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?

Comments

Gov't data

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Gov't data

[Oswald McWeany]

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?

Re:Gov't data

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Gov't data

[Oswald McWeany]

He's right though. Most 9 year olds I know aren't working. They should be sent to work in the coal mines to help make America great again!

Damn lazy kids going to school and playing Mario Brothers instead of working the coal mines like they're supposed to.

Re:Gov't data

[Layzej]

And independent analysis shows that the NOAA analysis is extremely accurate and even better than the competition.

It is not likely that the data would become tained. More likely the new administration would just stop collecting inconvenient data, or change the metric as described in the summary.

Re:Gov't data

[DarkOx]

Exactly what so many people seem to missing about all the hubub around presidency is the deep state is real, our bureaucracy for good and ill are quite resilient.

Just because you change out the man at the top and couple handfuls of his direct reports does not suddenly mean all the procedures, methods, systems, opinions, etc in use by all the 2,804,000+ federal workers and enumerable contractors both direct and corporate suddenly change too. That stuff is cultural and other than a few hot button issues that might get attention from POTUS directly takes decades to change, literally outlasting a single Presidents term of office in many cases.

In a lot a ways we are still feeling the effects of not exactly policy but popular opinion that dates to the Clinton Presidency and that of Gorge W Bush. People choose to get into civil service or not often depending on their admiration or lack their of for the top man in charge at the time they are ready to start a career. The people who started their careers in the late 90s and early 2000s are now the folks who have risen to positions where they are decision makers and mid-level bureaucrats. We have yet to see the real influence of Obama's millennial voters here yet (sadly IMHO, not looking forward to that all).

So the data is probably as trustworthy as it was 4 weeks or 4 years ago. Its probably as trustworthy as it was 8 years ago, or 16 or 20. That is to say its really not very trustworthy at all but probably less bias than you might imagine. There is a constant battle being fought between the left and right with the pendulum swinging both ways ever 8 years or so, but not as a far either way as the top men appear to swing. The real issue is that assumptions on either side are never really challenged or well examined because of the tug of war fought over the superficial stuff. So some labor statistic remains calculated they way it has been for the last 40 years when some probably well meaning person made a judgement call based on the information they had at hand. It never gets revisited in a serious scientific way because everyone is to busy doing studies and bickering over a handful of top line numbers that make for good headlines like the employment rate.

Depends on the Department

[IMightB]

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.

Why restrict this to US citizens?

[OzPeter]

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.

Re:We could never trust government

[AmiMoJo]

The two party system is a problem, but it's nothing compared to the danger of what Trump wants.

Trump is pushing for people to accept his "alternative facts" over the truth. It's a standard feature of post-truth politics. You pick the "facts" that you prefer. He wants voters to do that, to believe him rather than the press or government agencies that are publishing contradictory information.

Both Trump and his press secretary and various members of his staff have said this over and over. The press is dishonest, anyone who contradicts him is a liar. It's extremely dangerous to disregard the truth and stop caring about it.

Re:You just now started worrying?

[squiggleslash]

The list goes on...

...of stuff nobody has ever said?

'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.

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.

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.

Re:We could never trust government

[whoever57]

Is that another Trump fact?

McCarthy was not "completely and totally vindicated" by anything. The existence of a small number of Soviet spies did not justify the witchhunt that he pursued for political reasons. It did not justify all the false allegations and innuendo, it did not justify ruining of the careers of many innocent people.