Comment by Braxton1980

Comment by Braxton1980 3 days ago

9 replies

View on Hacker News

>If you pick any country and look at proxies that have significant cost associated with them, at relative population levels of verified locations, the population of the world differs pretty radically from the claims most countries put out.

Can you provide an example that shows a radically different population count?

>If you don't have independent verification free from censorial pressures and legal repercussions, then you get propaganda

Always?

How would you perform a census without massive amounts of money and cooperation from the government?

oyashirochama 3 days ago

China is the best example, its estimated that their population is off by entire countries in some statisitics, either through disppeared girls, hidden covid deaths, local economic fraud. There is also no independently verifiable group in China and is actually explicitly banned to use non-government methods.

Reply View 7 replies
  • dragonwriter 3 days ago

    > China is the best example, its estimated that their population is off by entire countries in some statisitics

    “entire countries” of population spans a range from single-digit hundreds to over a billion, so this could describe anything from an imperceptible error to an enormous one in China’s case.

    Reply View 0 replies
  • thijson 3 days ago

    I wonder if the population numbers could be reverse engineered through things like light pollution seen by satellites, or food consumption.

    Some people claim that China's population is half of what the officials claim.

    Reply View 5 replies
    • jerf 3 days ago

      Yes, it absolutely can.

      I'm sure the various high-end intelligence agencies have a much better view on this than the public does. All kinds of ways of cross-checking the numbers, all by doing things they'll be doing in their normal course of events.

      A normal person could probably do a decent job with an AI that isn't too biased in the direction of "trust gov numbers above all else" and tracking down and correlating some statistics too obscure and too difficult to fake. (Example: Using statistical population sampling methodology on some popular internet service or something.) The main problem there being literally no matter what they do and how careful they are, they'd never be able to convince anyone of their numbers.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • jandrewrogers 3 days ago

        Some intelligence agencies endeavor to maintain a profile of every identifiable person on the planet with data acquired by many diverse means. They have enough data to build excellent models of population coverage such that I would be surprised if they could not estimate population with high confidence.

        The problem with trying to measure this as a normal person is that you don't have enough access to different types of measurements to build good models of sample bias and selection artifacts.

        Reply View 0 replies
    • seec 2 days ago

      Food supply is something I though about but the problem is that we put a lot of it in storage and it's never clear how much because sellers may want to wait until markets are more favorable.

      With modern technology/knowledge, we have a lot of high-density calories lying around, in the form of grains, potatoes, oils, etc.

      It might be possible to get a rough picture tracking the perishables that are often animal products but poor countries don't use a lot of it because, well, they are poor. So it makes everything very complicated.

      Reply View 0 replies
    • mr_toad 3 days ago

      > Some people claim that China's population is half of what the officials claim.

      Some people claim that the Earth is flat. I’m rather more inclined to believe China’s official statistics than what ‘some people’ on the internet have to say.

      Reply View 0 replies
observationist 3 days ago

Why is the default assumption "just trust them bro, why would they lie!"?

That's not scientific. There's no verification or validation of data.

Your default assumption should be to question authority, especially if authority claims sole dominion over claims of fact, like "this is our population, because we say so."

They are humans with power, therefore they lie. If you don't have accountability feedback, you can never, ever check those lies, so you rely on proxies and legitimate models.

I highly recommend researching proxies you understand and can trust, and developing an understanding of the models that exist, and how to estimate confidence over a bounded range of values.

I don't think China has only 500 million people - that's a little silly. But I also don't think they have 1.4 billion, either, especially since one of their main justifications for that is "hey, we have this many phone accounts!" - their population control policies, their population decline, their cultural preference for male children and infant femicide, and so on don't jive with simple models of population growth based on human population growth constraints. If there's a deviation between properly error bounded models of populations over time in the hundreds of millions over the highest reasonably bounded value, something is suspicious.

You can take your reasonably bounded model and correlate with proxies - if the verifiable evidence supports the model over the claims, you can be more confident in the model than the claims.

Reliable proxies that can't be faked are difficult, and better models are going to be needed in the future as we get into AI slopageddon territory, where you can trivially fabricate entire identities and histories for billions of nonexistent people, even establishing social webs and histories for all of them, statistically indistinguishable from real people.

To perform a census, you need models constructed from verifiable data and first principles reasoning, with Bayesian certainty attached to each and every contributing factor, and then you need to set probabilistic bounds based on known levels of variability in things like population growth rates. Once you have an upper and lower bound, you can assign a certainty measure to the official claims - something like "this has a .01% chance of being true" - that's a good indication that reality diverges from those claims. It's not proof, it doesn't give you 100% certainty that some other number is precisely the case, but it's evidence.

The US government varies wildly in population counts, too, depending on which party is in power, which locales are being counted, the intent of the count, such as census, or estimation of population of illegal immigrants versus legal immigrants, etc. This is why census laws in the US forbid estimations or models or extrapolations; you need firsthand, auditable data collection, or fuckery occurs. The 2020 census was corrupted and then this was discovered by media and third party verification, for example. If you don't have a free press, things like that don't ever get revealed and confirmed, and authority is never held to account (in theory. In principle. In practice, power is rarely held to account anyway.)

Reply View 0 replies