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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

#441

Post by inigyou »

angry_octet wrote: post #419
lazide wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Many countries"? Do you have any evidence for this statement? I think that actually the US is an outlier.

When Germany invaded the Netherlands they found it extremely convenient that the Netherlands had a nice centralised paper filing system telling them exactly where all the Jews lived. The Holocaust proceeded more efficiently in the Netherlands than it had in Germany.

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

#442

Post by inigyou »

eriktrautman wrote: post #438

At the Republican TX state convention this week, they proposed to add wording against differential privacy to their proposed platform via an amendment, justified with an example from someone supposedly involved with the census of how it was common-sense silly because one homeless guy under a bridge can become five via DP. I don't know if it passed, but that's the grassroots push behind things like this.

How do you know that's grassroots?

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

#443

Post by inigyou »

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.

It makes it harder for them to do things, that is both right things and wrong things. They are doing a lot of wrong things recently.

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

#444

Post by Dylan16807 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #392
Dylan16807 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

Let's call those candidates A B X Y.

I don't see the issue. I vote my actual ranking, A is eliminated. If this scenario isn't super weirdly convoluted, more of those votes shift to B than X, so X is eliminated next. Now it's B versus Y. If I vote for B instead, the same thing happens and we also get B versus Y.

And what happens here in score voting could be basically anything. Not enough specifics.

> 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.

Yeah that's a real issue, and I'd want to use condorcet methods to fix that.

> 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.

Meanwhile with approval or score voting, a lot of people pretend not to like the other party's moderate because they're trying to get their side to win and it gets really messy. Is there a need to have multiple candidates per party? If there is, a two stage election that picks party first and then picks probably-the-moderate is probably better than anything.

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

#445

Post by Dylan16807 »

coldtea wrote: post #386
Dylan16807 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you want to argue the problem is he got "assimilated" then you have to argue he originally would have made a real attempt to fulfill the promise. My assessment is: no way.

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

#446

Post by inigyou »

Guvante wrote: post #407
wongarsu wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here in Germany, founding a company creates a public record. There are a number of companies who then send all newly formed companies an invoice that looks like a legitimate invoice for expenses related to creating said company, but on closer inspection actually contain a dense paragraph of text that details that this is not an invoice at all, merely an offer you accept by paying. Quite possibly even a subscription I…

Are they actually legal? Generally those kind of scams setup an illegitimate transaction that would be reversed in a court case. Whether they rise to a criminal matter is complicated but the vast majority of such scams hold up to scrutiny and instead rely on shell games to make retrieving your funds to expensive to be possible.

Germany follows the law extremely strictly, even more than the USA. If there's no law that says they can't do this, they can do it. Common sense rarely enters the picture in German legal battles

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

#447

Post by LocalH »

robotresearcher wrote: post #358
vjulian wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ironically, the way to change this is by voting. One election at a time, we can trend towards the better or worse.

We have to remove the power the current political duopoly has had for generations.

Fuck the Republicans. Fuck the Democrats. Rally behind a third-party candidate and blow up the establishment with your vote

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

#448

Post by inigyou »

Arodex wrote: post #310
dnautics wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a significant movement in conservative circles that "the census should literally only be a count". this could be a wedge to prevent detailed demographic data collection by the government

Those "conservative circles" don't exist anymore - if they ever. MAGA ate them, chew them and spit them.

MAGA is conservatism. Political factions evolve over time.

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

#449

Post by rayiner »

fragmede wrote: post #364
rayiner wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your model doesn’t eliminate politics, it just entrenches the particular politics of the kind of people who go to T10 schools then get jobs as division heads at federal agencies.[1] There is no such thing as “following the rules” in an apolitical way. Congress writes very broad laws, and the executive branch exercises a tremendous amount of discretion in enforcing and executing those laws. The founders understood tha…

It's not a fiction. People do their jobs even if they don't like the current or past President. I'm sure you can pull out a long list of people who didn't, but unless you name everybody, it simply isn't a fiction. My claim isn't bureaucrats are always apolitical, it's that they mostly are. Showing that some aren't doesn't show that they mostly are. Take the executive assistant to the American diplomat to, say, Sweden…

If career bureaucrats were just scheduling appointments and filing paperwork, I’d agree with you. But that’s not how these agencies work. Career civil servants are doing entire rulemakings, creating rules that have the force of law. They are preparing enforcement campaigns targeted at entire industries. They are setting internal priorities and policies. And the elected officials have limited ability to control what’s going on if the careers don’t cooperate.

In law school I was an intern for a Commissioner at the FCC. The Bureaus, which were staffed by career civil servants, would send entire rules and orders (hundreds of pages) fully formed up for the political appointees to vote on. Now, I think the career folks at the FCC are fantastic and very responsive to policy changes between administrations.[1] But that’s not true for many agencies. And in those agencies, the career civil servants wield tremendous power and make it very hard for appointees to implement policy the careers disagree with.

[1] Part of this is that, some high-profile stuff aside, there is a consistent ideology between the parties at the FCC. The republicans completely won in the 1980s and almost everyone takes a “law and economics” approach to communications regulations. So the careers are operating from the same analytical framework as the political appointees regardless of who is in power.

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

#450

Post by nullc »

nullc wrote: post #368
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…

> 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. That ideal became tantamount to enabling genocide when the US government breached the confidentiality of the census in order to prison camp the japanese on the basis of their race. > I understand why people decide to diminish all state capacity It's not even just a qu…

Replying to a dead comment that demanded an example, for example, Mao's mass killing of somewhere on the order of 30-40 million people famine (in addition to the million straight up murdered in the cultural revolution) created as a result of "helping" through planned economy food distribution and the Eliminate Sparrows Campaign.

People only kill at a truly massive scale because they believe they are doing something good or at least necessary (even in war, but especially outside of war). This is why hoping states aren't evil isn't sufficient-- in fact it may induce mass murder, because what could be less evil than to Do the Right thing.

The universal cure is to distribute power and influence in as many ways as practicable, such that the damage from erroneous thinking is contained.

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