Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
IIRC this is the same gov't that redefined broadband as 768Kbps so our broadband maps would look better back in the broadband recovery act days.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
"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
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
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.
To a degree, yes. Obviously a healthy amount of skepticism is needed and you need to be aware that governments can and will lie if there is a pressing need.
Individual politicians? No, don't believe a word they say without fact checking. Government agencies you tend to believe because they are large bodies with multiple employees paid to analyze data. In the era of Trump though I think I will be more suspicious of even government agencies than usual. We've already seen a press release filled with bare-faced "Alternate Facts". We've already seen the National Park service censored for publishing inconvenient data.
I think it's going to be more and more important to get news on domestic issues from overseas sources such as the BBC. Not only is our own media already polarized to the left or the right instead of just reporting facts, Trump threatened several times during his campaign to treat it as illegal for the press to criticize him. At what point will he try to enforce that?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The most important thing about gov't data is that they describe accurately where they get the data, what each of their terms mean, and that those not change from year to year or administration to administration.
As long as the methodology is consistent then it's useful for longitudinal comparison, regardless of whether you agree with the absolute numerical value.
I totally agree. However, you only need an elementary level in math to realize that something is amiss with Trumps numbers. For example, he claims that up to 42% in the US are out of work. Anyone with common sense would realize that having least 2 in 5 people out of work is absurd. In order to get to a figure like that, you would have to include every man, woman, and child over the age of 9. This includes retirees, students, handicapped, and other categories that can't or choose not to work. So to get that number down to a reasonable number, he would have to put children and retirees to work. I'll bet that he backtracks on this number and accepts the 5% unemployment very soon.
This shouldn't be the dawn of mistrust. Anyone who trusted the government was being, at the very least, gullible.
This is the surprise development of the information age... It was long thought that more information would give people a basis to make better decisions. The truth turned out to be that more information gave people more opportunity to discover facts that align with their beliefs. People trust data that says what they already think, they distrust data that says otherwise. It's always been that way.
The end result is that the trustworthiness of data is irrelevant in the public sphere. Regular people are simply discussing their opinion and hiding that opinion behind a "fact" they discovered.
Among experts in a field, data trustworthiness is important. However, experts are much better at validating data than the general public, so this usually isn't a problem.
On the bright side, it is refreshing to see the Democrats suddenly care about fiscal responsibility, and the press actually scrutinizing the government.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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.
So you don't like the "alternative facts" meme. What's a better word for "the things the news media leaves out so they can lie by omission?"
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
They stopped counting the long-term unemployed under St. Ronnie, under Shrub they redefined 'long-term'. I believe it was under Bush the Elected (but maybe under Clinton) that they stopped counting people who didn't have phones.
Removing food, fuel, housing and healthcare from the official yardstick for inflation happened during the '80s, that was how Reagan "beat inflation". In the '90s they added electronics and communications to make the numbers look better (not sure if they're still in there).
Benghazi? Seriously? I thought even InfoWars had given up beating that poor dead horse.
The IRS didn't target conservative groups, they were instructed by Congress to enforce the laws on the books about registering non-profit organizations (IIRC environmental groups were the actual target of Congress). That conservative groups were found to be breaking the law wasn't a surprise to anyone with two brain cells to rub together. They chose a category which disallowed political action so that they could hide their donor lists, and started politicking before they even finished the paperwork. The non-Libertardian groups caught said, "Oops, we chose the wrong category and will fix it."
Before you go off on your tangent of calling me an Obama-loving Democratic shill I should probably make clear that I loathe what the Democratic Party has become and seriously dislike Barry "Bush-lite" Obama. Just your post was so full of bullshit that it irritated me.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
You can also expect homelessness to be mentioned on the news again. Oh and the anti-war protestors who were mysteriously silent during Obama's non-stop drone wars will suddenly freak out because Trump bombs ISIS.
We were never mysteriously silent. Just because you didn't see it covered on FOX or Breitbart, doesn't mean it didn't happen.
There are also some other factors that skew the numbers, depending on how you count.
- Retirees have a full time job of being retired. Some statistics count them, some exclude them from the total, and some disregard them and the numbers go all wrong.
- Prison population, many of whom are modern slave labor (refuse to work = don't get parole). With the outrageously high prison population in the US, how this number is treated can make a significant difference.
- People who work multiple jobs. If you count the number of jobs, or count the number of workers, that leads to a discrepancy.
- The underemployed, who while having work, do not have enough income to subsist on. Seasonal workers can also fall under this. How should they be counted?
- Dark economy. Is it fair to count those who make a decent living outside the system as unemployed? This includes not only tax evaders and criminals at large, but also housewives and groups with an internal economy (mennonites, native tribes, communes).
While the exact numbers can be hard to determine, there's no doubt that the politicians have cooked the numbers many times by doing things like excluding those who have been unable to find work for a while, or excluding permanent residents and only counting citizens (as if the voting ability changes anything).
Unfortunately I can only read the abstract of the actual study but the article seems like crap. They state a bunch of opinions as fact. For example:
"Remember, a low-ball estimate says there are at least 11 million to 12 million illegals in the U.S., but that's based on faulty Census data. More likely estimates put the number at 20 million to 30 million."
What more likely estimates? What is your source? There are a number of different agencies and groups that estimate about the same numbers, some of whom have a vested interest in inflating the number (like the DHS). From Wikipedia:
"Specifically, the authors say that illegals may have cast as many as 2.8 million votes in 2008 and 2010. That's a lot of votes. And when you consider the population of illegal inhabitants has only grown since then, it's not unreasonable to suppose that their vote has, too."
The data from Pew indicates that the number has either stayed level or gone down (at least in the years they are citing). Again - what is your source of this data?
"Leftist get-out-the-vote groups openly urge noncitizens to vote during election time"
Which "leftist" groups? What did they say? This might have happened but it seems foolish just to take this on faith, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. I couldn't find too much relevant on Google (search terms "groups encouraging illegal voting california"), other than the claim (easily debunked) that Obama encouraged illegals to vote.
"Heck, even the liberal fact-checking site FactCheck.org says so."
What is your evidence that that the site is "liberal"? Is it just because they said something that disagrees with your narrative? According to their about page, We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. and publicly list all sources of their funding here.
In summation, the article seems quite bogus with a number of seemingly false or unsourced claims. This is a great example of the biased news that the site seems to rail against, but only if they are biased to the left.
Enigma
No kidding. The really sad thing is that libertarian candidates could be that viable alternative, if they would just understand that the tragedy of the commons is a real thing and that government is a legitimate means of solving it, and tone down the economic extremism. Progressives and libertarians substantially agree on social policy (except for affirmative action), after all!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Here is one example. Iceland kicks the FBI out of the country and claims directly that they were seeking to frame Julian Assange. Granted, this is a dailymail link but it is a direct quote from a minister for Iceland: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
How, could we ever trust our government if our highest law enforcement agency was actively attempting to frame someone for a crime. How often does stuff like this occur in other countries friendlier to such practices than Iceland?