Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

desfontain.es

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 662 posts

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#41

Post by glitchc »

jmole wrote: post #16

Ban it from the dataset, add it to the analysis. You can choose your own flavor of noise. I don't know what the political undertones are here, but at some level you need to have actual ground truth, including "this person/household declined". Publishing raw data though? That seems like shooting yourself in the foot from a national security perspective, not to mention all the other reasons not to do it.

> Ban it from the dataset, add it to the analysis. You can choose your own flavor of noise.

It is introduced in the public data, not the secret data.

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#43

Post by tbrownaw »

bpt3 wrote: post #34
simonw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard have you thought about this? The biggest challenge with running a census is getting people to trust you enough to answer your questions. A lot of census questions are sensitive. The ACS covers topics like citizenship status, disabilities, income, SNAP assistance, languages spoken at home. If you want accurate information about the people who live in your country you need the census process to feel as safe fo…

Replying to the ACS with accurate information is required by law, so they don't actually need to rely on people feeling safe to get answers. I don't trust the Census Bureau with my data, so if this is as "dangerous" as the author and some people here seem to think, they shouldn't be collecting it in the first place.

> Replying to the ACS with accurate information is required by law, so they don't actually need to rely on people feeling safe to get answers.

This works by the same principle as how nobody ever drives faster than the speed limit.

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#44

Post by philipkglass »

Telemakhos wrote: post #37
simonw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard have you thought about this? The biggest challenge with running a census is getting people to trust you enough to answer your questions. A lot of census questions are sensitive. The ACS covers topics like citizenship status, disabilities, income, SNAP assistance, languages spoken at home. If you want accurate information about the people who live in your country you need the census process to feel as safe fo…

I'd like to know when they stopped publishing census data. I have used it for genealogical purposes to track ancestors: you can see exactly who was living in which house, how they are related, and what their ages are (I found that women in my family often reported, both on the census and marriage documents, being younger than they actually were). I don't think I've seen data from after 1950, though. I don't understan…

They didn't stop publishing census data. Its publication is delayed for approximately one human lifetime, to avoid affecting the living:

https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2022/01/20/census-record...

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#45

Post by Polizeiposaune »

Telemakhos wrote: post #37
simonw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard have you thought about this? The biggest challenge with running a census is getting people to trust you enough to answer your questions. A lot of census questions are sensitive. The ACS covers topics like citizenship status, disabilities, income, SNAP assistance, languages spoken at home. If you want accurate information about the people who live in your country you need the census process to feel as safe fo…

I'd like to know when they stopped publishing census data. I have used it for genealogical purposes to track ancestors: you can see exactly who was living in which house, how they are related, and what their ages are (I found that women in my family often reported, both on the census and marriage documents, being younger than they actually were). I don't think I've seen data from after 1950, though. I don't understan…

They haven't stopped but they don't happen immediately.

Detailed census records are published 72 years after they were collected; the last release (of 1950 census data) came out in 2022; the next one should be published in 2032.

See: https://www.archives.gov/research/census

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#46

Post by tbrownaw »

asolove wrote: post #13

The replies here arguing we should publish it all are wild in the worst kind of first-order thinking way. It’s a census: it just asks questions. If you start publishing and weaponizing the data against people with various attributes, they’ll just lie or not answer. And then you are left with worse than nothing: bad data people try to act on.

Any use to identify where government resources are best used, will have people thinking they should have gotten more and would have if they'd answered differently. Ie, that their answers were "weaponized" against them.

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#47

Post by glitchc »

SoftTalker wrote: post #22
UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

But why is the census asking about those attrbutes at all. The Constitution requires a count. That's it. A number. We don't need to know the rest of it, or if we do, it should be surveyed separately with voluntary participation.

> We don't need to know the rest of it, or if we do, it should be surveyed separately with voluntary participation.

But we do. A detailed census is essential for making good policy. For example, knowing the age and distribution of children across the country helps local and state governments decide where to put the next school or children's hospital. The federal govt. allocates funds for education and daycare accordingly.

The census is the best and most important measure of govt. policy. Taking it away would leave everyone worse off.

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#48

Post by MinimalAction »

Whatever you do, there is a level of trust that is assumed when census takes place. The trust that this data is then not identified in a way that could be targeted for scams, frauds, and other such evils. But in NY, house sale records are made public but much to the detriment, many mortgage companies fake a bill for payment.

Differential privacy is absolutely necessary, and the social scientists being unable to reconstruct the data at an individual level is intended. A macroscopic description is rather enough for most purposes, and anything more is asking for a surveillance state.

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#49

Post by latency-guy2 »

simonw wrote: post #9
abletonlive wrote: post #4

There will be a bunch of people that start off with the premise that this data should be private and make following arguments based on this premise. So I'll just go ahead and ask, give me good reasons why this data should be private? My guess is that most of you think we should be counting illegals because they should have representation. And I reject that

How about we should be "counting illegals" so that we know how many of them there are? (Do you reject that? As someone who uses the phrase "counting illegals" I imagine you would be interested in knowing what that number is.)

Counting illegals on a poorly defined framework of which is largely self attestation?

Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

#50

Post by Kim_Bruning »

Coming from a certain european country, you never know what answer on the census might get you into trouble.

"What is your religious affiliation". Seems perfectly innocuous, but turned out to be retroactively fatal if your answer could be attributed to you by a certain foreign occupier in the 1940s .

Post reply on HN