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CDC data are disappearing

theatlantic.com

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Re: CDC data are disappearing

#421

Post by SeptiumMMX »

wilg wrote: post #363
SeptiumMMX wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem. Real humans in real world cannot be impartial and will always have biases. So if you expose the public to many different biased opinions and let them learn to recognize the biases and see past them, the "cumulative mindset" will be more objective and less prone to manipulation. But if you let one biased group decide what the majority is allowed to see, the public opinion will inevitably align with…

> Have you noticed how in the past decade or two we have totally abandoned the pursuit of happiness through self-reliance and independence? No.

Interesting. If you don't mind me asking, at what age do you plan to retire, what funds to you plan to use to cover the living expenses, and what skill set are you trying to pass to your kids so they will be able to afford moving out and staring their own families?

I'm asking because things things are getting harder every year and the media has a permanent blind eye on them.

Re: CDC data are disappearing

#422

Post by myvoiceismypass »

roenxi wrote: post #404
MrJohz wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Although true, it isn't a very useful observation. "How do I find someone impartial to this matter?" is one of the great unsolved questions that the lawyers have to deal with. Up there with "what is true?". Although true, this isn't a particularly useful observation either. It turns out we can define "true" very well for a lot of really useful stuff. We know the sky is blue. We know the sun rises. We know that two…

A lot of those are technically not true - the sky is frequently not blue, the sun doesn't actually rise and there are number systems where 2+2 does not equal 4 (eg, 2+2 = 1 in a mod 3 arithmetic). That sounds pedantic until people start disagreeing or implementing legal requirements that result in people needing to use the definitions. Eg, if there is a legal requirement to recognise that 2+2=4, is it ok to teach mod…

We are fucking doomed.

We cannot even agree on the basics any more.

Re: CDC data are disappearing

#424

Post by myvoiceismypass »

roenxi wrote: post #319
mcmcmc wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having two parties with opposing biases and incentives doesn’t magically cancel out and become impartial. That’s the opposite of impartiality.

Although true, it isn't a very useful observation. "How do I find someone impartial to this matter?" is one of the great unsolved questions that the lawyers have to deal with. Up there with "what is true?". If anything that is one of the big promises of AI systems. Maybe we can have adjudication that is both extremely intelligent and provably biased towards consistency, facts and evidence. SHA256sum-ed and torrented…

AI just regurgitates what it learned from non experts.

Re: CDC data are disappearing

#425

Post by ecocentrik »

SeptiumMMX wrote: post #328
mcmcmc wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having two parties with opposing biases and incentives doesn’t magically cancel out and become impartial. That’s the opposite of impartiality.

That's the problem. Real humans in real world cannot be impartial and will always have biases. So if you expose the public to many different biased opinions and let them learn to recognize the biases and see past them, the "cumulative mindset" will be more objective and less prone to manipulation. But if you let one biased group decide what the majority is allowed to see, the public opinion will inevitably align with…

There is some honesty with this argument. You can admit that your own bias overrides your ability to be impartial. The dishonest bit is that by attempting to refute a premise of impartiality, you're really making a case for the dominance of your personal bias against impartially. It's a posture that seeks a win condition in the form of a society that has abandoned impartiality, and with it ideas of justice, democracy, self rule, scientific progress (basically everything that depends on the pursuit of impartiality).

Your siren's song to a new and better dark age, isn't as appealing as you think it is. Get psychological help.

Re: CDC data are disappearing

#426

Post by IX-103 »

pmarreck wrote: post #221
CalRobert wrote: post #5

This is part of a broader rolling catastrophe. Musk is evidently seizing control of the Office of Personnel Management https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2025-01-31/exclus... Nasa took down their applied sciences page and is evidently scrubbing the data https://www.reddit.com/r/gis/comments/1icqchv/why_is_the_nas... ( https://appliedsciences.nasa.gov/ ) Lots of other data sets are disappearing too: https://ma…

I hate to sound like a conventional cis-man, but this is exactly the sort of situation where conventional cis-man energy is needed: Where are the CDC people growing a spine to stand up to this? This is obviously bad. The reason why bullies only understand 1 language (force) is exactly why counter-bullies who also speak that language are needed. And these are (usually) men (and some smaller percentage of women). (I'm…

Sorry, I couldn't get through your third paragraph without hearing the "Team America: World Police" pussies/dicks speech in the background.

But your argument is inherently flawed. Part of the point of government is to regulate and direct the use of force. We have mechanisms that are supposed to apply force to "bullies". The problem is that the "bullies" have co-opted that system to use it for their own ends. This happened gradually so it didn't become obvious until the most recent "bully" decided he didn't even want to pretend that he wasn't in control.

Individuals who directly stand up to this administration will be hammered down with the full force of the government. The best we can hope for is a passive resistance and malicious compliance. That combined with grassroots efforts to fill the media with protests of objectionable policies is probably the best we can do for now.

The only other option is to apply force outside of the system to correct it, but things are not nearly to the point where revolution is the better option.

Re: CDC data are disappearing

#427

Post by api »

repeekad wrote: post #418
pjc50 wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is intentional. They're mad about the covid response, and want to prevent mask mandates or lockdowns at any cost. At any cost. Including suppressing information about bird flu for as long as possible.

[flagged]

I’m curious about what will happen if they get to the parts of this Project 2025 like agenda that involves telling people to do things, or banning things people like.

We already see that abortion bans are unpopular. When they are put to a vote they lose, even in very red states.

How much more will people take? How will the Joe Rogan dudebro crowd react to banning porn? That’ll be interesting.

I’ve been predicting for years that it’s these guys — the Christian Nationalists / NatCons — who are going to mass confiscate guns. Would that be the third rail?

Re: CDC data are disappearing

#428

Post by neumann »

SeptiumMMX wrote: post #290
breadwinner wrote: post #240

Data is the ultimate Fact Check. This is a President that's adamantly opposed to fact checking [1] and has even coerced Facebook to drop fact checking. Of course they don't want data on government sites that disprove their "alternate facts". [1] https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4920827-60-minutes-tru...

Well, fact-checking works if it's done impartially. So, if you want to fairly fact-check a political debate, each side should have their own team of researchers/fact-checkers being equally able to object to an argument made by the opposing party. Due process, sort of, kind of. But I don't think I've ever seen that done actually. Usually, fact checkers are akin to Reddit moderators. Technically independent, but with o…

Pretty confident that now that critical thinking has been thrown out the window and accountability has disappeared in political discourse this would just result in endless objections in any debate deliberately used to add noise and misdirect conversation.

I don't know what the solution is in today's climate, but I suspect it no longer matters. America is post-truth and he who controls the data and pathways to information (Murdoch, Meta, Google) directly influences a large percentage of the people.

Re: CDC data are disappearing

#429

Post by neumann »

phillipcarter wrote: post #127

This is a blitzkrieg campaign designed to try and get Musk and his people as much control of the digital government as possible before the roadblocks (legal, systematic, etc.) make things too difficult for him. As it stands, his goal is likely a purge of the federal government akin to what he did with Twitter. And the resulting 80% drop in revenue by Twitter is a similar kind of outcome we can expect from his careles…

It is very plausible that he is also using it to get all the data he wants from this, not just to scrub it. It would make sense given his desire to compete on AGI that he can both scrub this data for public use and feed it to his own training sets.

Re: CDC data are disappearing

#430

Post by api »

nakajimayoshi wrote: post #405
dingnuts wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I’m not sorry, but the narrative that the 2nd amendment keeps the government in check is beyond naïve in the 21st century, its celebration of stupidity. Perhaps in a world where armed combat between civilians and the military only involves muskets this holds true, but exactly how do you expect to “exert your second amendment rights” when a squad armed with M16s, grenade launchers, body armor, and night vision goggles…

Under normal circumstances I agree. If things went really sideways… look at how well insurgencies around the world have resisted the US military in urban settings.

Loads and loads of armed angry people with home court advantage are hard to defeat unless you are willing to just flatten the city. Drones might change that calculus some, but against a large insurgency in a huge city of millions?

If we are flattening our own cities, we are so far gone we are in climbing barbed wire to get across the border (in the out direction) territory. Some of my ancestors on my dad’s side did that in WWII to escape Stalin and Hitler both. I hope to never see such things.

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