is the best we can do.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I used to run a system for the government. Users would complain that they could get 6 different answers to the same question. I had to show them that they were getting 6 different answers to 6 slightly different questions. It was like "how many of these things to I have?" There might have been 18 in stock, but 3 are broken awaiting repair, 2 are waiting for upgrades, and one is damaged beyond economical repair. Depending on how they ask the question, they will get different combinations of those items. Answers from data are only useful if you know the state of the data and the question asked. Just giving someone the answer can be very deceptive and lead to misunderstandings.
... part of the problem is you.
Our government has given us a long list of examples showing why:
1> We shouldn't implicitly trust them.
2> We shouldn't give them any more power/authority.
Each major party is too eager to overlook the evils of their own, as long as it benefits their "fight" against the other.
Their staunch supporters fear giving any ground in an argument, so they justify shit that should never pass if the roles were reversed.
I still remember the 1 in 4 statistic, which wasn't even used by the White House until *after* it had been debunked as a bold-faced lie.
We have this all the time as far as recalibrating data. Does anyone think we've been in a boom economy with sub-6% unemployment? I sure don't.
Most of it is from the media. Change the definition of AIDS from a CD4 count of 250 to 200 and voila, 6 months later, the media reports about a spike in AIDS cases.
Part of the problem comes from the media who present an agenda (or don't know what they're talking about), their reluctance to impart data (out of fear of boring their viewers) and of course part of the problem is the innumeracy of the general public.
Finally we have the retarded assumption that we have white facts, black facts, male facts, female facts and LG facts which are not the same as B&T facts.
(last clause was my attempt at a joke)
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
It's been for far longer than I've been alive that government information couldn't be completely trusted.
There are still people who believe that the federal government ran a surplus during the 1990s but it didn't. There are still people who believe that the US military was attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin, but it wasn't. There are still people who believe that it was a weather balloon that crashed in Roswell but it wasn't.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Do you also "personally remember" when the Obama Administration routinely manipulated employment data to make it appear the US was NOT in the middle an economic clusterfuck?
why should Americans be any differemt?
Statistics at that level are approximations, plain and simple. Ask any statistician and they'll explain in detail how it works. If you choose, educate yourself. Take the time to understand what it is they are saying and make your own interpretation. The reward is worth it. Even boards like Slashdot and Reddit are more echo chambers for like sentiment than actual education on the facts. Do the legwork.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
Alternative fact
Time to get some popcorn!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Why go back to Reagan — a hateful RethugliKKKan — (with an uncited "drive-by" accusation) when a beloved Nobel Peace Prize winner did just such a big lie in 2010?
And, if we are searching for the first such lie, we ought to go to, at least, F.D. Roosevelt — another beloved Democrat — and his redefining the price of gold and silver.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
The Internet is for politics nowadays. And the political actors who dominate the Internet aren't independent.
"You should never doubt what nobody is sure about." -- Willy Wonka
You should never trust data, unless you can verify it. This does not only work for government data, but also for data from companies or scientist or people or aliens.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The difference with Trump is the overt bias of himself and his appointees, and the actual removal of information at his request from government web sites and removal of funding for stuff he for some reason disagrees with. He clearly rejects reality and substitutes it with his own.
What changed during the Bush administration?
What changed during the Obama administration?
Why the fuck do you expect change now?
I don't get it. I really don't. NOTHING changed from one administration change to the next for the past decades. Oh yes, there was a war on terror. Oh. And? That would have been in what way different under any other rule?
Face it, folks: You're fucked. You have a system in place that allows you to choose every 4 years whether you want to feed one group of useless gits or the other group of useless gits. That makes a huge difference for the gits, and that's why that election fight is fought tooth and nail because it's all or nothing for them. Fo you, it's nothing. Either way.
Mostly because you don't get to choose who you can vote for. That's chosen for you. In the end, when you strip the whole fluff, the whole spectacle has a lot of the old Soviet times when you even sometimes got to choose between two candidates from the same party, supporting the same ideals and the same economic system, not questioning in the slightest the all-holy doctrines and differing in insignificant bullshit topics that were hyped and emotionalized to insane levels despite having exactly zero impact on anything that really mattered in the end.
Let's be brutally honest: The same is true for your DemRep Party.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Trump lies all the time, you might want to pretend it's partisan to say so, but you can see Trump lies just by comparing his words against his own contradictory words.
And he covers his lies. So all US government agencies are currently barred from using Twitter. EPA has its budget suspended, and is barred from making any public statement. This is new. A man so afraid of his own government staff he fears their words?
And then there's the hecklers, of which you are clearly one. He stuffs his press conference with paid hecklers, they cheer and whoop when he speaks, and boo and hiss when a reporter asks a difficult question. A new low.
"The government is 100% as trustworthy today as it was the during your god and personal saviour Obama's reign."
CIA says Putin hacked the election to put Trump into power. Trump says they cannot be trusted. So you contradict your own boss.
"with more than two brain cells "
You cannot defend the liar so you attack the messenger.
He's a liar. Americans rejected him at the ballot box. Putin hacked an election to put him into power. He's had ongoing contacts to Putin all the way through the election. Putin chooses Flynn in August, Trump appoints him in November. He's now trying to secure power for Putin over American institutions. You sir, are a traitor defending a liar.
I'm not aware of any data that's available from a person or institution that isn't funded, or otherwise involved, with government, unless you mean companies' financial reports, which of course are sometimes manipulated and therefore can't be trusted. So what is non-government data?
This is anything new. As a mathematician, I've seen an incredible number of abuses of statistics in every field. At my non-profit college, after releasing salary data, as required by the government, it was stated that nearly 40% of the payroll goes to "management positions" (administration, not teachers). After raising a huge stink, they simply redefined what "management" meant in the college and decreased this number to about 20%.
There will always be abuses of facts, statistics, and "truths". It is up to the people (and the media, although boy are many of the ignorant when it comes to numbers) to question anything presented to us as fact.
What trump said was correct, from his view you could see what he said and could make the guess of 1 million, you can see that from the pictures taken from the area he was standing looking at the crowd. Him sending out his press secretary to make those comments on saturday were just plain stupid, wrong and lieing.
However the media is at fault for the way they are thought of, they start by picking on statement of "from what I could see, and it looked like" and saying that is a lie; easy to make the case of it being wrong probably not a lie. When during the campaign the previous presidency they would happily accept any statement as the truth from the democrats and continue to do so. If the media had taken a neutral standpoint and done the job of reporting then they could of easily roasted the press secretary for that briefing on saturday and could of made the push to have him replaced and might of had some support from anywhere but the minority.
For the summary the media decided to go back six presidents to show a change in the definition of unemployment, when they could of just used a recent example from obama changing the definition but that is not the story they wanted.
.....which best describes govt data ?
The Washington Post calling out anybody on alternate facts is dubious at best. Downright scandalous at worst. And MSNBC plainly state they are an opinion station not a news agency. I want to know where anybody is getting "official" numbers for any of the inaugurations since they stopped taking headcounts years ago. All counts you see put forth as fact are actually guesstimations based on a photo of the event. The numbers can be close but never verified. The inauguration is harder to count because no aerial photography is allowed (No fly zone). Add to that rioters blocking the entrance to the Mall preventing attendees from actually entering and numbers become even more irrelevant. I didn't want to believe the media had gone completely partisan but the more they publish hearsay and innuendo the more it looks like they have.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Can the public trust the government at all would be the right question to ask. Frankly we can not. And with the hair bag we now have as president we can have no trust at all. The man lies constantly and is so dumb that he gets caught in his own lies. The Molester In Chief adds a whole new dimension to government lies and corruption. The first thing to be done is to release all materials concerning the JFK, Bobby Kennedy and MLK murders. Very few Americans feel that those murders were simply caused by the fickle finger of fate.
This is not something that's new with the Trump administration.
This whole attendance fiasco is just another attempt by the establishment to delegitimize Trump's presidency.
It doesn't matter one bit how many people were physically there. In terms of physical attendance, online streaming attendance, and TV ratings, this was, by a wide margin, the most viewed inaugural event in world history, with Barack Obama's coming in a distant second.
Trump is America's made-for-reality-TV President. He is fascinating, if also terrifying. He is the slow-motion train wreck one does not simply look away from. People can't help but watch.
This is fact. Just get over it already and move on to more real and substantive ways to keep Trump accountable to the Laws and to The People. The more we focus on irrelevant bullshit like meeting attendance, the more he will get away with.
Let's take a number the government has always loved to manipulate: unemployment. It's supposed to be between 5 and 6% right now, but we all know it's much higher. So obviously they're lying. But! They still tell the truth. While they feed the press easy-to-digest lies, they're publishing real numbers for underemployed, part time but want more, and so forth. So even if the cake is a lie they're giving you all the ingredients you need to make your own delicious cake of truth. Take the numbers they publish and choose on your own which ones tell the real story. THOSE numbers don't lie.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
The Washington Post is a propaganda outlet for Jeff Bezos and the other global elites who control all the wealth. We know for sure that you can't trust the Washington Post.
Can US citizens trust Washingon Post, New York Times, and CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, etc.?
A couple of days ago this is was emailed to employees at a federal research facility. Nothing is to be released until the some sort of "Ministry of Truth" is established to filter science. Scary. "Hello again All - Starting immediately and until further notice, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx will not release any public-facing documents. This includes, but is not limited to, news releases, photos, fact sheets, news feeds, and social media content. "Please contact Director of Communications xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with any questions about this guidance. Please also transmit to your employees as soon as feasible."
Well, fiction isn't necessarily the right word. Some parts of it are technically true, but misleading. Consider the unemployment numbers. You always imagine that number to be the portion of the country that needs a job. But it isn't, the headline number is the portion of the country receiving unemployment payments - which are time limited, and which go away if a person gets a part time job, etc, etc. In other words, it is a useful figure for short term fluctuations, but a lousy measurement for a multi-year malaise.
The labor statistics (headline name "job growth" or "new jobs") are a joke. They are allegedly based on estimates and get corrected as harder numbers come in. The initial estimates get all of the attention, and the corrections come silently and in the dark of night weeks and months later. Not surprisingly, for several years the corrections have nearly all been in the negative direction - meaning that the attention grabbing headline numbers have all been hopelessly inflated.
And anything involving the money supply or inflation gets redefined now and then to obscure comparisons to the past. And things like the CPI are hopeless, and would be even if managed by a perfectly honest angel. ShadowStats.com maintains, when possible, new data calculated using the historic formulas, giving as much continuity as possible. But I think it is a pay site now.
And then there is the climate "data"...
See that "Preview" button?
NOAA has been promulgating fake news for years concerning globull warming via "normalizing" historical weather data, which is just a euphemism for altering past climate data to fit the agenda. Strange how all the "normalization" for times longer than about 20 years ago always result in the temperatures being lowered so that more recent data appears warmer in comparison. A big house cleaning at NOAA is in order.
trust me, I had to work with them for years....the bosses are afraid to do anything about the minorities....so they often slack off and do not do their work
There are very few datasets that don't have some skew towards the viewpoints of those creating them. However it's become pretty obvious to anyone with a micron of common sense that the Trump admin is going to be close to if not the most deceitful admin in recent western government history. They have a disconnect with realty that is most often associated with serious mental illness (alzheimers, dementia, schizophrenia, etc). Politicians have of course skewed the truth for as long as politics has existed, but they generally avoid bold faced lies in all but the most corrupt governments. Trump and his appointees though seem to have few qualms about making statements that are obviously and easily verifiable as completely false. Either they really do have mental illnesses or think the public is too lazy/stupid to see through it.
Anymore than you can trust article written in the Washington Post, i..e, corporate media.
Seems to me the notion of verifying what be ideal.
that 'Alternative Facts' will be the phrase of the year.
I've been asking the same thing for years.
https://realclimatescience.com...
Oh wait, those aren't the PARTICULAR lies we're talking about? I'm sorry, I didn't realize this was a faux-objective-but-actually-political-rant?
-Styopa
Trusting data is only possible if the data and the processes that generate and manage that data (end to end) are transparently provided.
Otherwise it's just an exercise in "catch me if you can".
Certainly not if it's data on the size of the crowd that attended the inaguration.
sudo rm -r -f --no-preserve-root /
You trust, but verify.
Welcome comrades!
First, we have a multi-level, multi-branch government. For example, the Congressional Budget Office isn't going to disappear simply because a sitting president wants to pretend to turn a surplus. Second while on the surface data may change (e.g. the unemployment rate) the reason for that change typically is noted. This is like any other piece of data or news. It has context. The fact that Americans have been conditioned to read only 145 characters and then snarkly comment TL;DR, is not the fault of government or data providers but lazy readers. Stupidity is a choice. Third, while government always has been subject to spin, no one is unraveling the First Amendment and the laws that support it. Again, truth and clarity are out there. It just takes more time to find them because there is more noise now as everyone is a publisher.
A really good, balanced video with citations in the description:
https://youtu.be/Hn6JWzoKv14
...which is to say, the raw statistical data is always subject to interpretation. My statistics professor gave us a lovely anecdote. He's a runner, and read about a medical study showing that people who run tend to be in very good shape and not have running-related injuries, even those at higher ages. His wife retorted that of course they aren't injured, once they got injured they stopped running and were no longer counted in the study. Same data, different interpretation on what the data means.
Same thing as before: most of it is garbage even if it isn't manipulated. And for the rest of the data, people disagree over what it means anyway.
Underlying the question is the fundamental misconception that it's the job (or capability) of government to steer and improve the economy.
There are lies, damned lies, and Trump alternative facts, comrade!
(don't worry, there are backups, amazing what you can fit on 1TB flash drives you gave to colleagues in other countries)
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Indeed odd. I would qualify this as fakenews which it actually is. The government has always been lying. The question is did they also do something for the people or only when they were forced at the gunpoint
See my subject: Oh, really? Is that WHY washington post had to retract it?? Wapo owned by known globalist Jeff Bezos???
Give us a FUCKING break "Soros LOSERS", you lost... go away, + learn to lose with dignity & grace fuckwads!
BLM, this women's movement (Gloria Steinem funded by CIA too, ADMITTEDLY in her memoirs/books) etc.?? All FUNDED by SOROS loser - the man who outright ADMITS he wants the USA to be gone & is a pawn of IMF globalists (who are running to china in the Davos switzerland home of bankers no less, because they KNOW they have NO U.S. Military to back them & minus muscle? You have SQUAT... stupid fucks are looking for muscle via China - China will outsmart & BURN THEM for it I strongly wager - 1 thing I have to give China - they're smart).
People are onto their bullshit & are SICK of it - The USA needs to PULL TOGETHER as Mr. Trump said in his Christmas speech (he can't do it alone & divide + conquer IS the globalist goal here too people - wake up, smell that coffee!)
APK
P.S.=> I almost GUARANTEE they will resort to the ONLY thing they know next - playing games like currency speculation w/ other folks money (as Soros has done to Thailand, & the UK) via hedgefund funding to do so, not even his own money (as he uses for BLM etc.) no less so "who cares", right? They'll do that next, as it's all their history SHOWS they know how to do (fuck things up for others)... apk
This is a tricky topic with no easy answers or fixes.
The US government actually publishes several different metrics on unemployment. They don't make any ONE of them "official".
There has been one that has been by convention used as the unemployment rate by most of the press. But any politician or pundit can and often do cherry-pick which metric they want to use to spin things their way.
There are many gray areas to measuring. For example, there many people who would enter the work-force if offered enough, but otherwise are not actively seeking. "Domestic spouses" often fall into this category. They may be perfectly happy being a domestic spouse, BUT would probably take a job if it paid well enough. Same with retirees. That's why "actively seeking" if often a component of preferred metrics. However, some are down and out and have given up actively seeking. The reasons and motivations for not actively seeking vary greatly and have no clear cut-off points.
Compare it to trying to measure who is the best basketball player. Points-per-game is often used, but leaves out a lot of other details, such as passing ability, defense, rebounds, turnovers, shooting percentages, etc.
Shooting percentage is a fairly nice metric, but it often skips out the fact the best shooter is often given the ball when the play-clock is running down and they have to take desperate, well-defended shots because the defense knows they have to shoot very soon (as opposed defending against passing or driving toward the hoop, since there's no time for those). That's likely to lower their shooting percentage. We can perhaps compensate by splitting shooting percentage into those made with more than say 6 seconds to go and those made with less than 6. But as you see, it's difficult to find a single simple metric. Composite metrics can be formed, but few will agree on how to weigh and construct the various sub-metrics that go into such.
Table-ized A.I.
Nobody can trust data, because it can be manipulated to support any argument you want to make, in most cases. The data is so far removed from the original source that it loses its value.
Submitter is questioning government STATISTICS. The data is still there to crunch. There was a change in how unemployment was calculated, but the data still remains.
The EPA and I believe NOAA have been downloading as much data as possible to prevent it being deleted by the incoming administration. It actually happened once before; government agents went in and basically destroyed an entire library's worth of science books and valuable science data; shredded the books and threw them in dumpsters.
I don't think some people understand how seriously in trouble we are with this administration.
I know people in gov sciences departments; they're good people who do the best work they can to help a lot of people and the sciences.
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People that run governments can be trustworthy, but the question does not even present itself for the current US "leadership".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The web site ShadowStats.com features data by one statistician which recalculates various economic trends -- unemployment, inflation, etc. -- using current government data but using older, pre-cooked algorithms that have been tossed aside. As the post above notes, cooking the stats for short-term political gain is an old sport -- but it is also a bi-partisan sport practiced by Republican and Democratic presidents alike.
Your views may differ, but those recalculated stats reflect the unemployment of my friends and neighbors, and the prices of things I buy at stores, much, much more accurately than does the official government statistics that are trotted out on the nightly news.
It's free, and comes with redundant backups in Russian servers.
You want to see how wrong government numbers can be just check shadowstats . Com
People enjoy being lied to. That's the raison d'etre of magicians. People go in knowing full well they are being lied to, and are delighted when it actually happens. Trump figured this out long ago.
Some years ago I heard someone in government respond to the question of whether an administration can change the numbers agencies report, such as unemployment numbers, to suit the administrations wishes.
That person replied that government agencies had hundreds or thousands of employees working on such jobs, and those employees represent America in the sense that they come from a mixture of Republicans, Democrats, and other.
Any agency that tried to play fast and loose with how they gather date, process it, and report it, would have dozens or hundreds or thousands of individuals in a position to blow the whistle, leak info, or have an uprising. This would come from motivation 1. they respect the process and the continuity of it. 2. if it is politically motivated, workers from the other party or no party would not want an administration to get away with it.
run wild speculating about its savage implications. Thanks mainstream media for making sure to ram your bias down our throats whenever you can make the GOP look bad.
You are ascribing WAY too much control to a presidential administration. Sure, re-definitions happen, but they make the news when they are clearly political in nature, but if you think that somebody "in the administration" can go and start altering weather or census or traffic or ANY sensor-based collection, you clearly don't understand how these things work.
If someone can manipulate it to where they can profit from it, then no, not really.
alternate facts are the "facts" that the media makes up, then spreads by repeating it so many times that people start believing. Benghazi comes to mind, a video?!? really?!?!?
OK I admit voter fraud was real- I was blocked from voting in my state due to denial of ID as my data was "lost in system" wanted to vote as democrat but now don't even have ID. I am a member of the SAR and a direct descendant of one of the founding fathers and have tons of genealogical proofs as well as Birth cert etc.
Now Trump is crying that all is "Unfair". Whah. "Why did these protesters not Vote?" Would it have counted any more than the millions that he lost by yet their votes didn't matter? Hey here's a good one, check your history, why was the Democratic party created? Because Andrew Jackson lost the election because of electoral vote that went against him while he won popular vote! Since then, every time the electoral vote has changed the election it has favored only one party, the Republicans! Does this mean the Democrats have failed to protect Democracy principles in nearly 200 years since they were created?
Would like to see how many others could not vote in red states!
Housing prices and bonuses for the 1%. How to produce more without improving your situation in life.
You got me into this! You were the ideologue! I'm only a poor assassin! - Twenty evocations, Bruce Sterling
As long as the government continues to outsource IT, the answer is no. They outsource to companies that do 3rd party outsourcing etc. There is also the underlying current of ex govt personnel in startups that are controlling data and using algorithms to pick apart peoples lives and resell back to the government or another company that does it. Eg. Choicepoint. This has been going on for awhile. Today, many people are nervous, but it is their complacency in regards to privacy that has created this situation. The fear is that their data is in the hands of someone they don't really know very much about. But, do we ever really know any political figure? We just get media BS. So, my answer is NO. All you have to do is look at OPM, one case ...of what is most likely many.
Let's see... Our government tells bald-faced lies to justify a war in Iraq. Followed by bald-faced lies about what our troops are doing over there and who they're killing...
Our government forcibly interns Japanese, German, and Italian citizens and confiscates their property without due process and calls it a "voluntary" relocation.
Our government claims 5% unemployment, and expects us to believe it even though the labor force participation rate is at its lowest point in decades.
Our government claims they're not spying on American citizens, even though leak after leak strongly suggests that they are.
Our government gets caught running guns to Mexican gangs, all the while claiming that the fact that Mexican gangs are found with guns from American gun stores obviously means we need to give up our rights in order to be safe.
And we're supposed to believe that even though they have done/are doing these things and telling these lies, there is *no* way they would *ever* fabricate, forge, or falsify scientific data to support their political agenda?
If you hunt around you can find researchers who's findings didn't agree with the "official" position about climate, health, or whatever. Funny thing, as soon as they reported their preliminary results, their funding got cut and diverted to people who agreed with the party line. Put that together with some of the oddities that crop up in the data, and documented cases of what must be either horrible incompetence or deliberate sabotage in the data collection procedures and no, you can't really trust their numbers on any subject that has political ramifications.