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?
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.
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...
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?)
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?
You make a good point. However, the inability to trust government data goes back to long before Obama. It did get measurably worse under Obama, but that was only possible because the government had gotten away with being progressively more dishonest with its data. At one time, the government intended to be honest with its data. Unfortunately, to some degree, everyone is somewhat dishonest with their data (leaving out data points which appear to be aberrations because they do not fit the gatherer of data's understanding of what is going on, as one example). However, as the government collected more data by more agencies. people discovered they could shape people's actions by which data they released. From there it was a short step to only releasing the data which caused people to act the way those in power wished them to act. Then, there came "normalizing" the data, and making "seasonal" adjustments to the data. Until finally, they just outright changed it to make it fit what they wanted people to believe. What those doing this failed to realize was that at each step on the way more and more people began to distrust the data, until now, people recognize that data released by the government has been carefully chosen to promote the agenda of those who control the government, even if that means making numbers up.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.
"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
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.
Well put. When I saw this supposed question from the article, "In the Trump administration era of 'alternative facts,' what happens to government data?" I had a similar thought to what you stated. In fact, my first response to the "question" was, oh, do you mean 'alternative facts' like 'Islamic terrorism' not being a real thing, or like that we can pull out of Iraq and be free of our involvement there, or like that we can let Russia come in and take control and that won't have a bad impact on the US or our allies, or how if we just build schools, hospitals and give them jobs, everybody who would have become a terrorist will instead live a happy productive life without perpetrating any violence, or how we should release the bad people from Gitmo because they aren't really bad people they're just misunderstood, or going back to the Clinton administration how we don't have a problem with terrorists that requires a military solution, we have a problem that requires a criminal justice solution?
The list goes on, but you get the idea. All of those 'alternative facts' from Democrat administrations have resulted in the direct and indirect violent deaths of many Americans and other westerners. The Republicans have their fair share, but you can't lay the blame for the problem solely one party.
President Trump's press conferences indicate that what you say is not true. They proudly admit to the use of 'alternative facts' so, no, things are not 100% the same.
Europe here, what both sides do you mean? From over here, your both sides look similar enough to be considered the same side.
Maybe it's the distance that makes them indistinguishable from each other, I could swear that your politicians all say and do the same.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Europe here, what both sides do you mean? From over here, your both sides look similar enough to be considered the same side.
Maybe it's the distance that makes them indistinguishable from each other, I could swear that your politicians all say and do the same.
That's an easy one. The two sides are necessary to give the illusion of choice to voters.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Sorry, but actual progressives, as opposed to Democratic party faithful, knew Obama was not to be trusted from the first. One does not have a meteoric rise through Chicago politics if they're not dirty, after all. We weren't voting **for** him as much as voting **against** the other moron. I'm not sure why Libertardians can't figure out that actual liberals and progressives aren't tied to the thoroughly-corrupted Democratic party, we just don't have any viable alternatives in most elections.
On the other hand, while I certainly didn't expect a new FDR I don't think any of us were prepared to discover that he was Bush-lite.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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.
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.
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 what? Election's over. Now to eat our dinner.
A president that lies and claims it is very very dangerous and not to be dismissed lightly. This is why a functioning and rigorous press is necessary.
All your complaints seem to be policy points, not facts of any kind ,and certainly not government data.
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.
'Islamic terrorism' not being a real thing - I'm guessing this is a perversion of the Bush and Obama administration's refusal to call IS* or Al Qaeda terrorism "Radical Islamic Terror". But neither regime has said "'Islamic terrorism' not being a real thing", they've said that it's unhelpful and likely to help the terrorists' own campaign if you link the words "Islamic" and "Terrorism" because you're implying that IS*/AQ's linking of the two is legitimate, and because many, including Muslims, will take the phrasing as implying we're at war with Islam rather than at war with terrorists.
or like that we can pull out of Iraq and be free of our involvement there - Nobody has ever claimed this, ever.
or like that we can let Russia come in and take control and that won't have a bad impact on the US or our allies - Where? Syria? Because that's not what I've heard at all. Most politicians on both sides of the fence are deeply troubled by Russia's involvement in Syria. Hence the support for a no-fly zone.
or how if we just build schools, hospitals and give them jobs, everybody who would have become a terrorist will instead live a happy productive life without perpetrating any violence, - nobody has ever made that argument in the history of the universe.
or how we should release the bad people from Gitmo because they aren't really bad people they're just misunderstood - nobody has ever made that argument in the history of the universe. The complaint about Gitmo is two fold: one, there are a lot of innocent people there, and two: it's unconstitutional and illegal to hold people without due process (see (1) for the reason why.) Obama was making plans to move prisoners at Gitmo to the US in the early days of his administration, to US prisons, to be processed by constitutional authorities. After Congress effectively made that option impossible, he did the exact opposite of what you claim: he kept Gitmo open, rather than releasing people being held illegally there.
or going back to the Clinton administration how we don't have a problem with terrorists that requires a military solution, we have a problem that requires a criminal justice solution? - congrats, you found something that's correct, but alas, still not something the Obama administration has ever claimed. Terrorism is indeed best treated as a criminal, rather than military, problem. Turning Terrorists from murderous scum into heroic soldiers is the worst thing the Bush administration ever did, and is probably why we've seen an uptick in terror in general, not just in the creation of IS*, but also in groups not associated with Arabs or Radicalized Religious fanatics such as white supremacists.
None of those "Alternative facts" exists. The nearest you got to, that a twenty year old Democratic government might have had a different view of terrorists to the heroic soldiers view you subscribe to, saved lives - it was a conventional law enforcement operation that prevented the NYE attack on LAX from being better known than 9/11. And it was Bush's refusal to take seriously those policies that lead to 9/11.
And, even if any of those alternative facts did "exist", ie Democrats were actually saying them, none of them would ever cause lives to be lost.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
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.
All your complaints seem to be policy points, not facts of any kind ,and certainly not government data.
They seem to be policy points, that hasn't stopped the responsible administrations from treating them as facts, particularly when you look at their unwillingness to entertain that their assertions may not be entirely merit worthy.
Of course, if instead I had decided to point out the "Iraq has WMD, we must invade," or "mission accomplished" (regarding Iraq, in 2003!), or "we need the wall street bail out" of the Bush administration, or the "we have to arm the Contras" of the Reagan administration. I probably would have been modded to +5 insightful.
But that wasn't the point. The point was to show that administrations of all stripes will engage in the same sort of behavior when it suits their narrative and political objectives. Heck, Obama himself blasted the Bush administration' method of calculating unemployment as wrongly characterizing unemployment figures as too low, then he didn't change it within his own administration. I'll give you three guesses why that was.
Those were similarly policy issues where the administration deliberately twisted the facts, just like the Clinton and Obama administrations had done with the examples I mentioned in my first post. If you don't believe me, go talk to some folks in the intelligence community who were specifically told what facts they could and could not include in their reports and what the results and conclusions of their analyses had to be. It has happened under every administration at least that I can remember.
Problem is, it was never covered (at least not any more than a passing mention at most) on CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC...
Only the farther-right sites really went into any detail at all.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
that 'Alternative Facts' will be the phrase of the year.
Not only should you not trust the "government" data, you shouldn't trust anyone's data, in the sense that you shouldn't accept what people presenting the data claim to be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It is human to game the system; it's built into our minds and into our culture. When we have a message to send, we find the data that makes the best case possible for the message that we want to send, and that is the data that we show.
I'm sure many have heard the saying "... popularised in United States by Mark Twain (among others), who attributed it to the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: 'There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.'" (Wikipedia). At the heart of this is that when you get to pick what data to show, what statistics to publish, you get to control the impression people take away from viewing that data.
If the question is whether you can trust that the actual data presented by a government agency is "good," the answer is probably "yes" as long as you understand all of the assumptions behind the collection and presentation of the data, as well as the particular meaning of the terms being used to describe the data as used by the people who gathered, processed, and are presenting the data. This, in effect, makes it very difficult to take anything anyone with an agenda says at face value, including the government. Two examples of problems with government data come to my mind immediately: Inflation, and Employment.
In the United States, inflation is typically measured by the government using something called "the Consumer Price Index." This represents the change in the cost of a "basket" of consumer goods over time. The goods are supposed to be representative of the goods that most people need to acquire as part of their regular daily existence. https://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpifaq.htm But whether or not this inflation value applies to you and your family depends upon how closely your purchases match the assumptions built into the CPI. To the extent to which you deviate from the CPI, the real effects of inflation upon your purchasing power will vary. Are the people who create the basket of goods used to measure inflation trustworthy? I'm sure that they believe that they are, and I'm sure that they try as best as the can to get it right according to what they think is right. Do they measure it how I would measure it? I don't know, and I would have to understand much about their methodology n order to answer that question.
Employment. Big grey area, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Ideally, you would measure the total number of people working, and divide it by the total number of people who would like to be working (assuming for this method that everyone who is working wants to be working), and that would tell you the "employment rate" (and the unemployment rate would be 100% minus the employment rate). Even assuming that you can get accurate numbers regarding how many people are working, its almost impossible to know how many people want to work but can't find a job. Some measures use the number of people who are collecting unemployment compensation, but not everyone who wants a job collects unemployment. Other measures might try to estimate the total labor force using age, etc. Obviously how you estimate this number affects the employment/unemployment rate calculation, quite significantly.
No matter whose data you are viewing, you need to understand the assumptions and the methodology behind collecting, processing, and presenting the data in order to know what that data might saying, and even then you aren't seeing all of the data that isn't being presented (that might give you a more complete picture). Even science has trouble with this, so don't expect anything better from politicians.
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
If you have a choice between two shit sandwiches, but one of them is dried, grass-fed cow shit, and the other is a hot steaming pile of HIV-positive human shit, it's absolutely true that they're both shit and you'd be best off eating neither, but it's even more clear which one you should choose if you have no choice but to eat one or the other.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."