Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau • Hacker News Board

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

#381

Post by SadErn » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 10:15 PM UTC

JoshTriplett wrote: post #343

SadErn wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. The system is confidentially designed to provide little to no evidence of the fraud it allows. Even simple signature and ID checking is banned in California. The system itself is the evidence of the fraud. It is purposefully desig…

You are creating an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and not attempting to falsify it. Why do you believe what you believe? What would be true if it were false? Is that a thinkable alternative? If not, do you really have a hypothesis, or do you have a political belief being presented in the guise of a claim of fact?

[dead]

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

#382

Post by gigatexal » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 10:19 PM UTC

Yet another thing this admin is screwing up. News at 11. Let’s fix this in the midterms by voting out the republicans. That’s it. That should be the sum total of the platform: not republican and not crazy.

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

#383

Post by dash2 » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 10:20 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #318

ThePhysicist wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure about that? You are saying that differentially private census data couldn't be used for gerrymeandering and advertisement while non differentially private data could? Hard to believe, I'm not an advertisement or gerrymeandering expert but I would assume people running ads or cutting up districts are mostly interested in aggregate statistics i.e. they won't care about single households? And I would assume…

> You are saying that differentially private census data couldn't be used for gerrymeandering and advertisement while non differentially private data could? They definitely didn't say that. You said that. And you said that because you would prefer to argue impossibility vs. possibility rather than more useful vs. less useful. You prefer this because for the first irrelevant question which no one asked (it is possible…

> for the second, relevant question (would allowing this data make it easier and far more useful for gerrymandering and advertisement), you are obviously wrong.

Really? Why? When has gerrymandering ever relied on identifying individuals? Have any advertisers ever tried to use census data to identify individuals? That strikes me as highly unlikely - they are gonna use Facebook and Google, not some government database they’d have to deanonymise.

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

#384

Post by rescripting » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 10:20 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #366

jimbokun wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does nothing to make government less powerful. It just makes government stupider so even if they decide they want to do the right thing, now they can’t because they don’t have the information needed to make effective decisions.

Making them less able to do whatever it is they might want to do is pretty much the definition of making them less powerful.

Feels like they’re hedging their bets. If Republicans stay in power they’re going to keep doing whatever they want; it’s not like they’re making data driven policy decisions today. If they are ousted then the incoming administration has bad data they can’t act on, and Republicans can go back to banging their old drum of “government is useless and dysfunctional”.

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

#385

Post by hitekker » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 10:20 PM UTC

appreciatorBus wrote: post #244

> Differential privacy makes this trade-off explicit, and thus impossible to ignore. 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 ot…

imho, one big reason why Data Science as a big org lost clout in tech companies was a tendency to treat DS as gatekeepers of data. Outsourcing the responsibility of stat thinking gave many DS a weird power trip; when one dude gets to decide the trade-offs first without anyone around them needing to understand properly.

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

#386

Post by coldtea » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 10:23 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #331

coldtea wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is not that MAGA "ate them, chew them and spit them", but that the traditional neoliberal shit GOP circles "ate, chew and spit" the MAGA movement and what people voted Trump for. Instead Trump was fully assimilated to the Borg/Swamp, with a big fuck you to the MAGA promises (except the show he put on about immigration).

Trump was never ever going to drain the swamp. And I wouldn't say he served existing entrenched interests very well either. To the extent he touched the swamp it was to put in worse people only he liked.

>Trump was never ever going to drain the swamp.

Doesn't matter for the point of the argument, he was elected on that promise, and others, that he eventually broke.

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

#387

Post by gopher_space » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 10:30 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #254

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting Illegal voting is so rare that almost every time folks go looking for it they come up empty handed. Examples of voter suppression, on the other hand, are trivial to fine. (And both parties do it, particularly around primaries.) In my state, we’re trying to enact a citizenship-proof requirement which…

If someone mails in my absentee ballot and I don’t complain, how do you detect that voter fraud? Or if someone knows their friend is sick and votes without an id, how do you detect that? It seems like there are currently many ways to vote illegally that don’t get detected.

We already handle all of that, comrade. Every corner case floating around your brain was floating around someone else's brain a long time ago. Most of this is covered in high school in the US, and it's all enforced by volunteers from across the political spectrum.

Our documented examples of voter fraud come from a time when in-person voting was the only option, again something we teach in school, while the modern concerns from security professionals focus almost entirely on electronic voting machines.

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

#388

Post by clipsy » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 10:33 PM UTC

alterom wrote: post #369

windthrown wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did similar and you summarized the feelings well. It's really sad and hard to rebuild that trust And disheartening that people continue to gravitate to a political party that proudly announces desires to abuse this data.

>And disheartening that people continue to gravitate to a political party that proudly announces desires to abuse this data. The same party that promotes distrust in the government (that is justified by the abuse the same party does when in power). Amazing, innit.

The premise of the Republican party for half a century now has been: "The government can't do anything right, and if you elect us we'll prove it!"

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

#389

Post by pandaman » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 10:35 PM UTC

estearum wrote: post #287

Jiro wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Illegal voting is "rare" because the system is set up so that it is in most cases impossible to detect.

Can you describe the specific chain of events required to create a fraudulent vote that is "impossible" to detect? Surely if you can confidently state the system not only is this way, but is purposely designed this way, you should have zero problem describing it exactly step by step. Extra credit if you can describe a method that can produce 10, 100, or 1000 votes.

Feds made a nice write up for you, if you are actually curious: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-woman-federally-ch...

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

#390

Post by tw04 » Sat, Jun 13, 2026, 10:36 PM UTC

jimbokun wrote: post #342

arjie wrote: post #74

Pretty sad, in my opinion. In my ideal the state should have visibility into the shape of the people present so that we can make good decisions about our combined organization. I think we’re making a mistake we will come to regret by intentionally damaging our data collection infrastructure. I think a large amount of the US’s success is the result of good institutions handling granular data. Policies can be adjusted…

This does nothing to make government less powerful. It just makes government stupider so even if they decide they want to do the right thing, now they can’t because they don’t have the information needed to make effective decisions.

No, it gives them data to attack specific groups of people that were previously anonymized. The two options are less granular data, or data that can be abused.

There is no question the end goal is data that can be abused, and anyone left who would protest their actions will be fired and replaced with more sycophants.