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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

#141

Post by gs17 »

estearum wrote: post #115
p-e-w wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. Clearly this isn’t the answer. And neither is protesting, considering that 4 of the 5 largest demonstrations in US history happened in the past 10 years and achieved nothing.

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.

You also need the option to vote for "less-bad" people. Where I am now, my vote doesn't matter, even if it means the "less-bad" people win with no competition (as opposed to where I moved from where things were skewed the opposite way).

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

#142

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

I really have to take the anti-noise side here. I get why it's a hard problem, and I get why the Census Bureau thought this was a neat solution. But I'm imagining an accountant stepping through a similar chain of logic:

* I want to accurately report the finances of our company to the best of my ability.

* But that report would allow people to reconstruct private data about the terms of our contracts with various counterparties. I'd really like to avoid that, there's no rule that says we're supposed to release that data. In fact some of those contracts probably came with nondisclosure agreements!

* So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to calculate our results to the best of my ability, and then I'm going to add random values to them and report only the randomized ones. Any reconstruction people try to do will be wrong because of the randomness.

* If the SEC says "no, you need to report your actual numbers", I will explain to them that there's no such thing as an actual number because all data is noisy.

I can't get behind it.

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

#143

Post by well_ackshually »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #50

Coming from a certain european country, you never know what answer on the census might get you into trouble. "What is your religious affiliation". Seems perfectly innocuous, but turned out to be retroactively fatal if your answer could be attributed to you by a certain foreign occupier in the 1940s .

France used to make plenty of lists. We loved lists. Lists are good. Jews lists? Sure, it's maybe useful one day when we want to do something.

Boy were the Germans happy to find these.

The American obsession with asking for people their perceived origins (AAPI, AA, Latino, ...) is more than weird: it's downright dangerous. Don't fucking ask these questions, and never, ever write it down, especially not with names.

Thankfully, now they can just buy it from data brokers and let Palantir target, so that makes life easier for them

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

#144

Post by sieabahlpark »

newZWhoDis wrote: post #67
bagels wrote: post #59

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.

Does anyone actually believe this crap? You think the census is what the government would use to mass identify and imprison people, not the NSA database(s)? You think homeland security, or the FBI, or any other alphabet agency doesn't already have access to a giant list of people? Think about what meta knows about everyone, or Google. You do realize that the US gov has read access to their core databases right? "The…

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

#145

Post by kajman »

ShinyLeftPad wrote: post #69
asolove wrote: post #13

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.

You first gather the data while people don't know or care. Then you weaponize it later. It happened at least once not long ago in another country, seems not overreaction to be concerned about it

If this is a Nazi reference, Census data was used to send people to concentration camps here during the same era. Less awful than death camps, at least.

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

#147

Post by sieabahlpark »

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…

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

#148

Post by amanaplanacanal »

deaux wrote: post #138
p-e-w wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. Clearly this isn’t the answer. And neither is protesting, considering that 4 of the 5 largest demonstrations in US history happened in the past 10 years and achieved nothing.

> 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…

You are saying the candidates are forced on us by someone else. But that's just wrong, we choose the candidates. Anybody can run, there is no secret cabal that decides who can run and who can't.

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

#149

Post by simonw »

wpollock wrote: post #64
simonw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How hard have you thought about this? The biggest challenge with running a census is getting people to trust you enough to answer your questions. A lot of census questions are sensitive. The ACS covers topics like citizenship status, disabilities, income, SNAP assistance, languages spoken at home. If you want accurate information about the people who live in your country you need the census process to feel as safe fo…

> Are you saying the census shouldn't collect any data that people wouldn't be comfortable publishing? Because that's a recipe for a census that is far less useful for helping the country make useful decisions. I'll say that. The state representatives should provide congress and the president any data needed to inform policy decisions about the people they represent. And as others have pointed out, other departments…

The census doesn't collect party affiliations.

https://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/voting/about/faq...

> the CPS Voting and Registration Supplement does not ask any questions of a partisan nature.

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

#150

Post by fwipsy »

Pragmata wrote: post #3

Frankly i see no reason to keep this data private. They should simply publish a full dataset of the census, with no such data coarsening/differential privacy/ etc... Fundamentally this is public data. If it's to dangerous to make public, it's too dangerous to collect, and people should be aware of exactly what it is. There are very few things that the state has data on that should not be made public. Census data is s…

So do you believe that individual income should be public? Or do you believe that the government should not take income into account for taxation or distribution of benefits?
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