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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

#511

Post by pollorollo »

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…

Indeed, the very word "statistics" originates as an understanding or description of the state [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics#History

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

#512

Post by bobthepanda »

Sabinus wrote: post #476
bobthepanda wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There also needs to be, probably, more party diversity. The fact that the current president has such a stranglehold over their party is pretty unprecedented; normally, the big tent parties have lots of little camps with power bases that somewhat insulate independence, whether that be on an issue or regional level. It's kind of odd that the disenfranchised members of that party have not started up their own party. Als…

Ranked choice voting and the implementation of independent impartial redistricting are very urgently needed reforms.

I think rather than redistricting in the narrow sense, we should consider

* repealing the cap on house seats, which has been stuck at 435 arbitrarily * requiring that metropolitan areas consist of multimember districts that get allocated by proportional voting

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

#513

Post by noisy_boy »

foolfoolz wrote: post #68

i have such a hard time reconciling stuff like this: > The census bureau decided to adopt differential privacy for the 2020 Census and: > The consequences will be dire for utility or for privacy, and possibly both. It's hard to understate this point: future statistical releases will either be useless compared to past ones, or they will be incredibly unsafe so we took the census for centuries before this point, and it…

> but there were no privacy features before. so we’re actually still much better off than we were for hundreds of years before this.

If you are choosing hundreds of years ago, when we had no computers and internet, I wonder how we had worse privacy than the surveillance world today.

> so we took the census for centuries before this point, and it was “ok.”

Yes because we didn't have computers to unearth patterns in the data in a millisecond and politicians could have their career ended for doing the wrong thing, when revealed, instead of being rewarded for it.

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

#514

Post by pollorollo »

inigyou wrote: post #442
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?

That's what confounds the media [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sN98wmzisn4 (Excuse this poor quality, it was the only version I could find that wasn't tiktok)

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

#515

Post by jmole »

thomasahle wrote: post #435
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. Not sure exactly what you're proposing, but if the noise is added independently to different people, you can just buy multiple copies to reduce it. There are a lot of ways to do this wrong, which is why so much analysis has gone into differential privacy.

Sorry, I think you're reading more into this than I intended to say. My point was that the raw data itself doesn't need noise, but the published data necessarily does.

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

#516

Post by AlotOfReading »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #457
ajmurmann wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's assuming that this undermining of trust won't result in reduced willingness to share accurate data.

Next they will make it a felony to share inaccurate data and use it as justification to send to camps when raiding

It's already a federal crime to lie to the census bureau, it's just not prosecuted for discretionary reasons.

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

#517

Post by svnt »

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 the government stupider so there are more excuses to bring in better private solutions.

Handicap the public services if they are working well, then talk about how bad they are to justify for-profit replacement.

Or don’t and just exploit the gaps directly with better private data, whatever increases proximate wealth inequality.

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

#519

Post by jibal »

nandomrumber wrote: post #508
smaudet wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You should never trust a politician, especially one that claims to be on/in the left. These two statements are equally as vacuous.

No, the first one is true. It's the copycat comment that is vacuous and doesn't even make any sense -- "in the right" has a clear meaning, "in the left" is nonsense.

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

#520

Post by gs17 »

pseudalopex wrote: post #228
gs17 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole idea of "third-party voting is a complete waste in the US" is incredibly dumb because a vote for someone who loses isn't a wasted vote. Yes, but with a caveat, if you had a strong preference between the top two actually-likely-to-win candidates (assuming the third party wasn't competitive), it's at least not voting the most in your interests for the outcome. Which is why we really need approval voting, so…

> Which is why we really need approval voting, so we can actually vote for the candidates we like, rather than needing to "strategically" hold our noses. Approval voting would not end strategic voting.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Strategic_voti...

Yes, but it specifically ends the "vote for a candidate you dislike instead of the one you do like" type. Strategic approval voting is simply setting a higher/lower threshold on your approval. Your favorite is always included in your vote (assuming you like at least one candidate).
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