Comment by 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, see the work of Fuxian Yi as one example: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/researcher-questions-chi...
> 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.