241–250 of 662 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, are you saying Europe doesn't have censuses?
In my European country (Switzerland), it's mandatory to notify the government whenever you move. There is thus no universal census and also no voter registration. There's still subsampled surveys though, for e.g. economic data, that might come by mail (addressed to you by name, because they know where you live!).
I "enumerated" for the last census. Trust in my community was already not high* and I had lots of interesting encounters. I really believed the rather invasive data I was collecting with a friendly face would be used and handled responsibly. I feel for the poor souls that'll sign up to go door to door for 2030 now that the firewalls against weaponizing and monetizing all of our sensitive government data has been torn…
And disheartening that people continue to gravitate to a political party that proudly announces desires to abuse this data.
I think he has it backwards here.
Techniques like differential privacy hide the fact that a trade-off exists, except for a small cadre of experts who live and breathe this stuff.
I don’t know enough to defend this decision, but it strikes me that if there is a real trade-off, not having access to these techniques will force people other than statisticians to confront the trade-off.
If data about the public is so dangerous that we must disguise the results, then perhaps its data we shouldn’t be collecting in the first place.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. In a sense, this in itself is the issue. It's long-term _worse_ to vote for the "lesser of two serious evils". This extreme "long-term pain for short-term gain" attitude is what's gotten the US to where it is. If in 2016 of 2024 even 20% of the dems would've stayed home or voted third party, the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zer…
> 2024 [...] the DNC's continuous forcing of awful corpocrats with zero charisma would've become completely untenable and Trump would've been limited to one term. You mean the 2024 election cycle where incumbents all around the globe were beaten because the economic situation was strongly anti-incumbent? Are you positing that the US election was somehow a unique outlier and solely down to Harris being the Democrat ca…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_%28epithet%29?w...
Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. People didn't want Trump in 2016, they wanted her. But he won the electoral college,
He won the popular vote in 2024, but the tight margin in the electoral college suggests a democratically elected Democratic candidate (i.e. one selected by a primary, not one appointed by the sitting president) could have won instead. Other potential candidates were polling better than Harriss. I personally think Gretchen Whitmer could have successfully distanced herself from the Biden administration and defeated Trump.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data. The most obvious example is the Census Bureau compiling lists of people of Japanese descent to imprison during WWII. That's just the most obvious one that I know of without looking up more. The real push for this now is to form lists of people to disenfranchise.
Remember “leftist “ and transgender activists are terrorists now. First they came for…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well right... you also need to vote for the correct ("less-bad") people and get your friends to do the same. Voting for the worse people makes things worse.
Ranked Choice Voting makes it easier to vote for “less bad” candidates. RCV also tends to work against polarization, since it rewards candidates who are at least acceptable to a broad swath of the electorate. It may not be the “answer” for all that ails the American political system, but it would help. ETA: Unlike many other reforms it's also doable within the constraints of the current constitutional order and is ha…
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.