Population much more than 8.2B, rural areas underestimated • Hacker News Board

Re: Population much more than 8.2B, rural areas underestimated

#21

Post by VincentEvans » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 10:30 PM UTC

lurk2 wrote: post #20

MichaelZuo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve actually looked into this for a few developing countries, and dam resettlement figures are very likely to be inflated. There’s no actual combination of outsiders going around to every household in every village for even a dozen days of the year to plausibly provide a third party confirmation of claimed residence for each individual. It’s effectively villagers certifying each other that they really live there as…

One of the more frightening things I ever learned was that if the population of China began walking in front of you at a rate of 1 person per second, it would take approximately 31 years for the entire population to pass you. The math, roughly: 1 billion people (there are more now, but we’ll call it an even billion) / 60 seconds ≈ 16,666,666 minutes 16,666,666 / 60 minutes in an hour ≈ 277,777 hours 277,777 hours / 2…

Using your own contrived math - if you have just 30 helpers - you can count population of China in 1 year. Or with 219 helpers you can do the same for world population.

In US, for the 2020 decennial census, the U.S. Census Bureau hired approximately 500,000 temporary workers across the country to assist with the count.

Re: Population much more than 8.2B, rural areas underestimated

#22

Post by Muromec » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 10:31 PM UTC

solid_fuel wrote: post #15

pessimizer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that large infrastructure projects have been systematically overcounting population in order to pay more compensation? That there's an interest in making them seem more disruptive, and as if they displace more people? If that's an obvious conclusion, I need more explanation.

It doesn't need to be top-down corruption on the part of Dam Corp, LLC. Think about it this way - you and your family live somewhere and are being displaced to make way for a dam, some guy in a suit comes around and says "we'll pay $1000 per resident to move you somewhere else". Maybe your uncle lived at your house with his wife for 5 years, until they moved to the city last year. Your grandmother lived there until s…

Chekhov, "Dead souls". The scam can go both ways, you need to be local to know how it works and not benefit from it enough to snitch.

Re: Population much more than 8.2B, rural areas underestimated

#23

Post by Muromec » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 10:32 PM UTC

00N8 wrote: post #16

pessimizer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that large infrastructure projects have been systematically overcounting population in order to pay more compensation? That there's an interest in making them seem more disruptive, and as if they displace more people? If that's an obvious conclusion, I need more explanation.

No, I think the conjecture is more that people from the surrounding areas could be claiming residency in the affected area to receive the payouts, even though they normally live elsewhere.

Likely the manager who makes the payouts happen and not people themselves

Re: Population much more than 8.2B, rural areas underestimated

#24

Post by lurk2 » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 10:35 PM UTC

kristjansson wrote: post #18

jdietrich wrote: post #4

>"When dams are built, large areas are flooded and people need to be relocated," Láng-Ritter said in a press statement. "The relocated population is usually counted precisely because dam companies pay compensation to those affected." Sure, "we've been systematically undercounting population for decades" is a more plausible explanation than "large infrastructure projects in rural areas of underdeveloped countries are…

A dollar per dead snake, you say?

I saw this happen on a Minecraft server. It was an economy simulator based out of Sweden or Denmark. The administrator was committed to Keynesian economics. One day he wants to clear a desert to build a new town. To compensate people for working there, he used a plug-in called Shop Chests, allowing users who deposited 64 sand into the chest to receive 100 units of the server’s currency. This was substantially more than the sand was worth on the open market. Since this guy was a Keynesian, he had also built a government marketplace that bought and sold all the major blocks. Rather than spending the afternoon digging, I warped to the market, bought out the entire supply of sand, warped back to the job site, and sold the sand at the higher price.

This kind of thing happened a lot with absentee owners who would set prices for their shops lower or higher than the market price. If the owner had set up hoppers underneath the shop chest, you could effectively bankrupt him overnight. It happened a lot with minecarts, diamonds, colored wool, and things like that.

Re: Population much more than 8.2B, rural areas underestimated

#25

Post by Ekaros » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 10:37 PM UTC

insane_dreamer wrote: post #17

Doesn’t every country or at least major country conduct censuses? Assuming there are some countries that can’t or don’t due to conflict, lack of resources etc. it seems these would be limited and therefore whatever estimates are made for those countries would be off my millions but certainly not billions.

No. Some countries don't need "census" as every citizen is sufficiently tracked and must report their official address. And so would most migrants. Meaning that with modern computer databases you can track births, deaths, immigration and emigration down to single person.

Re: Population much more than 8.2B, rural areas underestimated

#26

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 10:51 PM UTC

jdietrich wrote: post #4

>"When dams are built, large areas are flooded and people need to be relocated," Láng-Ritter said in a press statement. "The relocated population is usually counted precisely because dam companies pay compensation to those affected." Sure, "we've been systematically undercounting population for decades" is a more plausible explanation than "large infrastructure projects in rural areas of underdeveloped countries are…

[deleted]

Re: Population much more than 8.2B, rural areas underestimated

#27

Post by more-nitor » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 10:58 PM UTC

MichaelZuo wrote: post #10

zamadatix wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concerningly, they acknowledge accuracy of the numbers reported by the dam projects under limitations... by only highlighting the opposite, that it could be under-reported by them. I feel like I'm missing a lot for this to have been published but I'd expect such a paper about limitations of existing studies to be especially heavy on what the limitations of this new method might be. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41…

I’ve actually looked into this for a few developing countries, and dam resettlement figures are very likely to be inflated. There’s no actual combination of outsiders going around to every household in every village for even a dozen days of the year to plausibly provide a third party confirmation of claimed residence for each individual. It’s effectively villagers certifying each other that they really live there as…

> It’s effectively villagers certifying each other that they really live there as a primary residence.

this. some smart asses would be calling all their relatives, distant-relatives, friends, etc AND claim that they all lived there. then, share the loot(?) like 50%, 30%, 20% etc

the more better approach would be compensating by property, though does have its own downsides

Re: Population much more than 8.2B, rural areas underestimated

#28

Post by lurk2 » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 11:00 PM UTC

Newlaptop wrote: post #19

Frustratingly problematic headline, I'd expect better from Popular Mechanics. The title "Oops, Scientists May Have Severely Miscalculated How Many Humans Are on Earth" is entirely misleading- it's not "scientists" who have miscalculated this, it's government bureaucrats in various countries who are responsible for collecting and reporting census information in their region. This matters, because we live in a world wh…

What distinction are you drawing between government bureaucrats and the scientists who use their data? If the thesis is correct, then most demographers are wrong about the world’s population. The bureaucrats themselves might not be scientists, but the demographers surely are.

This is a thinly-veiled ode to the “trust the experts” paternalism that dominated the early 2020s. This attitude isn’t scientific, it destroyed the trust in the scientific method it claimed to want to preserve, and it resulted in many policies that courts have since ruled to be illegal.

Re: Population much more than 8.2B, rural areas underestimated

#29

Post by AnotherGoodName » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 11:01 PM UTC

00N8 wrote: post #16

pessimizer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that large infrastructure projects have been systematically overcounting population in order to pay more compensation? That there's an interest in making them seem more disruptive, and as if they displace more people? If that's an obvious conclusion, I need more explanation.

No, I think the conjecture is more that people from the surrounding areas could be claiming residency in the affected area to receive the payouts, even though they normally live elsewhere.

The way i see it people really do often live in multiple locations at once and bureaucracy has a hard time with that fact. Think of the itinerant workers travelling around for seasonal jobs. The census might count them in one location but it’s quite reasonable they count for the relocation too.

So it’s possibly a matter of edge cases in the wheels of bureaucracy than outright graft.

Re: Population much more than 8.2B, rural areas underestimated

#30

Post by casey2 » Fri, Mar 21, 2025, 11:04 PM UTC

Newlaptop wrote: post #19

Frustratingly problematic headline, I'd expect better from Popular Mechanics. The title "Oops, Scientists May Have Severely Miscalculated How Many Humans Are on Earth" is entirely misleading- it's not "scientists" who have miscalculated this, it's government bureaucrats in various countries who are responsible for collecting and reporting census information in their region. This matters, because we live in a world wh…

The government bureaucrats in this case are usually scientists employees by the government. And as far as I'm concerned anybody using the scientific method is a scientists, and if they aren't then they aren't, job title is meaningless here.

Stop pretending that scientist should be trusted. The recurring narrative you complain about is true and it's what separates science from dogma.

Scientists are experts in incredibly narrow fields and almost always speak about topics they have no knowledge of, even more dangerous, they convinced themselves and others that they have knowledge of these topics because they are superficially similar to something they know well.