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Ask Slashdot: Can US Citizens Trust Government Data? (msn.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the fiction-or-non-fiction dept.

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?

2 of 460 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Depends on the Department by Freischutz · · Score: 1, Troll

    >> I wouldn't trust anything coming from Trumps office for shit...

    Would you have honestly trusted data coming from Hillary's office had she become president?

    I would trust that Hillary would not have sent people into the NOAA, NASA, to either 'adjust data' to suit the alt-right world view or intimidate scientist into doing it. Trump on the other hand has openly declared his intention to crack down on scientists that come to conclusions which are incompatible with his world view and inconvenient for the fossil fuel industry.

  2. The issue is leftist naivety. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Obama was not to be trusted. So yeah, what's the issue here?

    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.