If nothing else, it's not the only hail mary you could potentially go out on. Would you give up the potential of being part of a trial for a drug that has actually done the work and demonstrated real promise in various pre-trial tests just to take a gamble on this alternative which hasn't even had the initial test replicated yet?
Further there is the potential for a false negative. If they don't understand enough about how the drug would work in humans, they may trial inappropriate doses or delivery methods. If those don't help or make things worse, it could be mistaken for the drug being ineffective and lead to the whole line of inquiry being abandoned. Then not only do you die, but countless others are potentially harmed by an effective version not being developed.
Finally, cancer treatments aren't just for the terminal. Drugs which primarily help during the early stages by necessity need to be trialed on people who still have a chance, maybe even a decent one, going with other, well established treatment options.
Fake is generally the wrong word. Inaccurate would be much more appropriate. Every population estimate is just that. There is going to be error. The error may be small or large, and it may be biased in one direction or another, but there is a clear chain from data to result. Even if your data sources are fraudulent, if you're making any attempt to account for that, though you may not do a very good job, it's still just inaccuracy. Fake would imply that the people releasing the population estimates have a much better estimate but are choosing to instead publish a made up number. This may actually happen in a few cases, but the claim that it's widespread is both hard to believe and unsupported by this article.
> Fake would imply that the people releasing the population estimates have a much better estimate but are choosing to instead publish a made up number.
That is literally what the article describes, though, in Papua New Guinea. And it describes why states in Nigeria have such a strong incentive to fake their population numbers, that it's impossible to achieve an accurate national total.
I do think the headline exaggerates, I doubt "a lot" are fake, but some do seem to be.
> That is literally what the article describes, though, in Papua New Guinea.
No it doesn't. It says the UN came up with a different estimate, which the UN wound up not adopting. There is no evidence that the UN estimate actually used better methods.
> I do think the headline exaggerates, I doubt "a lot" are fake, but some do seem to be.
I am strictly arguing against "a lot" being fake, and specifically that an isolated example is not evidence of "a lot."
> There is no evidence that the UN estimate actually used better methods.
The article certainly argues that the UN used better methods. Do you have evidence to the contrary? See:
> So the 2022 population estimate was an extrapolation from the 2000 census, and the number that the PNG government arrived at was 9.4 million. But this, even the PNG government would admit, was a hazy guess... It’s not a country where you can send people to survey the countryside with much ease. And so the PNG government really had no idea how many people lived in the country.
> Late in 2022, word leaked of a report that the UN had commissioned. The report found that PNG’s population was not 9.4 million people, as the government maintained, but closer to 17 million people—roughly double the official number. Researchers had used satellite imagery and household surveys to find that the population in rural areas had been dramatically undercounted.
The article argues, but does not provide evidence. It specifically says the UN used surveys immediately after saying surveys don't work here. There's no validation that estimates from satellite imagery are better than the methods PNG used.
The fact the UN didn't adopt this report would certainly be an argument against it.
It's an article, not a 20 page research analysis. It provides detail aappropriate to its scope.
If you disagree, it's up to you to provide additional evidence to the contrary. The article devotes a paragraph on why the UN didn't release the report. If you want to argue that the UN shelved it for reasons of accuracy rather than for political reasons, please provide the explanation for why the article is wrong and why you're right.
I mean, maybe you're right. I certainly don't know. But the article is going into a degree of depth to defend its reporting, and you're not.
> It's an article, not a 20 page research analysis. It provides detail aappropriate to its scope.
And if it merely cited the 20 page research analysis someone else did, that would be fine, but it doesn't.
The article also is rather disingenuous, leaving out a lot of context. Looking closer, this was not some isolated UN estimate. Instead the UN was generating estimates every year, and the 2022 study was conducted differently because of covid. Subsequent UN estimates also went back to the original numbers. Also it wasn't a report that was buried, the numbers were released in 2022, they were revised down in 2023 after the UN conducted its next study. Seems like quite the omission.
> If you disagree, it's up to you to provide additional evidence to the contrary, not just arguments.
While arguments presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, sure here's the CIA estimate for the population which is in close agreement with both PNG's internal estimate and the actually adopted UN estimate. While the CIA is hardly the ultimate source of truth, the arguments that PNG pressured the UN to change its estimates for its own internal political reasons can't possibly explain the CIA coming to the same conclusion.
> The article devotes a paragraph on why the UN didn't release the report.
The article spends a paragraph insinuating an ulterior motive while giving no evidence it is anything other than pure speculation.
> But the article is going into depth to defend its reporting, and you're not.
The article throws claims against the wall. It is obliged to defend them and it fails. That I can find contradictory evidence with a 30 second google search is convenient but irrelevant. Even if would take a year of extensive research to refute the claim, it does not change the fact the claim was never supported to begin with.
I mean, I'm not an expert on any of this, but I'm looking it up and you seem to be quite wrong:
> Looking closer, this was not some isolated UN estimate. Instead the UN was generating estimates every year, and the 2022 study was conducted differently because of covid.
It seems it was indeed an isolated UN estimate, done in conjunction with the University of Southampton, conducted because the country's census was cancelled, supposedly due to COVID. Yes the UN provides yearly estimates, but it looks like this was a separate, one-off research project.
> Subsequent UN estimates also went back to the original numbers. Also it wasn't a report that was buried, the numbers were released in 2022, they were revised down in 2023 after the UN conducted its next study. Seems like quite the omission.
No, it looks like the report's numbers were never officially adopted at all. You can see the yearly figures here, there's no bump at all:
As far as I can tell, all reporting states that the report remains publicly unavailable. The numbers weren't "released", they were leaked. That certainly seems "buried" to me.
> While arguments presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, sure here's the CIA estimate for the population which is in close agreement with both PNG's internal estimate and the actually adopted UN estimate.
The CIA World Factbook isn't trying to independently maximize accuracy using new techniques. They're mainly relying on official data provided by the countries themselves:
> Estimates and projections start with the same basic data from censuses, surveys, and registration systems, but final estimates and projections can differ as a result of factors such as data availability, assessment, and methods and protocols.
Again, I'm not an expert in any of this. But nothing in the article appears to be contradicted by public reporting I can find. It provides additional information, you're right that I don't know how the author got it. You say you "can find contradictory evidence with a 30 second google search." But you haven't, you've actually given a bunch of wrong or irrelevant information.
> Yes the UN provides yearly estimates, but it looks like this was a separate, one-off research project
Yeah, a one off research project that used different methods from every year before or since got totally different results. That was the point I was trying to make.
> No, it looks like the report's numbers were never officially adopted at all. You can see the yearly figures here, there's no bump at all:
That's what revised means. They updated it prior to publication in July 2023.
> As far as I can tell, all reporting states that the report remains publicly unavailable. The numbers weren't "released", they were leaked. That certainly seems "buried" to me.
The report was leaked several months prior to publication. You'll note that every source claiming it was leaked was from early december 2022. You are engaging in exactly the same baseless speculation based on incomplete information that the article is.
> The CIA World Factbook isn't trying to independently maximize accuracy using new techniques.
They are trying to maximize accuracy using well accepted best practices. They adopt different numbers from either PNG's government or the UN. They are starting with the same data and doing their own analysis to reach an independent conclusion. If they knew the official data was highly skewed , they would account for it. Likewise there have been many other independent estimates, and an entire new census in 2024, all of which are nowhere near the 17 million estimate. Not utilizing a new technique that yields a radically different result from many different independent estimates and which is viewed with skepticism by experts is to be expected.
It's still possible that the one UN study was right and everyone else was wrong, but that claim can't be taken as a given, and it's certainly not supported in any way by the article.
> But nothing in the article appears to be contradicted by public reporting I can find.
How is every other independent estimate disagreeing with the 17 million figure not a clear contradiction of the article's implicit claim that the 17 million estimate is more accurate?
But even if you don't feel I've contradicted the article, again, I don't need to contradict the article. The article is the one making the claim, it has to prove it true.
> But you haven't, you've actually given a bunch of wrong or irrelevant information.
Everything I've said is backed up by sources. I'm not an expert, the sources could be wrong, but I'm going to go with all of them over a random article which makes incredible claims with no evidence.
Enough that "a lot" seems to be a fair characterization.
Also - while he implies this, I think it's important to mention explicitly - there's obvious fakery in the number of significant digits. If the numbers are approximations to the nearest ten million (or worse), it's a form of scientific fraud to provide a number like "94.9 million".
The only one of those that is an example is Nigeria. All the others are just listed as examples of countries that have not conducted a census in an extremely long time. While that's a good reason to think the numbers are probably inaccurate, it's not a good reason to think they are fake.
> there's obvious fakery in the number of significant digits. If the numbers are approximations to the nearest ten million (or worse), it's a form of scientific fraud to provide a number like "94.9 million"
The numbers aren't approximations to the nearest ten million. Just because they're inaccurate doesn't mean they're imprecise. For comparison if my bank statement is missing a large transaction it may be off the true value by hundreds of dollars, but that doesn't mean they didn't count the cents for the transactions they're aware of.
Any country where there's no robust free press and legal protections for things like criticizing the government is lying about nearly everything, in the direction where the government feels it is advantageous to lie. If they feel they get a benefit from inflating population, they will inflate population, and it won't be subtle. The WHO and other international organizations are not legitimate sources of information; they take direction from their host countries and report numbers as directed.
If you pick any country and look at proxies that have significant cost associated with them, at relative population levels of verified locations, the population of the world differs pretty radically from the claims most countries put out.
If you don't have independent verification free from censorial pressures and legal repercussions, then you get propaganda. This is human nature, whether it stems from abuse of power or wanting to tell a story that's aspirational or from blatant incompetence or corruption.
Population numbers fall under the "lies, damned lies, and statistics" umbrella.
>If you pick any country and look at proxies that have significant cost associated with them, at relative population levels of verified locations, the population of the world differs pretty radically from the claims most countries put out.
Can you provide an example that shows a radically different population count?
>If you don't have independent verification free from censorial pressures and legal repercussions, then you get propaganda
Always?
How would you perform a census without massive amounts of money and cooperation from the government?
China is the best example, its estimated that their population is off by entire countries in some statisitics, either through disppeared girls, hidden covid deaths, local economic fraud. There is also no independently verifiable group in China and is actually explicitly banned to use non-government methods.
> China is the best example, its estimated that their population is off by entire countries in some statisitics
“entire countries” of population spans a range from single-digit hundreds to over a billion, so this could describe anything from an imperceptible error to an enormous one in China’s case.
I'm sure the various high-end intelligence agencies have a much better view on this than the public does. All kinds of ways of cross-checking the numbers, all by doing things they'll be doing in their normal course of events.
A normal person could probably do a decent job with an AI that isn't too biased in the direction of "trust gov numbers above all else" and tracking down and correlating some statistics too obscure and too difficult to fake. (Example: Using statistical population sampling methodology on some popular internet service or something.) The main problem there being literally no matter what they do and how careful they are, they'd never be able to convince anyone of their numbers.
Some intelligence agencies endeavor to maintain a profile of every identifiable person on the planet with data acquired by many diverse means. They have enough data to build excellent models of population coverage such that I would be surprised if they could not estimate population with high confidence.
The problem with trying to measure this as a normal person is that you don't have enough access to different types of measurements to build good models of sample bias and selection artifacts.
> Some people claim that China's population is half of what the officials claim.
Some people claim that the Earth is flat. I’m rather more inclined to believe China’s official statistics than what ‘some people’ on the internet have to say.
Why is the default assumption "just trust them bro, why would they lie!"?
That's not scientific. There's no verification or validation of data.
Your default assumption should be to question authority, especially if authority claims sole dominion over claims of fact, like "this is our population, because we say so."
They are humans with power, therefore they lie. If you don't have accountability feedback, you can never, ever check those lies, so you rely on proxies and legitimate models.
I highly recommend researching proxies you understand and can trust, and developing an understanding of the models that exist, and how to estimate confidence over a bounded range of values.
I don't think China has only 500 million people - that's a little silly. But I also don't think they have 1.4 billion, either, especially since one of their main justifications for that is "hey, we have this many phone accounts!" - their population control policies, their population decline, their cultural preference for male children and infant femicide, and so on don't jive with simple models of population growth based on human population growth constraints. If there's a deviation between properly error bounded models of populations over time in the hundreds of millions over the highest reasonably bounded value, something is suspicious.
You can take your reasonably bounded model and correlate with proxies - if the verifiable evidence supports the model over the claims, you can be more confident in the model than the claims.
Reliable proxies that can't be faked are difficult, and better models are going to be needed in the future as we get into AI slopageddon territory, where you can trivially fabricate entire identities and histories for billions of nonexistent people, even establishing social webs and histories for all of them, statistically indistinguishable from real people.
To perform a census, you need models constructed from verifiable data and first principles reasoning, with Bayesian certainty attached to each and every contributing factor, and then you need to set probabilistic bounds based on known levels of variability in things like population growth rates. Once you have an upper and lower bound, you can assign a certainty measure to the official claims - something like "this has a .01% chance of being true" - that's a good indication that reality diverges from those claims. It's not proof, it doesn't give you 100% certainty that some other number is precisely the case, but it's evidence.
The US government varies wildly in population counts, too, depending on which party is in power, which locales are being counted, the intent of the count, such as census, or estimation of population of illegal immigrants versus legal immigrants, etc. This is why census laws in the US forbid estimations or models or extrapolations; you need firsthand, auditable data collection, or fuckery occurs. The 2020 census was corrupted and then this was discovered by media and third party verification, for example. If you don't have a free press, things like that don't ever get revealed and confirmed, and authority is never held to account (in theory. In principle. In practice, power is rarely held to account anyway.)
In the United States, the media is nearly 100% controlled by political / business factions and while there is technically "free press" on the law, the money side of things prevents truth to be spread, unless you're on other media platforms that are not under control.
> Fake would imply that the people releasing the population estimates have a much better estimate but are choosing to instead publish a made up number
Fake simply means not genuine. It doesn’t require the people reporting it to have a real estimate. It simply requires the people reporting it to just not try finding the real number.
Not even that. If I give you a fake number (by whatever definition) and you report it... the number is still fake, regardless of whether you had any inkling it might be, or whether you tried to verify it in any way.
I'm trying to think of a definition, and the best I can come up with is this: fake means the number was modified at some point without an auditable trail. For example, if I see 1 deer on a sq km and I extrapolate linearly to a 100 sq km area that there are 100 deer in that area, then the number is fake if I don't disclose the extrapolation -- and this is true even if the actual number is in fact 100 in reality.
Actually, I don't even think this covers all the bases, because it assumes there was an initially factual measurement. For example, if it that one observed deer was in fact a statue, the numbers are all fake even if everyone documented everything and acted in good faith and accidentally came up with true correct number at the end...
How can any estimate, even a very poor estimate, be not genuine if there isn't a known better estimate? If I estimate there are 8 alien civilizations in the milky way it may be a truly terrible estimate, and the methods by which I came up with that estimate (eg one per galactic arm) may not stand up to any rigorous scrutiny, but it's as genuine an estimate as any other. To be not genuine, there must be something that is genuine, which it is not.
You don't need to necessarily know the right answer to have a fake estimate, but you have to be doing something to the estimate that you know is making it worse, which is equivalent to having the estimate where you didn't do that, which would be better.
Incentives (for western Governments) are strong to show population has grown as little as possible, because it reduces stats on (mostly illegal) immigration, and improves GDP-per capita. I think it is probably healthy to explore if these incentives leak into the data that Governments produce. Probably to some extent it does, to be frank, even if that extent is just not looking too closely at passive measurements like food purchase trends or similar.
> Incentives (for western Governments) are strong to show population has grown as little as possible
Well, for some people - there's a notable tranche of people who are sounding the alarm bells about the demographic problems of low birth rates and an aging population leading to ever-fewer workers being squeezed by an ever-growing cohort of retirees who are hoarding wealth and real estate.
> Both warm-blooded dinosaurs and the Chicxulub impact were both theories dismissed as fringe for decades before overwhelming evidence led to them being accepted as likely. In no small way thanks to Jurassic Park.
The main rejection of the impact hypothesis was that the dinosaurs had already died off by the time of the impact, the idea that the iridium in the layer came from an impact was reasonably well received. In 1984 a survey found 62% of paleontologists accepted the impact occurred, but only 24% believed it caused the extinction. The Alvarez duo, who proposed the impact hypothesis, were proposing to redefine where the cretaceous ended based on a new dating method (at the time the end of the cretaceous was believed to be a layer of coal a few meters off from the now accepted boundary), and fossil evidence at the time seemed to show gradual decline. A big part of the acceptance of the theory was the development of new analysis methods that showed the evidence for a gradual extinction prior to the impact to be illusory. By the time the impact crater was identified, it was already the dominant theory. Actually in the early 90s major journals were accused of being unfairly biased in favor of the impact hypothesis, with many more papers published in favor than against.
Completely coincidentally, the theory that the chixulub structure was an impact crater was initially rejected and it wasn't until 1990 that cores sampled from the site proved it was.
Dinosaurs being warm blooded was well accepted by the late 70s.
The US imports about 30% of its lumber. Canada is the largest source of imported lumber, but it's still less than a quarter of all lumber consumed in the US. Surprisingly, the limit on US production is not trees but sawmill capacity.
Sandpaper requires specific grades of corundum; Ontario happens to have several notable large deposits of extremely fit-for-purpose corundum. The Canadian deposits were also a conveniently close source for what would become America's largest abrasives products producer, 3M, after its attempt to mine corundum in Minnesota failed (3M stands for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing company).
There aren't a lot of things I would claim Russia is a leader in, but state sponsored hacking and spying on its own people would both definitely make the list. That's not to say no one has cracked it, but if the Russians couldn't do it there aren't many who could.
That's not the point of civil disobedience, it's an unfortunate side effect. You praise a martyr for their sacrifice, you deplore that the sacrifice was necessary.
It's not that the point of breaking a law is that you go to jail, it's that breaking the law without any intention of going to jail isn't a sacrifice. 'Martyrs' who don't give anything up, who act without punishment aren't celebrated, they're just right.
Pottsville wasn't founded as a mining settlement. It was an industrial hub that built up around the nearby forge purchased by John Potts. It had a large textile industry and still has America's oldest brewery. In addition to industry it's also the local county seat, and it briefly had an NFL franchise. The industry mostly left in the late 20th century but the nearby mining continues - the coal is just sent elsewhere for use.
Further there is the potential for a false negative. If they don't understand enough about how the drug would work in humans, they may trial inappropriate doses or delivery methods. If those don't help or make things worse, it could be mistaken for the drug being ineffective and lead to the whole line of inquiry being abandoned. Then not only do you die, but countless others are potentially harmed by an effective version not being developed.
Finally, cancer treatments aren't just for the terminal. Drugs which primarily help during the early stages by necessity need to be trialed on people who still have a chance, maybe even a decent one, going with other, well established treatment options.
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