Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you get the idea that migration is "planned"? You've lost the plot entirely
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Except that has nothing to do with voting which is the claim that was being made
Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
341–350 of 662 posts
Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
#342Pretty 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.
Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
You should carefully examine the evidence you have supporting that belief. Start by observing that this is a partisan issue in which the official positions of the two major parties disagree on a factual claim, not merely the policy . A disagreement on policy can (sometimes) be chalked up to a difference in values, even though those do sometimes arise downstream of factual incorrectness. But a disagreement on facts is…
> you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. The system is confidentially designed to provide little to no evidence of the fraud it allows. Even simple signature and ID checking is banned in California. The system itself is the evidence of the fraud. It is purposefully desig…
You are creating an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and not attempting to falsify it.
Why do you believe what you believe? What would be true if it were false? Is that a thinkable alternative? If not, do you really have a hypothesis, or do you have a political belief being presented in the guise of a claim of fact?
Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
#344So "differential privacy" pretty much sounds like someone gets to modify the results of a census and how it gets modified is entirely up to their discretion. Seems like something that could be abused to achieve political objectives.
Not really, it has to be random in a predetermined fashion to be considered differential privacy. It is reversible in the way that someone shouting over an aicraft producing white noise is intelligible. I guess someone could fiddle with the noise, but then why not nudge the originals? Or more insidiously, control what is published?
If someone modified the original dataset and it was discovered they would be held accountable. However if you have a departmental policy of modifying the data for "privacy reasons" and it just so happened to surrepititiously affect some sort of political outcome then ah geez that just a wacky coincidence not any individuals fault.
Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
#345The 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.
The term “first-order thinking” just clicked for me. So revealing. One of today’s lucky 10,000
Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
#346Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
High turnout brings out the low-information voters and changes the composition of the viable coalition for both parties. If we restricted the franchise, we might be able to sustain something closer to the Romney GOP versus the Mayor Pete Democratic Party. And that would make the government a lot more orderly and competent. I doubt the top 10-20% of either side wants a democracy. The difference is in where we want the…
I don't know who the > The “Mayor Pete” neoliberal democrats are, but yes, you want career bureaucrats running the show that follow the rules as set forth by Congress, with appointed officials that pass vetting at the top. Otherwise every position becomes political and the laws themselves go further out the window.
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 that, and their solution to the problem was frequent elections, not the fiction of neutral, apolitical credentialed bureaucrats.
[1] A good example of this is the bank bailouts in the first Obama administration. Even though the voters were outraged at Wall Street, Obama followed the bailout strategy developed by Wall Street. He replaced Hank Paulson (Goldman Sachs) with Tim Geithner (NY Fed then private equity), but everyone underneath stayed the same and the bailout strategy stayed the same.
Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But in NY, house sale records are made public but much to the detriment, many mortgage companies fake a bill for payment. That frankly sounds more like a failure of enforcement, on top of a failure of the construction of the financial system. Here in Germany, it is absolutely not a common thing that mortgages or the banks holding them get sold like a hot potato towards some other sucker, and thus such a letter woul…
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…
In the USA you'll get buttloads of mail urging you to do things such as confirm your home warranty at risk of not being covered. With addresses that says "RE: (your mortgage provider)" to make it look like it's from them.
Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items. The current admin doesn’t need it to discriminate, you can just access cameras and license plate readers and target easily that way. The purpose is to scare people into misstating or obscuring data to reduce total house representation for an area. It’s to win votes, there are much better ways to do all these things than us…
> Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items. What does this have to do with the census? A doctor would know the race of their patient without needing to deduce it statistically from their neighborhood. Also, don't we not want financial institutions using demographic data decisions in making loans etc.?
How do you show that financial institutions aren't using demographic data unless you have it and run statistical analysis that shows they aren't? Banks aren't the government and can use methods that are illegal for the government to do in order to collect data. Let's say a bank manager is racist in giving out loans, how do you prove it unless you have the data to show it?
Re: Noise infusion banned from statistical products published by Census Bureau
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ranked Choice Voting makes it easier to vote for “less bad” candidates. RCV also tends to work against polarization, since it rewards candidates who are at least acceptable to a broad swath of the electorate. It may not be the “answer” for all that ails the American political system, but it would help. ETA: Unlike many other reforms it's also doable within the constraints of the current constitutional order and is ha…
Approval Voting would be an easier pill to swallow for most americans. It’s hard to explain “yeah Trump got the most #1 votes but still lost” and easy to explain “this other candidate got the most checkmarks”. https://www.rangevoting.org/CompChart.html#votsysts
> Approval Voting would be an easier pill to swallow for most americans. It’s hard to explain “yeah Trump got the most #1 votes but still lost”
As a non-US-American, it is hard to understand for me why this is so hard to explain: the amount of #1 votes is rather a measure for the number of "ultra-fans" that the candidate has.
I think it should be rather easy to find an example in US-American pop culture of some C-list celebrity who has a respectable base of very devoted ultra-fans, but is hated by basically everybody else.
This example should make the fallacy obvious to most people.