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Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau

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

#391

Post by vlovich123 »

dash2 wrote: post #379
vlovich123 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not, mathematical techniques and computational power have increased in the past hundreds of years, not to mention the digitization of everything. Privacy issues that weren’t possible before due to cost are now pennies to exploit. Also keep in mind as it points out people were using census data to drive gerrymandering efforts, so these attacks are real and have been going on for a long time.

I don’t understand why gerrymandering would require privacy violation, or how differential privacy would stop it.

Gerrymandering is most effective when you know exact voting patterns of each household so you can draw the lines to get the result you want. Differential privacy blurs those boundaries and provides more room for the partisan hacks to make a fatal mistake.

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

#392

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #363
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We already have a system where the person with the most #1 votes can lose. A third party candidate that only got a couple states would be able to prevent a majority. And people complain about it. If you were trying to make a change from some other status quo to that, it would be a significant impediment. > Approval voting would be an improvement over the status quo but it makes it a lot harder for me to influence t…

> Approval voting is the range compressed version of score voting. I'm not thrilled with score voting to begin with, and compressing it down doesn't change much. > Use score voting and you can give your favorite candidate a different score than your second favorite without giving them the same score as your least favorite. That doesn't solve my problem. Take exactly what I said before, but replace "check" with "give…

> I'm not thrilled with score voting to begin with, and compressing it down doesn't change much.

Compressing it makes it slightly worse, but some people think it makes it easier to understand. I tend to think that's silly; people can understand "score each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10" perfectly well. But approval voting would still be a significant improvement over FPTP, and even over RCV.

> That doesn't solve my problem. Take exactly what I said before, but replace "check" with "give the maximum score to".

RCV doesn't solve that either, because it's subject to Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. It's actually even worse, because it makes you give a lower rank (rather than an equal one) to your most favored candidate to prevent an even worse candidate from winning.

Suppose your favorite candidate is the first choice of 20% of the population, your second favorite is 25% and the two candidates you hate are at 25% and 30% respectively. RCV makes you give your top pick to the second candidate so they can beat one of the two candidates you hate and ensure the runoff isn't between both of the candidates you hate.

Meanwhile with score voting your favorite candidate might have won, because they were the first choice of only 20% but the second choice of everyone else, and then end up with an average score of e.g. 6 when all the others are at 4 and 5.

RCV tends to do the opposite of that. If you have two opposite extremists and a moderate, the moderate can get knocked out in the initial round and then you get a coin flip between the two opposite extremes, even if the moderate would win one-on-one against either of the extremes. Or, in a district that skews to one side, give the district to the other side, because the minority party makes it to the runoff with 40% of the vote, the majority party splits between two candidates each at ~30%, but then if the majority party's extremist goes to the runoff instead of its moderate, they could lose the runoff to the minority party's moderate and give the district to the minority party.

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

#394

Post by closeparen »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #328
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…

> 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. By this logic no one should ever collect your address for any reason ever. How do we function as a society if we can’t ever give PII in any context? Anonymization/security is critical and makes a lot of critical functions possible. How could you receive your mail in a worl…

Name, address, and phone number served plenty of critical functions when they were published in the White Pages. Cell phones not being listed there was kind of an accident of history. It was common to call a listed landline and be given or forwarded to a cell number. Only after most people stopped having landlines altogether did a phone number come to be considered sensitive information (unless you were a celebrity or something).

Ironically Facebook is responsible for much of this, as friending someone on Facebook became a lower stakes, less intimate alternative to exchanging phone numbers.

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

#395

Post by specialist »

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 worse things get, the better they do. It's an insidious, vicious cycle.

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

#396

Post by lazide »

testing22321 wrote: post #321
kajman wrote: post #124

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…

> The comments that this rather expensive endeavour should just be about getting a head count are also amusing to me Countries conduct censuses so they can understand, in great detail, what is going on with the people who make up the country. With this accurate information, improvement plans can be made, and life can be improved for everyone. The comments about just making it a head count give a very interesting wind…

Eh, that’s the ‘if people do the right thing’ approach.

Many countries use census data to target (or even round up and murder) specific groups of people by religion, ethnicity, etc.

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

#397

Post by vel0city »

throwawa1 wrote: post #365
cyberax wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Tens of millions"? Really? Even if we take 20 million, that's 75% of the total population of Venezuela or half of the population of Colombia. There simply are not enough people in South America for these kinds of numbers.

[flagged]

> There are 45 million Spanish speakers in the United States - in 1950 there were effectively zero.

This is either a bald faced lie or demonstrates an extreme ignorance of history. There have been tons of Spanish speakers in the United States for a loooong time. Before Texas joined the United States, Spanish was an official language, as in 1837 a law was passed to ensure all laws were translated into Castilian.

> Be it resolved, by the senate and house of representatives of the republic of Texas, in congress assembled, That in justice to that numerous portion of our fellow citizens who understand only the Spanish language...

https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth45355/m1/99/

You think all these Spanish speakers just disappeared when Texas became a state?

You think there were also no Spanish speakers in the rest of the Western territories? No Spanish speakers left in the parts of Florida Spain originally conquered? No Spanish speakers left at all in the lands that became the state of California or Nevada or New Mexico?

> In 1980 the US was 95% white

More like 80% white. Even in the 1950s the black population was ~10%. If the black population is historically ~10%ish, how is the white population going to be 95% when we also break out other ethnicities? Strange how you're consistently overrepresenting white English speakers in your falsehoods. Interesting pattern you've got there.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_101.20.a...

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1950/...

> The root of all western Ethnic issues are Zionists.

Ah, I see now. Hunch confirmed. Makes sense about why you tend to lie in a consistent pattern.

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

#398

Post by toofy »

rescripting wrote: post #384
thaumasiotes wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

repeatedly we see them cause the problem then complain about it.

destroy the tools to make government more effective then complain that government is ineffective.

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

#399

Post by heheheisis »

lazide wrote: post #396
testing22321 wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The comments that this rather expensive endeavour should just be about getting a head count are also amusing to me Countries conduct censuses so they can understand, in great detail, what is going on with the people who make up the country. With this accurate information, improvement plans can be made, and life can be improved for everyone. The comments about just making it a head count give a very interesting wind…

Eh, that’s the ‘if people do the right thing’ approach. Many countries use census data to target (or even round up and murder) specific groups of people by religion, ethnicity, etc.

[dead]

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

#400

Post by specialist »

vjulian wrote: post #284
estearum wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voting and getting everyone you know to vote

Many of us find voting insulting, given very low marginal power in a vote; it’s akin to throwing breadcrumbs to the poor. The structure of governance (the reality, not the mythology taught in schools or pushed forth as propaganda) is not in support of ‘the people”. Right or wrong, this is how many of feel. Voting is silly and futile.

Not voting is much more insulting, by far.

Edit: "civic religion" aha. Sorry, I should have guessed you were trolling. Can't wait to see what kind of revolution you cook up.

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