[HN Gopher] Population much more than 8.2B, rural areas underest...
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Population much more than 8.2B, rural areas underestimated
Author : the__prestige
Score : 54 points
Date : 2025-03-21 19:19 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.popularmechanics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.popularmechanics.com)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| Well, is it a few million, or a billion?
|
| It doesn't really say in the article.
| wongarsu wrote:
| _If_ the paper is accurate and not falling prey to false
| assumptions or some other error we are talking about billions.
| If we just generalize the deviations claimed by the paper out
| to the entire world there are about another 3-5 billion humans.
| If the paper is accurate but doesn 't generalize to other
| countries we are still talking about a billion people.
| johnea wrote:
| I had the same question.
|
| I thought reading the paper in Nature would give some more
| insight, but no.
|
| I was looking for at least an estimate of what they thought
| world population should be, but that doesn't seem to be
| included in any of the text...
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| The article doesn't really give much scientific information. But
| wouldn't areas flooded by dams be much higher in population than
| other areas? They would be by rivers and within valleys.
| Protected land with a fresh water supply. What relative
| population increase did they assume for these regions?
| jdietrich wrote:
| _> "When dams are built, large areas are flooded and people need
| to be relocated," Lang-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 bonanza of corruption".
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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/s41467-025-56906-7#:~:text=L...
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| 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 a primary residence.
| lurk2 wrote:
| 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 / 24 hours in a day [?] 11,574 days
|
| 11,574 / 365 days in a year [?] 31 years.
|
| That's just China. The global population would take around
| 220 years, with not so much time as to say hello. A
| bureaucracy can of course delegate census reporting such
| that the groups become manageable, but it puts a lot of
| things into perspective when you understand the sheer scale
| of the human population.
| VincentEvans wrote:
| 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.
| more-nitor wrote:
| > 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.
|
| the more better approach would be compensating by property,
| though does have its own downsides
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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.
| allturtles wrote:
| The issue is that the availability of money gives people an
| incentive _to be counted_ , even if they don't live there.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| No, it's the people being resettled who have an incentive to
| overcount themselves.
| solid_fuel wrote:
| 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 she died 6 months ago. So lets
| say it's just you, your partner, and 2 kids.
|
| But, that's a lot of money - do you tell the man in the suit
| that your house has 4 residents, or maybe stretch the truth
| to 5 or 6 (your uncle might move back soon, after all)?
|
| And remember, corruption often stacks - individuals might add
| an extra person here and there, but then the local relocation
| manager adds a few % to get a little extra on top, and their
| boss adds another few %, and so on... soon you're seeing 25%
| more people than actually reside there.
| Muromec wrote:
| 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.
| 00N8 wrote:
| 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.
| Muromec wrote:
| Likely the manager who makes the payouts happen and not
| people themselves
| kristjansson wrote:
| A dollar per dead snake, you say?
| lurk2 wrote:
| 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.
| wongarsu wrote:
| The original paper is discussed here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43398308
| rendang wrote:
| I've typically heard it rumored that populations get
| overestimated, as corrupt local officials in developing countries
| want to get more resources/power allocated to their district
| TwoPhonesOneKid wrote:
| That seems like the kind of behavior that would drastically
| vary from place to place and culture to culture. Just compare
| Rwanda with the DRC, for instance--neighboring countries with
| nearly polar-opposite reputation of how corruption is
| expressed. The DRC's corruption (aka Tshisekedi) means very low
| centralized control and an incredibly brutal multi-front civil
| war. Kagame's style has led to one of the most authoritarian
| countries on earth, albeit one with very low crime rates. That
| these are bordering countries with overlapping cultures and
| peoples and these places produce such wildly different
| expression of societies (as of today, that is) is quite
| illustrative.
|
| There are certainly some ways that the behavior of countries
| can be painted with a wide brush, but each country still has
| unique dysfunctions and strengths. It's very difficult to say
| anything broadly applicable that doesn't have glaring
| exceptions undercutting the premise.
|
| This is especially, especially true in places with great
| restrictions on freedom of the press--Rwanda's image is almost
| certainly partially fabricated, but it's very difficult to
| interpret the state of affairs from outside the country.
|
| Corruption is certainly a constant across all countries, but
| the form the corruption takes is very dynamic.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| 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.
| Ekaros wrote:
| 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.
| Newlaptop wrote:
| 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 where many people get
| much of their information only from headlines, and a recurring
| narrative of "Scientists make mistakes" or "Scientists can't be
| trusted" has real impact to policy on climate change, vaccine
| hesitancy, and other areas where distrust of scientific knowledge
| or expertise causes uninformed people to make decisions harmful
| to their own well-being or harmful to those around them on
| everything from nutrition to pollution to evacuations before
| hurricanes.
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(page generated 2025-03-21 23:01 UTC)