Ask Slashdot: Can US Citizens Trust Government Data? (msn.com) 460
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?
Gov't data (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Gov't data (Score:5, Informative)
And independent analysis shows that the NOAA analysis is extremely accurate [sciencemag.org] 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 (Score:4, Insightful)
If they did, then they would be merely continuing the SOP for all federal government data collected and reported, as done previously by Obama, and Bush and.....
Nothing new to see here folks.
Re:Gov't data (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
Re:Gov't data (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Gov't data (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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(Accidentally hit "Overrated" instead of "Funny" when moderating. Posting to undo. My bad.)
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For example, he claims that up to 42% in the US are out of work.
You sure he wasn't just talking about young black males?
Re:Gov't data (Score:4, Informative)
Yes....
Trump, Time magazine interview, Aug. 20, 2015: Our real unemployment rate–in fact, I saw a chart the other day, our real unemployment–because you have ninety million people that aren’t working. Ninety-three million to be exact. If you start adding it up, our real unemployment rate is 42%. We have a lot of room. We have a lot of people who want to work.
Since there are around 38 million blacks in the US and he claims 93 million are out of work, this cannot be true unless every black man, woman, and child is out of work three times. BTW, the 93 Million figure came from a report on non-workers, not unemployed workers. Even using this bogus number comes to under 30% unemployment.
He should have mastered this level of math by 5th grade. If you look at the ~5% unemployment figure, this is a reasonable number. When the unemployment drops below 3% we'll be under severe inflationary pressure.
Re:Gov't data (Score:4, Insightful)
To Trump, facts are whatever he wants them to be.
He is a pathological liar and simply has no concept of truth that normal people would understand. I suspect that when he is lying, he isn't aware that what he is saying isn't true.
Re:Gov't data (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not how pathological liars work. They absolutely know they're lying. But they assume everyone else is lying, too, and it's okay to lie to a liar. Gotta fool them before they fool you, right?
I don't think that describes Trump, though. What he mainly does is exaggerate, or a variation of Cunningham's Law. He says things that are imprecise, but in the direction of truth that otherwise the media would never report. Example, Trump wants people to know "employment numbers are bad." Obama/Hillary says 5%. Trump throws out any random high number (42%, whatever) and then everyone "proves" Trump wrong by saying "well yeah the 5% number is bullshit so maybe it's really like 15% or 20% when you start factoring in underemployed..." etc etc. Okay, great, Trump had a number wrong, but at least he recognizes the problem. Most importantly, the voters who are struggling to find work are now very aware that Trump is aware of their employment problems. They don't really give a shit about the exact number, because the only number they care about is the number of jobs they have. Obama and Hillary also both have wrong numbers, and are wrong about the existence of the problem. If Trump gave the 15% or 20% number himself everyone would just ignore it.
Same thing with Mexican rapists. If he just said "some illegal immigrants are criminals" he would be ignored. So he said Mexico is sending rapists, and then the media has to start arguing over just how many Mexicans are rapists. Fun(?) fact, 80% of central American women and girls are raped during their illegal border crossing. [huffingtonpost.com] So, as Trump said, "well, somebody's doing the raping." Voters are then more concerned with stopping the rapes rather than nitpicking over the number of rapists.
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He's not a liar. He's worse. He's a bullshitter. As elaborated in one of my favorite philosophical works, On Bullshit [wikipedia.org] by Harry Frankfurt, the difference between a liar and a bullshitter is that a liar knows and cares what is true and false and is deliberately trying to make people believe things that are false; while a bullshitter couldn't care less whether the things he's saying are true or false, so long as people believe what it is useful to him that they believe. If that should happen to be true, how co
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I assume that politicians lie. I prefer the variety that doesn't lie about easily checked facts . For example, the recent insistence that Trump's inauguration ceremony was attended by far more people than the evidence points to: not only was that a completely unnecessary lie, it's easily refuted.
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Clinton was a typical politician, she lied when it suited her purposes, but compared to Trump she was a paragon of honesty.
Re:Gov't data (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
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Well, then you have someone like my wife, for the first 10 years of having kids she didn't work, because she wanted to take care of the kids. (doing the maths we worked out that daycare at somewhere we trusted for 3 kids would eat almost all her income, so wasn't worth her working- after childcare costs we'd be getting very little return). Now, the last 3 years she's been back in college.
She is unemployed, but she has had no intention of finding a job the last 13 years. It's wrong to count EVERY work-age
Re:Gov't data (Score:5, Insightful)
Either way, it sure makes the 5% look suspect.
not after you subtract retirees, student, and stay at home parents.
if you're not working and not seeking work, you aren't part of the labor market despite being "unemployed", and hence not counted.
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Of course, if he uses the usual government basis for such claims (people who are of working age & health), he might be right.
Mind you, I think he's full of crap. But I also know that the government's usual unemployment figures are a steaming pile. Just because you've given up on finding a job for now (for values of "you" and "now") doesn't mean you should be removed from the "unemployed" list, as is done by the US Government statistical guys....
Re:Gov't data (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Gov't data (Score:4, Insightful)
Each of these are more or less accurate and precise, and each has their own source of biases, and therefore you can trust them more or less.
We could never trust government (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:We could never trust government (Score:5, Insightful)
In a properly functioning government, independent bodies are created to gather data for use by the public and politicians. Those bodies are overseen by bi-partisan groups with representatives from multiple parties, and their mandate is independence, transparency and impartiality.
It works in some democracies. The UK has the Office for Budget Responsibility, Japan has various agencies... Of course, politicians do their usual thing of cherry-picking and and misinterpreting the data, but the raw stuff is available and generally considered reliable.
It's also not the case that US governments have always been this bad either. I don't recall one telling the National Parks Service to stop publishing factual information because it contradicted their lies over something as trivial as the size of the inauguration crowd.
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In a properly functioning government, independent bodies are created to gather data for use by the public and politicians. Those bodies are overseen by bi-partisan groups with representatives from multiple parties, and their mandate is independence, transparency and impartiality.
I'd say you're missing one main part there: "bi-partisan groups" is itself one of your problems. In more functional democracies, they're called "all-party committees" because we're not two-party systems.
I agree with most of what you posted, but remember to focus on one of your other major problems, that being your two-party system.
As for those knocking the submitter, at least they were self-aware enough to realize that this may always have been a problem that they were for some reason (ie: their own po
Re:We could never trust government (Score:5, Insightful)
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:We could never trust government (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:We could never trust government (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Perhaps you should have read the whole article:
These viewpoints are considered by most scholars to be fringe revisionist history.[158] Challenging efforts aimed at the "rehabilitation" of McCarthy, Haynes argues that McCarthy's attempts to "make anti-communism a partisan weapon" actually "threatened [the post-War] anti-Communist consensus", thereby ultimately harming anti-Communist efforts more than helping.[159]
Depends on the Department (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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>> 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?
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>> 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
I'll give you that she probably wouldn't but only up until the point that some "inconvenient truth" they said ever got in her way.
>> 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.
Please cite your references.
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Have you seen his appointees? It's pretty obvious.
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You first said he openly declared it. Now you're saying I have to guess from his appointees.
You've clearly shown you are completely like most other dems in that you're just making up contentious shit on the spot then selling it as something he already said. Then irony of ironies, you accuse him of fact-free politics. Pot meet kettle.
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...unless they're laid off/fired in witch hunts before hand.
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Trump has already made clear he won't censor them - he is simply shutting them down, any department that has consistently been saying things he doesn't want to be true (like NASA's earth science division) is for the chopping block.
Who Has EVER Trusted Government Data? (Score:3, Informative)
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Heck, Yesterday's news (from Friday's release) that there was a "bug" that under reported Not for Profit university student loan default rates, but the same bug didn't effect "for profit" schools, and almost the entire difference in the data was the bug. But because of that, we don't hold not for profit schools to the same rules as for profit. Gee, maybe it is because some of the biggest names, including Ivys would have been charged...
Re:Who Has EVER Trusted Government Data? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who trust government data? Anybody who uses a USGS map. Or a weather forecast that uses satellite data. Or who uses a GPS (both the satellite signal and the base map, which is compiled by private companies from government sources).
Now any statistic is capable of misleading, if you choose to misinterpret it. Take unemployment. I think that figure is accurate, it just doesn't mean what people think it does. By 2016 unemployment had recovered to where it was before the Great Recession, but if you think that means the government is fraudulently telling you that the job picture is good, that's you misinterpreting what it means. The low unemployment rate masks (a) relatively low labor participation and (b) disastrously low job growth and labor participation in certain regions of the country -- particularly rural and small to middle-sized cities. How do I know this? Well, government data, obviously. [usda.gov]
You are conflating "data", with "information" and "opinion". The Food Pyramid is opinion, not data. If you think for yourself and drill down into the facts a bit, you'll find that government data is pretty useful. Opinions, less so.
government job numbers (Score:2)
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So long as they report U3 consistently, that is not even misleading. To say that someone is “unemployed” when they are “underemployed” is just lying. I think John Green explains this quite well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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That being said, with the manipulation of data that goes on across the board (NOAA, NASA, etc etc) You can't trust anything coming out regardless of who is president.
How cute, you seem to be deliberately conflating political manipulation of data with changing data via scientific processes in order to make a thinly veiled anti-global warming statement.
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How cute, you believe that people who are 100% on political money are magically gallant, honorable, have no biases or beliefs that cloud their thought process, and would never interpret data or correct data towards the objective of continuing their income.
Ahh .. yes. The global conspiracy of scientists who are only in it to line their pockets. Never mind that their data and methods are publicly available for scrutiny and that even independent skeptics organizations have validated the data and conclusions.
Humans are bastards (Score:2, Interesting)
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 th
Re:Humans are bastards (Score:4, Informative)
I take it you haven't read the Bible. God isn't trustable either.
Yes! Absolutely! (Score:2, Funny)
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?)
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That's true!
And it's still true tomorrow when he says the opposite. It's just another truth! He is Trump! He has more truths than anyone else! Make America true again!
A Better Ridge (Score:2)
The amount of trust you should place in government facts and figures shouldn't vary from one Presidency to the next.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Why restrict this to US citizens? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Poverty (Score:2)
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd... [google.com]
The questioner reveals their own dishonesty (Score:2, Insightful)
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, tha
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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.
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.
Reagan is the one who stopped counting people not looking for work. Talk radio started describing these people as "discouraged" during Obama's administration, but they were not counted among the Bush unemployed, either.
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Wow, you got a lot of dishonest stuff there yourself. So lets start by addressing the first one.
Under Obama, we stopped counting people as unemployed if they gave up looking for a job.
Can you provide some citations for your claim? Because the only thing I recall being change was Obama making our unemployment tracking MORE accurate, not less. Here's my citation (and select quotes):
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com... [usatoday.com]
"the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), beginning Saturday, will raise from two years to five years the upper limit on how long someone can be listed as having been jobless."
So
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The food pyramid was laughably unscientific when it was created. Need I go on?
And it still is. Today's guidelines are based on that purely "made up" pyramid. Wonder why we have so many sick people?
Lots of info out there, but this is a good one. The Limits of Scientific Evidence and the Ethics of Dietary Guidelines [youtube.com]
Re:The questioner reveals their own dishonesty (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Nothing Changes (Score:4, Interesting)
"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.
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Time to feed a troll.
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 )
This is not providing intel, not feeding false data.”
Number of civilians killed as collateral damage in any military operation.
I might be wrong, but I haven't seen anyone showing the data is wrong. They have “unconventional” understanding of what is a combatant and they admit that they can't always verify actual deaths.
Unemployment numbers ( which conveniently leave out those who exhaust their unemployment benefits and aren't counted as unemployed )
They report on U1 to U6. Again, you might feel that U6 is more important, but that is not the problem of government data.
Blaming Russia / Hackers for anything that happens these days
Really everything? Which data is putting blame on Russia? There are intelligence reports, that blame them
Alternative Facts (Score:5, Interesting)
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... [bls.gov] 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.
Silly question (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Why question just Government data? (Score:4, Interesting)
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
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Interpretation suspect, not the data (Score:2)
At least in the case of the Reagan example.
Alternative Fact (Score:2)
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.
What data can you trust? (Score:2)
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 i
All data is subject to interpretation (Score:2)
Short, no. Long, noooo (Score:2)
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.
Changing Data (Score:2)
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
Its statistics, plain and simple (Score:2)
Time (Score:2)
Time to get some popcorn!
Why go back to Reagan? (Score:2)
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 [gallup.com] in 2010 [usatoday.com]?
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 redef [wikipedia.org]
Can you trust other Slashdot commentators? (Score:2)
The Internet is for politics nowadays. And the political actors who dominate the Internet aren't independent.
Comment removed (Score:3)
Before you think about this, answer me that: (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Yikes. OK, how about healthcare. Are 20 million people who could well be without healthcare shortly an insignificant detail? Is not having healthcare insignificant? It is until you're ill, then there is nothing more significant in the world. Same with gay marriage or abortion - insignificant, until it really really isn't.
You're looking for a different economic system that isn't on offer, and that sucks. But the things you mention as "insignificant bullshit" is a colossally dismissive attitude to take. You d
Nothing new... (Score:2, Interesting)
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 t
Media is the problem and summary shows why. (Score:2)
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
Pot...Meet Kettle (Score:2)
I predict... (Score:4, Funny)
that 'Alternative Facts' will be the phrase of the year.
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Re:You just now started worrying? (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [bls.gov] 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.
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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 tha
Re:You just now started worrying? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:You just now started worrying? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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?"
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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.
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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.
The new president is already going around saying he lost the popular vote because 3-5 million "illegals" voted in the election. You elected a liar; "magic" has nothing to do with it.
Re:You just now started worrying? (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org]:
"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 [pewresearch.org] 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 [snopes.com]) 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 [factcheck.org].
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.
Re:You just now started worrying? (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:You just now started worrying? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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!
Re:You just now started worrying? (Score:5, Interesting)
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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.
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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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.