[HN Gopher] A lot of population numbers are fake
___________________________________________________________________
A lot of population numbers are fake
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 213 points
Date : 2026-01-29 13:36 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (davidoks.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (davidoks.blog)
| direwolf20 wrote:
| A previous employer deployed a wireless relay network through the
| jungle in PNG and had rules to obey to avoid being accused of
| witchcraft and burned.
| ChrisGreenHeur wrote:
| Would they normally do witchcraft if they did not have those
| rules?
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| We all do witchcraft on a daily basis. I am manipulating
| light on a sub-microscopic scale to beam words into your
| retina from across the world. They are right to be
| distrustful of our ways.
| sejje wrote:
| Wait, is it witchcraft to use a machine created by
| witchcraft?
|
| Forever?
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| at the very least, it's acceptance and support of
| witchcraft which has at times been plenty to justify
| execution
| nxobject wrote:
| TikTok, sadly, is the best hypnotic spell ever made.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| The US fucked it a couple of days ago, maybe it isn't any
| more.
| vajrabum wrote:
| I suspect they'll just replace the old recommendations
| with new ones.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| They did, but they fucked it so hard it might actually
| lose users. They made it so dang obvious. They show you
| an error message if you send the word Epstein to someone
| in a private message. Even China's apps know they need to
| silently delete the censored message to avoid alerting
| the user.
|
| I heard people are switching to an Australian clone app
| called Upscrolled? The same way people switched to
| rednote for a while until tiktok was unbanned the first
| time.
| peterlk wrote:
| My dad has some stories of working in Burkina Faso (and Mali,
| and other countries) with a drone, and having to appease locals
| about his witch-bird. A lot if places in Africa still prosecute
| witchcraft.
| ashleyn wrote:
| Curious what the rules were.
| escapecharacter wrote:
| This is a EULA I'd love to read.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| probably mostly "stay well away from people and stay away
| from these areas"
| coredog64 wrote:
| PNG is so violent that you don't even have to be accused of
| witchcraft to have something bad happen to you.
|
| I worked at an NGO in the region and made several duty travel
| trips to PNG. The office building I was working in had a
| platoon of security guards and metal detectors in the lobbies
| of every floor. A local employee kept an M-16 and ammunition
| locked in the server room. We had to have security escorts to
| travel anywhere outside of downtown Port Moresby. Coworkers
| shared stories of being carjacked like you or I might relate
| losing a phone.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| Sounds like the experience of a foreigner that didn't bother
| with local customs and went against the grain in every way. I
| wouldn't generalize from experiences like yours (and others
| like you).
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I vouched for this comment, which got flagged dead. It's
| got an accusatory tone, which is not great. But it also has
| accurate substance.
|
| It's true that westerners visiting nations like PNG for
| work are often cloistered behind elaborate security. This
| is in part because the organization has legal
| responsibility for sending those workers, and the deterrent
| security measures are way less expensive than the legal and
| PR headache of an incident. In addition, well-funded and
| highly organized foreign businesses attract local ire in
| ways that random individuals do not.
|
| In any one of those countries at any given time there are
| also foreigners passing through on travel or less organized
| work (e.g. academia) who experience the country without
| that thick security layer... and are perfectly fine.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| May be because they have less money. Almost any westerner
| is much richer than the locals, so makes a good target in
| a way that most South Americans do not.
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| This is true of a lot of foreign countries where people
| somewhat exaggerate the security issues, but really isn't
| of PNG. It's the kind of place where it's not just the
| foreigners who need a thick security layer to travel,
| there are plenty of places in the country where no
| official government representatives could safely travel
| to without basically bringing the army.
| eitally wrote:
| I spent a lot of time working in Brazil between 2004-2015 and
| in the first five years or so of that, it was very similar to
| what you describe (though not the onsite weaponry in
| offices). Most expats lived in secure walled compounds and
| execs usually used bulletproof transportation. And this was
| in Sao Paulo state, not even an out of the way part of the
| country.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Cannot get to the page, from the wayback machine, the link works
| odd for me, but select "A lot of population numbers are fake"
| once the page displays.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20260129141207/https://davidoks....
| mrjay42 wrote:
| Exactly the same for me, thanks for the link!
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://archive.ph/n59iR
| bookofjoe wrote:
| https://archive.ph/n59iR
| kubanczyk wrote:
| The page has been archived with a popup obscuring the main
| point of the text about Papua New Guinea. This rule in uBlock
| Origin cleans it up for me: ##article >
| div:nth-of-type(1) > div
| rafram wrote:
| That will probably break other archive.ph pages in the
| future, but you could accomplish the same thing by deleting
| the element in browser devtools.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Or you could be a non-techie like me and use no ad
| blocker etc....
| lionkor wrote:
| Do you enjoy ads? If not, install an adblocker. There is
| no technical skill involved.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Chrome says no.
|
| Of course that's why I use firefox now.
| rafram wrote:
| uBlock Origin Lite works perfectly well, FWIW. The
| features that only "full" (MV2/Firefox) uBlock Origin
| supports are fairly advanced.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Agreed. Still blocks all the ads, but is much more
| efficient. Zero complaints here.
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| The population numbers of other countries are only relevant when
| serving an imperial or colonial enterprise. In a way this article
| reads somewhat like a mob boss complaining that their accountant
| is skimming off the top.
|
| If I were a rightful leader of all Nigeria I would make sure
| those numbers would never be accessible for westerners as it's
| the fist thing you need to know when you decide to wage war of
| any kind against some people.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| Do you really think the outcome of western militaries vs
| nigeria will be different if Nigeria has a million or a billion
| people?
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| How else are you going to estimate the number of soldiers to
| send, the overall cost, and the projected return from labor
| exploitation? How do you think wars are waged and what do you
| think motivates them?
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| Do you think that the British had an accurate census of the
| populations of all the places they were conquering on their
| attempt at world conquest in the 1600s-1800s?
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| Do you think they have an accurate census now? Isn't this
| the very subject the author is trying to outline?
| anonymous908213 wrote:
| No, but you are the one presupposing that an accurate
| census is a necessary tool of colonialism and conquest,
| which seems not to be borne out in any way by the history
| of colonialism and conquest.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Modern data driven enterprises typically like to avoid
| failure and do so at an appropriate cost. They didn't
| have these tools at all in the past, and on occasion a
| misguided conquest could lead to the end of the
| conquesting nation.
| AreShoesFeet000 wrote:
| In your honest opinion, is current colonialism in /that/
| country that is doing genocide more or less effective
| than South African apartheid?
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Nope, and it didn't matter.
|
| You need to know military, not population size (how
| quickly can a militia be raised, how long can it be
| sustained, how well they are armed, who can be persuaded
| to defect, etc.). This _is_ related to population size,
| but not linearly.
|
| Population counts get only interesting for military and
| tax _potential_ during administration of a territory.
|
| GP's point is valid, though, imho.
| OtherShrezzing wrote:
| >The population numbers of other countries are only
| relevant when serving an imperial or colonial enterprise.
|
| Is this statement not in direct contention with this
| statement:
|
| >If I were a rightful leader of all Nigeria I would make
| sure those numbers would never be accessible for westerners
| as it's the fist thing you need to know when you decide to
| wage war of any kind against some people.
|
| Surely the leader of the colonisation target country would
| like to know the population of the coloniser, so that they
| can get an understanding of how many soldiers to keep in
| the defence force?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Satellite photos?
|
| You can easily get an estimate of the number of _buildings_
| and especially _vehicles_ , which tell you two important
| things. Not to mention that as a matter of course the first
| thing to do is photograph everything that looks like a
| piece of military equipment, which has been a purpose of
| satellite photography from the beginning.
|
| Various kinds of countries get paranoid about letting
| people have maps or accurate geographic data. This makes
| very little difference militarily but causes real
| inconvenience for the locals.
|
| Besides, nobody wages wars for labour exploitation any
| more. It's all about what's under the ground.
| torginus wrote:
| Yeah, spy sat tech today is likely good enough to track
| every single person that steps outside in the FoV of the
| sat in _real time_.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| If I am to start violent colonial project today I will care
| for resources not people. And depopulating an area is fixed
| cost.
|
| Anyway with underdeveloped countries - you only need to
| bribe couple of people and you effectively run the country.
| Which once again is fixed cost.
| vladms wrote:
| Quoting from the article "But here's a question about Papua New
| Guinea: how many people live there? The answer should be pretty
| simple."
|
| That sounds a very strange expectation. Most of my life post
| university I realized most of questions have complex answers, it
| is never as simple as you expect.
|
| If the author would check how things biology and medicine work
| currently, I think he will have even more surprises than the fact
| that counting populations is an approximate endeavor.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| > Most of my life post university I realized most of questions
| have complex answers, it is never as simple as you expect.
|
| I find the complication comes from poor definitions, poor
| understanding of those definitions, and pedantic arguments.
| Less about the facts of reality being complicated and more
| about our ability to communicate it to each other.
| apercu wrote:
| I've noticed the inverse as in the more I understand
| something, the less "simple" it looks.
|
| Apparent simplicity usually comes from weak definitions and
| overconfident summaries, not from the underlying system being
| easy.
|
| Complexity is often there from the start, we just don't see
| it yet.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree. Simplicity
| comes from strong definitions, and "infinite" complexity
| comes from weak ones.
|
| If you're always chasing the next technicality then maybe
| you didn't really know what question you were looking to
| answer at the onset.
| balamatom wrote:
| IMO both perspectives have their place. Sometimes what's
| missing is the information, sometimes what's lacking is
| the ability to communicate it and/or the willingness to
| understand it. So in different circumstances either
| viewpoint may be appropriate.
|
| What's missing more often than not, across fields of
| study as well as levels of education, is the overall
| commitment to conceputal integrity. From this we observe
| people's habitual inability or unwillingness to be
| definite about what their words mean - and their
| consequent _fear of abstraction_.
|
| If one is in the habit of using one's set of concepts in
| the manner of bludgeons, one will find many ways and many
| reasons to bludgeon another with them - such as if a
| person turned out to be using concepts as something more
| akin to clockwork.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Yes, we're in complete agreement about conceptual
| integrity.
|
| Reality is such that, without integrity, you can prove
| almost anything you want. As long as your bar for "prove"
| is at the very bottom.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >If you're always chasing the next technicality
|
| This sounds like someone who has never studied physics.
|
| "Oh wow, I figured out everything about physics... except
| this one little weird thing here"
|
| [A lifetime of chasing why that one little weird thing
| occurs]
|
| "I know nothing about physics, I am but a mote in an
| endless void"
|
| ---
|
| Strong or weak definitions don't save you here, what you
| are looking for is error bars and acceptable ranges.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Your response along with others is proving my point in an
| unfortunate way.
|
| If you think I'm saying that the world is not infinitely
| complex, you are missing the point.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| This is actually insightful: we usually _don 't know_ the
| question we are trying to answer. The idea that you can
| "just" find the right question is naive.
| breuleux wrote:
| > Simplicity comes from strong definitions
|
| Sure, you can put it this way, with the caveat that
| reality at large isn't strongly definable.
|
| You can sort of see this with good engineering: half of
| it is strongly defining a system simple enough to be
| reasoned about and built up, the other half is making
| damn sure that the rest of reality can't intrude, violate
| your assumptions and ruin it all.
| WJW wrote:
| Simple counterexample: chess. The rules are simple enough
| we regularly teach them to young children. There's
| basically no randomness involved. And yet, the rules
| taken together form a game complex enough that no human
| alive can fully comprehend their consequences.
| somenameforme wrote:
| There's a great analog with this in chess as well.
|
| ~1200 - omg chess is so amazing and hard. this is great.
|
| ~1500 - i'm really starting to get it! i can beat most
| people i know easily. i love studying this complex game!
|
| ~1800 - this game really isn't that hard. i can beat most
| people at the club without trying. really I think the only
| thing separating me from Kasparov is just a lot of opening
| prep and study
|
| ~2300 - omg this game is so friggin hard. 2600s are on an
| entirely different plane, let alone a Kasparov or a
| Carlsen.
|
| Magnus Carlsen - "Wow, I really have no understanding of
| chess." - Said without irony after playing some game and
| going over it with a computer on stream. A fairly frequent
| happening.
| ric2b wrote:
| Funny how the start of your scale, 1200 Elo, is
| essentially what I have as a goal and am not even close
| yet, lol.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| I think it's more of a curve from my point of view.
|
| Beginner: I know nothing and this topic seems impossible to
| grasp.
|
| Advanced beginner: I get it now. It's pretty simple.
|
| Intermedite: Hmm, this thing is actually very complicated.
|
| Expert: It's not that complicated. I can explain a simple
| core covering 80% of it. The other 20% is an ocean of
| complexity.
| empressplay wrote:
| Wisdom comes from knowing what you don't know.
| nathan_compton wrote:
| Haha.
| evan_a_a wrote:
| This is a literary device. The article continues to explain why
| this isn't a simple problem, and it's clear from the conclusion
| that the author understands the complexity.
|
| >But it's good to be reminded that we know a lot less about the
| world than we think. Much of our thinking about the world runs
| on a statistical edifice of extraordinary complexity, in which
| raw numbers--like population counts, but also many others--are
| only the most basic inputs. Thinking about the actual
| construction of these numbers is important, because it
| encourages us to have a healthy degree of epistemic humility
| about the world: we really know much less than we think.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| I guess this is why reading things other than technical
| documentation remains important.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Or it's a reason why literary devices should only be
| employed when they aren't distractingly wrong.
| vladms wrote:
| I tried to check a list of literary devices (Wikipedia) and
| couldn't exactly map to a specific category - would be
| interesting to know if there such a category.
|
| The problem I have with this literary device is that I think
| it works if most / many questions would fit it then he would
| go to disapprove it. Using it, for me, kind of indirectly
| reinforces the idea that "there are many simple answers".
| Which I came to loathe as it is pushed again and again due to
| social media. Everything is "clear", "simple", "everybody
| knows better", "everybody did their research".
|
| How did this literal device make you feel? Interested?
| Curious? Bored? When I read it my initial instinct was "no,
| it's definitely not simple, so if that's what are you going
| to explain me, I will not bother".
| ajkjk wrote:
| The list of literary devices on Wikipedia is a tiny subset
| of the list of literary devices in reality. Although in
| this case it is a well-documented one: it's just a
| rhetorical question.
|
| anyway it is just a writing style. if you don't like it,
| fine. If you can't parse it, well, now you can.
| leesec wrote:
| "It shouldn't be new to anyone that population data in the poor
| world is bad" from the same author and same article. but cherry
| pick away if it makes you feel intelligent.
| adamrezich wrote:
| Most people believe that most things are knowable, and happily
| defer to published statistics whenever possible.
| rayiner wrote:
| "The next census, in 1991, was by far the most credible, and it
| shocked many people by finding that the population was about 30
| percent smaller than estimated. But even that one was riddled
| with fraud. Many states reported that every single household had
| exactly nine people."
|
| If I worked in the government of a country like this I'd just
| throw in the towel.
| mrighele wrote:
| If you worked in the government of such a country is probably
| because of nepotism and to get a salary that is both guaranteed
| and above average.
|
| You are part of the system, so if the guy that gave you the job
| (and may fire you as easily) asks you to "make it so that the
| population is X millions" of course you do it.
| detectivestory wrote:
| at that point you are pretty much "throwing in the towel"
| clickety_clack wrote:
| "If I had to work under a terrible system like that, I
| would simply continue to work under the system."
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Less than 0,000000000000000000000000001% of the people in
| the world cares about truth or about doing an honest job.
| The entire concept of doing anything which doesn't directly
| benefit them is laughable and alien to those.
| me_again wrote:
| That would be significantly less than one person,
| regardless of how off the population estimates are ;-)
| chrystalkey wrote:
| This may say more about the people that surround you
| specifically. I have made the opposite experience.
| mrighele wrote:
| "throwing in the towel" would be a "I would do my job but I
| am forced to cheat the numbers otherwise I lose my job".
|
| I was thinking more to a "I am grateful to my father's
| cousin for giving me a comfy job where I don't have to do
| much of the day, of course I am going to return a favor"
| kind of situation. Of course it is not always this way, but
| it is fairly frequent.
|
| This is in particular true for those countries whose
| borders where designed not around ethnic lines but
| arbitrarily by external forces. The loyalty is to the clan,
| not to the state.
| merryocha wrote:
| I was in Chile in 2017 for a census operation and the whole
| country shut down to conduct the census. It was a pretty big deal
| while I was there (and also a bit inconvenient because everything
| was closed). There was a lot of talk about how there had been a
| previous attempt at conducting the census which had ended up
| being a huge failure and how getting the 2017 census done right
| was a point of national pride.
|
| I also worked as a canvasser in 2019 and 2020 for the US census
| and, while we were about as thorough as you could reasonably get,
| the whole operation made me somewhat skeptical of official
| statistics in general. 2020 in particular was a bit of a disaster
| due to the pandemic and when the statistics were published, a
| bunch of mainstream news outlets published stories about certain
| areas experiencing "population decline" and all I could think was
| that those were actually the areas where the census didn't manage
| to count everyone.
| Thlom wrote:
| Over here we just have every person registered in a central
| database from birth and it's mandated by law to keep the
| registry updated with your current address. The last census was
| in 2001 and then there was also done a big job registering
| every residences in multi residence houses. The assumption is
| that we will never have to do a form based census ever again
| and just use central registries instead.
| pixl97 wrote:
| That may or may not work depending on where you're at.
|
| If for example you have poor compliance with the law then the
| law is mostly useless (in the US you do have to update your
| ID in 30 days, but huge numbers of people dont).
|
| And that doesn't count if your country has a huge
| undocumented population, like some places in the US do.
| expedition32 wrote:
| Most countries don't extend citizenship to illegals. No
| driver license, no housing, no benefits. They are
| irrelevant to the statistics- it would be like counting
| squirrels.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >They are irrelevant to the statistics
|
| "Wow, why are the roads wearing out twice as fast as we
| expect?!"
| Lalo-ATX wrote:
| Undocumented residents are pretty different from
| squirrels. They participate in the economy pretty
| similarly to documented residents. Consumption,
| transportation, jobs, housing, etc, and all the related
| taxation and resource utilization.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| "Over there" is one of those countries where hundreds of
| people register their adress with the government at the house
| of an unsuspecting widow?
|
| And how long does it take for that central registry to be
| informed when somebody has emigrated from the country without
| informing the government? Five years? Ten?
| kuschku wrote:
| > "Over there" is one of those countries where hundreds of
| people register their adress with the government at the
| house of an unsuspecting widow?
|
| In e.g. Germany that requires a signed statement from the
| landlord, and the ability to receive mail at that address.
| If you can't receive mail at your own address, it'd be
| noticed and reported within at most 5 years. I actually
| believe it'd be the national health insurance that'd be the
| first to notice & report you missing, as having health
| insurance is mandatory (even if you continue paying them,
| they'd notice it once they can't send you a replacement
| card).
| pimlottc wrote:
| That seems to assume that immigration and emigration is not a
| significant factor for your country
| munificent wrote:
| _> we just have every person registered in a central database
| from birth_
|
| "Just" is doing a lot of work in that sentence!
|
| A human female can have sex once and pop out a new human 9
| months later regardless of her connection to any official
| social systems or state apparatus. She could disappear into
| the woods as a hermit and produce a completely uncounted
| unknown new person.
|
| To the degree that that _doesn 't_ happen, it's because a
| country has spent generations building a giant high trust
| society with good widely available medical infrastructure and
| a culture where almost everyone believes it is better to use
| that than to go it alone. Building that system requires the
| powerless to organize themselves and counterbalance the
| powerful elite who otherwise have a tendency towards
| despotism and corruption. That in turn requires a lot of
| shared culture so that the powerless feel they are all one
| tribe and not fractured out-groups (a reality the elites are
| constantly incentivized to manufacture). You need good
| education, mobility, safety.
|
| An easy census is the very pinnacle of a successful society
| and only in a few places in the recent past has any country
| reached it.
| chneu wrote:
| I used to do canvassing and yeah, I never believe official
| stats anymore.
|
| Especially anything that's self reported or whatnot. People
| lie. People misunderstand questions. No process is perfect.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_census_phenomenon
|
| Unfortunately, this extends to research studies. My mother
| enrolled me in the Growing Up Today Study
| (https://gutsweb.org/). I eventually stopped responding to
| that, as I couldn't see how any child (or even adult) could
| answer their questions on estimated food consumption remotely
| accurately, making the whole thing seeming dubiously ethical.
|
| It's cited constantly in the research on ultra-processed food
| you see these days.
| expedition32 wrote:
| The Netherlands stopped with the census in the 1970s when
| computers became viable. You have to report each birth and
| death to your domicile. It's fairly foolproof because you can't
| do anything if you do not legally exist.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| It's somewhat common knowledge that China's population count has
| been inflated for some time now, perhaps by 100's of millions.
| Not hard to believe when you realize how much data out of China
| is very difficult to verify (like GDP for instance). Evidence
| typically cited to support this are discrepancies in birth data,
| reports of 350 million duplicate IDs and fertility rates likely
| lower than official estimates. It's also reasonable to conclude
| there are systemic incentives for local officials to exaggerate
| numbers.
|
| There is a strange pro-China faction on HN that will downvote me
| for this comment (not that this comment is at all anti-China)
| However you can ask any honest economist, etc and they will
| betray at least some suspicion themselves.
| 0xTJ wrote:
| This particular topic is covered in the "Are there billions of
| fake people?" section of the linked article.
| hearsathought wrote:
| > There is a strange pro-China faction on HN
|
| There's an even stranger anti-China faction on HN.
|
| > However you can ask any honest economist, etc and they will
| betray at least some suspicion themselves.
|
| Those same "honest" "economists" have been saying china was
| lying the other way. Did you know that people like you were
| saying "the ccp" was intentionally UNDERCOUNTING their
| population not so long ago? That china couldn't be trusted and
| china's real population was near 2 billion.
|
| Strange people like you say shit like china is buying up all
| our real estate and then turn around and say china's economy is
| a fraud and they are about to go bankrupt? China's military is
| about to expand around the world and then say china's corrupt
| and they are a paper tiger?
|
| Sometimes strange people like you contradict yourselves within
| the same thread. Strange.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| There are a lot of women who do not officially exist because
| of the one child policy. The CCP may or may not have a full
| account of their population.
| hearsathought wrote:
| There we go. One strange nutjob says china is overcounting.
| Another strange nutjob says they are undercounting.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Then the fallacy of the middle ground says we must take
| Chinas number at face value.
| hearsathought wrote:
| Strange.
| CGMthrowaway wrote:
| I did not know that. I know of no other "people like me." I
| have been following reports of China's population being
| overcounted for at least 25 years. Not sure I want to be
| introduced to these people you know, although I am open to
| considering their evidence.
| hearsathought wrote:
| > I did not know that. I know of no other "people like me."
|
| You peddle standard anti-china propaganda and you know no
| one like you? Strange.
|
| > I have been following reports of China's population being
| overcounted for at least 25 years.
|
| 25 years? Amazing. Are you a professional anti-china
| propagandist or something?
|
| And in your 25 years, you haven't heard anything about
| china undercounting their population? Even stranger.
| torginus wrote:
| This is the most ridiculous take. If I were pro/anti-US, It
| would be understood as an opinion on the domestic/foreign
| policy of current or past US administrations.
|
| If I were pro-China, that would by this standard, mean that I
| refuse to believe unsubstantiated rumors and or didn't qualify
| every undeniably real Chinese achievement with either
| skepticism or 'at what cost'.
| maxglute wrote:
| "Credible" critics (as in least noncredible) i.e. YiFuxian
| undercount in <10% range, which comports with bureaucratic
| incentive to overcount before digitization when head count hard
| to track.
|
| >perhaps by 100's of millions
|
| More than 10%, i.e. PRC actually only 800m-1000m (20-30%
| undercount) is when claims become statistically retarded.
| There's proxy indicators like PRC ag imports, especially animal
| feed (soybeans), if they were 100s of millions short then per
| capita caloric consumption reach biologically impossible levels
| (like 200 grams of protein / 5000 calories per capita)
| meanwhile key policy CCP (Xi personally) hammers is food
| security / wastage. This when demographic skepticism becomes
| unhinged.
|
| TBH PRC over reporting pop, UNDER reporting GDP is sensible.
| PRC entire history has been trying to underreport GDP
| (specifically per capita gdp) using accounting methods to stay
| under high income status for development perks, literally since
| initial IMF negotiations to set PRC per capita baseline, PRC
| insisted on something like 50% lower than what IMF calculated.
| Of course the anti PRC faction won't accept the logical out
| come is that PRC that is much richer it claims, with less
| people than it claims, i.e. PRC per capita much higher than it
| claims only makes PRC system look stronger. Then factor in
| demographic income disparity (i.e. tertiary educated newer gen
| make multiples more) and realize as PRC demo phases out
| undereducated/unproductive elders in next few generations and
| PRC per capita is statistically locked into doubling/tripling.
| Then factor in PPP / potential future FX moves, i.e. PRC
| appreciating rmb is another multiplier on PRC per capita. Not
| many "honest" economist talks about how PRC is actually
| incentivized to look statistically weak (somehow people forgot
| about hide/bide when it comes to economy), because muh
| authoritarians like to look strong, leading to plenty of PRC
| doomer economists who keep being wrong.
| ecshafer wrote:
| I had a coworker who had lived in Nigeria, working for the oil
| companies, with some pretty crazy stories. Duffle bags full of
| money guarded by squads of guys with machine guns being a normal
| day to day practice in some parts of the business. Extreme
| poverty right next to country clubs for the oil company staff. It
| wouldn't surprise me that they are up or town tens of millions of
| people.
| bombcar wrote:
| This was relatively common in the USA in living memory - before
| mass bank accounts and easy check depositing, payday would
| often involve large amounts of cash.
| varjag wrote:
| Poor methodology or even some bug in an Excel macro at the UN
| headquarters could well be a reason behind the sudden,
| synchronous decline of population in all cultures and political
| systems of this planet.
|
| And like the article suggests it can be deliberate too. Am
| extremely skeptical of population figures in some parts of former
| Soviet Union. The official demographic loss figures in WW2 had
| tripled since 1945 but post-war census figures were never
| revised. That could easily account for the "demographic collapse"
| of 1990s.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Population counts are parts of geopolitics.
|
| If you're the neighbor of some country that has a number of
| natural resources you'd like to get a hold of then you want to
| do things like formulate battle plans. If you have to make a
| plan to conquer 10 million people, it's going to be a bit
| different than one for 5 million people. The 10 million one is
| going to take longer. And then when you figure out that country
| is using deception to bolster its population numbers you have
| to figure where they lied about these numbers. Is it
| everywhere, is it in the place you want to invade. Is the
| population actually higher where you want to invade but lower
| in the rest of the country. Now you have to invest in doing
| your own general population and capability counts to make sure
| you don't step 10 feet deep in a 2 foot deep pool.
| johngossman wrote:
| I doubt this explains the world-wide phenomenon, but regionally
| sure. I remember in the 90s when studies brought the Nigerian
| population estimates down this triggered a drop of growth
| forecasts across sub-Saharan Africa.
|
| Edit: changed world-wife (which sounds interesting
| demographically) to world-wide
| varjag wrote:
| Sure, it is quite far-fetched. However it is extremely
| uncommon that we experience unified social trends all across
| the board, from liberal Finland or Japan to North Korea and
| Taliban-run Afghanistan. Usually there are odd reversals and
| exceptions here and there; not this time apparently. And we
| still lack a satisfying theory that could account for
| fertility decline in every country.
| taeric wrote:
| Feels like this should dive into accuracy and precision? And for
| the next fun number to look into, try declared calories on food
| packaging.
|
| Just don't fall into the trap of thinking you can't use these
| values if they are not perfectly accurate.
| hybrid_study wrote:
| The post leans too hard on "we have no idea." Population numbers
| are estimates with error bars, especially in places with weak
| census infrastructure, but that's not the same as ignorance. Most
| countries run censuses (sometimes badly) and use
| births/deaths/migration accounting to update totals. Calling them
| "fake" is misleading -- it's uneven data quality, not numerology.
| "Large uncertainty" [?] "no idea."
| nostrebored wrote:
| Countries have incentives to manipulate population data. Most
| error that I'm aware of is not attributable to poor data
| quality. For example, if you have a real estate bubble you have
| a strong incentive to show population growth.
| Muromec wrote:
| >For example, if you have a real estate bubble you have a
| strong incentive to show population growth.
|
| That's one source of bias that is present at a specific time.
| Mostly you would have competing incentives. There is usually
| more than one agency that runs does the counting. Vital
| records registration, voter rolls and tax payers lists, for
| example are separate agencies in some countries. Not every
| tax payer is a voter and not everyone who was born still
| lives in the country. The sources are sometimes cross-
| referenced too. Then there is usually a place that needs to
| do macroeconomic forecasting and needs to have some numbers
| to do it's job.
| tscherno wrote:
| Agree. I feel that it is beneficial to present yourself
| larger than you really are.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Not just that. Poorer countries inflate their numbers so they
| can get more financial aid
| nerevarthelame wrote:
| Do you have specific examples?
|
| This study published in Nature [0] says that rural
| populations in particular are typically UNDERCOUNTED
| (exactly like the Papa New Guinea in the OP's article), and
| that this happens at similar rates across poorer and
| wealthier countries: "no clear effect of country income on
| the accuracies of the five datasets can be observed."
|
| [0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56906-7
| autoexec wrote:
| I doubt places where the data is poor like Somalia or
| Afghanistan are making up their numbers because of a real
| estate bubble
| ekianjo wrote:
| Births and deaths are not recorded in many places
| simonw wrote:
| > The Democratic Republic of the Congo, which by most estimates
| has the fourth-largest population in Africa, has not conducted
| a census since 1984. Neither South Sudan nor Eritrea, two of
| the newest states in Africa (one created in 2011 and the other
| in 1991), has conducted a census in their entire history as
| independent states. Afghanistan has not had one since 1979;
| Chad since 1991; Somalia since 1975.
| johngossman wrote:
| You are conflating known and unknown unknowns, otherwise known
| as Knightian uncertainty. As the article says, many countries
| have not run censuses in many years and/or manipulate the
| numbers.
| postsantum wrote:
| Link is dead but I think the population number of DRC (Congo)
| can't be right
|
| Look at the size of the country (around 1/3 of USA) and the
| number of people living there (112M according to wikipedia), also
| 1/3 of USA. So the density should be about the same but when you
| look at satellite photos it's one giant city (18M), several
| smaller cities and the endless forest. Can it support other 90M
| people?
| rjrjrjrj wrote:
| "one giant city, several smaller cities, and the endless
| forest"
|
| Doesn't that describe many US states? (although sometimes
| desert/plains/etc instead of forest)
| pixl97 wrote:
| Um, you ever look into the size of Japan versus it's population
| ratio to the US? Tokyo is only twice as big as the giant city
| you're talking about, but the country itself is like 1/20th the
| size of the US.
|
| So yea, DRC can easily be like that. Especially if they don't
| subscribe to 4-6 people living in a house thing that the US
| does.
| postsantum wrote:
| Take a look at the neighboring Uganda. Most of the country is
| covered by cultivated fields, roads, villages. Sure,
| population density is higher but it's not even comparable
| with emptiness of DRC
| pixl97 wrote:
| Again, those are just assumptions you make without further
| understanding of a great number of things.
|
| If you looked at US infrastructure and based the population
| we should have on how a developing nations population
| works, then you'd come up with a number like 750 million to
| a billion people... because 6 to 10 people live in a house,
| right? FYI, average US household is 2.5 people.
|
| Simply put you cannot make any of your assumptions without
| more knowledge.
| postsantum wrote:
| > You can't do any assumptions because you just can't,
| okay??
| pixl97 wrote:
| Correct, show your homework, as the teacher says.
|
| Or I should say, it's hypocritical in an article about
| population numbers being fake to generate your own fake
| set of numbers and say it's better.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| Even the capital does not look large enough. Brazzaville on the
| next side of the river is apparently 2 million, and Kinshasa
| definitely does not look 9x larger.
| pibaker wrote:
| Look more carefully into the rural areas of DRC and you will
| see little huts and hamlets everywhere, even in the jungles
| there are clearings clearly inhabited by human. There are also
| larger towns scattered around that appears to be yellow, earthy
| spots on the landscape but if you zoom in you can see its
| houses. Each of these houses can likely house an entire family.
|
| Also keep in mind the US is very sparsely populated after all.
| You can easily drive hours in parts of the western US (never
| mind the parts you cannot even drive through, or Alaska)
| without encountering a single human settlement.
| chneu wrote:
| I drove for almost an hour last night in Oregon without
| seeing another car. This was on a highway at 10pm not far
| from a city of 60K.
|
| People forget how rural the US can be.
| johngossman wrote:
| Go look at Bangladesh (or the whole Ganges valley). Extremely
| dense population outside of urban cores. Tiny area compared to
| the US but a lot of people...maybe 500 million between India
| and Bangladesh.
| postsantum wrote:
| Just checked, Bangladesh has almost no unused land. Please
| take a look at google maps
| zadkey wrote:
| I don't trust China's population numbers at all. Officially
| before the one child policy they were at 800 million. After 30
| years of 1 child policy somehow they were at 1.2 billion. The
| math isn't mathing. How do you have explosive population growth
| when birth control is brutally enforced?
|
| The official fertility rates for that period was 1.3. For
| reference: 2.1 is the replacement rate.
|
| If anything their total population went down during one child
| policy.
| 3rodents wrote:
| The one child policy only really mattered in the cities, rural
| China had different rules. There is also no incentive for China
| to lie, quite the opposite, underreporting their population
| would be a boon for their success on the global stage: imagine
| if they are achieving what they achieve, with half as many
| people?
| empressplay wrote:
| Yes, except that China also uses its population as a military
| threat. It going down would take away some of the impact of
| that. So it always needs to go up, to reinforce it.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Mostly in the past before they were well industrialized.
| When you had India with over a billion people as a threat,
| it was a good measure. Now most of the surrounding
| countries have fallen below population replacement rate
| excess population can cause issues with economic growth in
| places resources and space are constrained.
| 3rodents wrote:
| Does it? Russia has 1/10th the purported population of
| China, lost most of their military aged men in a conflict
| that has exposed Russia's supposed military might as a work
| of fiction and yet the west remains scared senseless of
| Russia because of the nuclear threat. China has nuclear
| weapons, whether they have 10 million or 100 million men
| they can send to the frontlines to absorb bullets is
| irrelevant to their national security.
| sapiogram wrote:
| > Officially before the one child policy they were at 800
| million. After 30 years of 1 child policy somehow they were at
| 1.2 billion. The math isn't mathing.
|
| Even if I take your numbers at face value, it is absolutely
| possible for this math to math. To simplify massively, if the
| average person dies at 80 years old, the population growth
| today depends on the number of births 80 years ago, compared to
| today. Not 30 years ago. The population may have grown
| massively between 30 and 80 years ago, so that the absolute
| number of births remains high, despite a low birth rate.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Yep, people don't understand moving averages with a wide
| range. The old population getting older massively changes
| demographics. You start looking like Japan where a huge
| portion of the population is above retirement age.
|
| And this fits for China where the standard of living has
| massively increased. What would throw off most Americans is
| that in 1962 the average life expectancy in China was only 50
| years old, and has increased to roughly 78 today. 28
| additional years of life is huge and it was so rapid that it
| would create a massive increase in population.
|
| This also reverses causality on the one child population
| rule. They didn't add the rule because their population was
| huge at the time, it was added because increased life
| expectancy with nothing else would have increased their
| population now to something like 1.7 to 2 billion.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| And inverse is also true, so that China's population is
| currently shrinking and aging, despite the "1 child" policy
| being abandoned a decade ago.
| sct202 wrote:
| Just to put some numbers into perspective. China and Europe
| have roughly the same amount of land, and Europe has a
| population of 744m (vs your est of <800m for China). So like
| idk how that would make sense for them to be the same range of
| population when China seems way more overcrowded.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| > So like idk how that would make sense for them to be the
| same range of population when China seems way more
| overcrowded.
|
| Different population distributions. In particular, the
| population of China is concentrated in the eastern half of
| the country, with very few people living in the western half.
| Contrast to Europe, which from what I understand is more
| evenly spread out.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > The math isn't mathing. How do you have explosive population
| growth when birth control is brutally enforced?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_momentum
| maeln wrote:
| Lebanon has had no official census since ... 1932. Since the
| constitution distribute the power based on religion, any census
| that would mention religion might put into question the current
| distribution. In a country already plagued with religious
| conflict, this is less than ideal. You could make a secular
| census, but that might also reveal the extent of the population
| who is leaving Lebanon. So the Lebanese governments and political
| elites have done what they do best : Absolutely nothing (while
| stealing as much money as possible).
|
| It is both funny and sad that we have more accurate number of the
| size of the Lebanese diaspora than the actual number of people
| living in Lebanon.
| seszett wrote:
| > _Since the constitution distribute the power based on
| religion, any census that would mention religion might put into
| question the current distribution._
|
| Funny how similar it is to Belgium's situation, the "language
| border" was established through census and then was revised as
| few times with census results, but since not everyone was happy
| with it it was essentially fixed and stopped being revised.
|
| Today it's which side of the border you live in that determines
| which language you officially "speak".
| thunderbong wrote:
| The main tweet the article is referring to
|
| https://x.com/BonesawMD/status/2010343792126128535
| pimlottc wrote:
| Thanks for this, I assumed there would be some more rigor
| behind this but it hardly seems credible, it relies mostly on
| anecdotes and "common sense".
| Supermancho wrote:
| > Actually faking the existence of billions of people would
| require a global conspiracy orders of magnitude more complex than
| anything in human history...
|
| This is wildly incorrect and is intentionally narrow minded -
| obvious by the end of the paragraph. All there has to be is
| financial incentive. There were multiple, for decades. Aligned
| incentives are far more effective than coordinated deception. Ofc
| this assertion comes right after acknowledging that an island
| nation literally miscounted by HALF. I'm not sure there's
| anything in this blog post worth remembering. It seems ill-
| considered.
| torginus wrote:
| This sounds very conspiracy-y. I'm sure there are metrics like
| consumption of certain items like food, medicine, etc. which is
| at a mostly consistent level accross subsections the human
| population. Like arthiris medication, foodstuffs, diapers etc.
|
| It would take a very involved conspiracy to make these numbers
| fall in line with where they _should_ be given a certain pop cap,
| and I 'm not sure what would be the benefit.
|
| Like all conspiracy theories, if it requires a coordination of
| large unrelated organizations over long timeframes, which seems
| impossible even over the table, its almost certainly fake.
|
| Like you can fake census data, but not how many cans of beans
| does a US-headquartered supermarket chain sells.
| empressplay wrote:
| You don't need a conspiracy, you just need the right incentives
| (aid) and the rules (freely available). People are going to
| independently figure out how to game the system.
|
| Then there's also Occam: if you're a poor nation and you'll get
| more foreign aid if you inflate your population, you will
| inflate your population, full stop.
| pixl97 wrote:
| There are a few particular problems with this, and that is
| you're thinking like a first worlder.
|
| What we consider developing nations can quite often just go
| without these items. Economies in these countries can have
| rapid swings that cause massive changes in consumption.
| Shortages of medicines in one year can massively increase child
| deaths in the first year, where as the next 5 years don't have
| an issue with that.
|
| With the last one, maybe there is a tik-tok trend that makes
| beans popular for a year, and then it dies out and half as many
| beans are consumed. This also isn't counting the average
| calorie consumption in a country. 10 cans of beans in the US
| might feed 20-30 people in another country when supplemented
| from locally grown items.
|
| Shit's hard, yo.
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _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.
| observationist wrote:
| 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.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| >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?
| oyashirochama wrote:
| 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.
| thijson wrote:
| I wonder if the population numbers could be reverse
| engineered through things like light pollution seen by
| satellites, or food consumption.
|
| Some people claim that China's population is half of what
| the officials claim.
| jerf wrote:
| Yes, it absolutely can.
|
| 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.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| 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.
| ninininino wrote:
| Yes, see the work of Fuxian Yi as one example:
| https://www.reuters.com/world/china/researcher-questions-
| chi...
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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.
| observationist wrote:
| 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.)
| carlosjobim wrote:
| All "societies" from the smallest to the largest are built
| upon lies upon lies upon lies. When it starts falling
| apart, the violence commences.
| almosthere wrote:
| 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.
| Braxton1980 wrote:
| How is a strong incentive alone evidence of wrongdoing?
| crazygringo wrote:
| I didn't say it was. I was just providing the context. The
| entire middle of the article describes the wrongdoing.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > 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."
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _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._
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://www.cia.gov/the-world-
| factbook/about/archives/2023/c...
|
| > 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.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Papua_New_G
| uin...
|
| You can see the sources Wikipedia links to.
|
| > _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:
|
| https://population.un.org/dataportal/data/indicators/49/l
| oca...
|
| 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._
|
| https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/faqs/
|
| 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.
| stickfigure wrote:
| The author brought up more examples besides PNG:
|
| * Afghanistan
|
| * Nigeria
|
| * Congo
|
| * South Sudan
|
| * Eritrea
|
| * Chad
|
| * Somalia
|
| * South Africa
|
| 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".
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| matt-p wrote:
| 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.
| Marsymars wrote:
| > 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.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > 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.
| dataflow wrote:
| 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...
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| itsamario wrote:
| I remember hearing that NYC had millions of commuters a day via
| NJTransit.
|
| I took those trains for a decade and the math doesnt add up. The
| capacity of the carts and speed they operate through the tunnel
| suggests less than a million at most.
| zipy124 wrote:
| No it adds up. The latest data [0] shows an average of 3.7
| million a day on the subway. For comparison London on the
| underground has about 2.6 million a day [1]. Given the size of
| the cities and surrounding areas compared, these numbers seem
| reasonable. Are you to believe that all these public transport
| companies are all in some global scheme to fudge their numbers
| to similar magnitudes? The MTR in hong kong similarly reports
| 4.45 million a day [2], a similar amount. I'd wager a guess
| you'd see similar in Paris, Tokyo etc...
|
| [0]:https://www.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-
| bus...
|
| [1]: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/travel-in-
| london-2025-consolidate...
|
| [2]:
| https://www.mtr.com.hk/archive/corporate/en/investor/annual2...
| cptaj wrote:
| >Every election would have to be fake. Every government database
| would have to be full of fake names. And all for what? To get one
| over on the dumb Westerners?
|
| While I agree that the claim that world population is under 1
| billion is bonkers, I also think he grossly underestimates how
| frequent and large the fraud is.
|
| Take Venezuela for example, the UN and several NGO's have
| confirmed a diaspora caused by chavismo of well over 7 million
| people. This is not recognized by the venezuelan government and
| is not reflected in any of the stats pages you can find.
|
| That's a 20-30% difference in the real vs reported population of
| the country.
|
| And yes. They do fake the elections.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >world population is under 1 billion is bonkers,
|
| Yea, that would leave the US and Japan with about half the
| world population assuming our counts are even close to correct.
| e44858 wrote:
| > assuming our counts are even close to correct.
|
| That's a bold assumption. States get more representatives if
| they inflate the population count:
| https://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/congressional-
| ap...
| hbarka wrote:
| Data quality is always going to be an issue. In this case the
| reporting is based on an honor system. I imagine extrapolation
| using satellite imagery and mathematics on people mobility would
| be good for validation and correlation.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Sat imagery, understanding average household size, knowing
| average calorie consumption vs what can be grown on the ground,
| knowing imports of particular products, etc.
|
| For example you couldn't use the same algorithm that you would
| on US or Japan as you would on a non-developed/developing
| country, you'd get nonsensical numbers.
| Anonyneko wrote:
| The latest population census in Russia was executed so horribly
| that demographics experts still rely on the 2010 and earlier ones
| to figure out the approximate population number (the difference
| between estimations is in ~10 million range). Of course the whole
| war, relocation, and undocumented immigration things aren't
| making things any easier.
|
| Much easier to calculate population numbers in countries with a
| population register, but those are usually smaller countries like
| those in the Nordics. I don't think censuses are even held around
| here...?
| samus wrote:
| Those rely on a strong centralized government that can somehow
| penalize people for not keeping records up to date. Not
| necessarily by direct checks, but maybe via inconveniences
| caused by inaccuracies. They are probably using other data
| (aggregate statistics from health system, tax records, social
| services) to conduct cross checks.
|
| A few years back in Austria there was a small scandal as a
| newly introduced government app to notify about changing
| residence was used by a member of parliament to declare they
| moved into the Parliament.
| jl6 wrote:
| Dead Internet theory, meet Dead Earth theory. There are actually
| only 87 people in the world, and they've made up the rest as part
| of a welfare scam.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Interesting idea (confession, I can't get to the article)
|
| Regardless, I live in a place that, according to the magazines
| and blogs, has a very high level of crime. I don't actually
| believe it does.
|
| One sort of _confirmation_ of this. One study I saw was counting
| crimes that happened here per population -- but the college
| students were not counted in the population; and this was a time
| where yeah, e.g. college students stealing each others TV 's and
| or getting in fights etc, was prevalent.
| 827a wrote:
| My favorite conspiracy theory I've heard gain surprising traction
| in some circles is that the world population is closer to 5B, not
| 8B. I think the theory goes that there's so much miscounting in
| third-world countries, combined with perverse incentives at every
| level to seem bigger than you actually are in second-world
| countries, that the final =SUM(B1:B195) Excel formula "they" run
| to get the world population is based on so many nested and poorly
| reported =SUM() formulas that the number is far more inaccurate
| than just "slightly".
| dzonga wrote:
| the author thinks the inaccurate population numbers are just an
| African / 3rd world phenomenon - where dodgy officials inflate |
| understate numbers due to corruption etc
|
| same mistake - westerners keep on making - mostly of the liberal
| kind when they don't want to face reality.
|
| all countries have the same problem - whether developed | high
| trusting | low trusting or not.
|
| observe what happens during elections - now suddenly a rural
| village it could be in bumwhat Alabama or middle of nowhere
| Africa - numbers are suddenly inflated -
|
| same thing happens during humanitarian disasters - Side A accuses
| Side B of atrocities - then side A says XX number of people were
| killed | displaced - later on down the years we find out Side A
| made up the number the people would not have up x hell not even
| large X.
|
| it's just human nature - lie, deceive and make up reality!!
| blaufuchs wrote:
| Did I miss something here? Or is Bonesaw just completely
| trolling?
|
| >The true population of the world, Bonesaw said, was
| significantly less than 1 billion people.
|
| Even if we assume Bonesaw is correct and China has 500M people,
| India has 300M people in the cities and 0 rural population...
| that's only 200M left to reach 1B between all of the
| Americas/Europe/Africa and the rest of Asia.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| Maybe he's trolling, maybe he's a schizo or a conspiracy
| theorist. Regardless, the author thinks (as do I) that this is
| obviously ridiculous.
| blaufuchs wrote:
| Yeah I should have been clear that I'm disagreeing with
| Bonesaw and not the author here, whose article I enjoyed. I
| was just genuinely confused how one could add "500M + 300M +
| rest of world" and arrive at "significantly <1B", but I
| haven't been on Xitter in a minute now.
| flerchin wrote:
| Was that a mistranslation, and instead the meaning is that the
| true population is 1 billion fewer than the generally accepted
| ~8 billion people? So more like 7 billion?
| markstos wrote:
| My city of Bloomington appears to have almost a third of the
| population living in poverty according to the US Census, but
| you'd have a tough time seeing that if you drove through.
|
| What we have is a large university with almost half the
| population being college students.
|
| https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US1805860-bloomingt...
| vgivanovic wrote:
| >Actually faking the existence of billions of people would
| require a global conspiracy orders of magnitude more complex than
| anything in human history.
|
| No true. All that is required is for incentives to be roughly
| aligned for people to tend in a similar direction.
| mannyv wrote:
| Lot of data is "fake."
|
| I remember my political economy prof talking about when he was in
| the Prime Minister's office of some African country and they were
| "estimating" the GDP numbers for the OECD.
|
| Collecting statistics is hard when your basic systems don't
| function well and there are plenty of incentives for "optimistic
| projections." And in many countries statistics collection doesn't
| occur or are inaccurate because cheating is rampant. I mean, why
| tell the government your income when they're just going to tax
| you on it?
|
| You can see that in the US' import values. Everyone who imports
| knows that you can ask the shipper to fudge the invoiced amounts
| so the importer pays less in customs fees/taxes. The assumption
| by the statistics people is that it all "averages out." But they
| have no way to prove that assumption. And it's well known that
| transfer pricing is a total fantasy.
|
| So - lots of numbers are fake. In the West fewer numbers are
| fake, probably.
| sixsevenrot wrote:
| In March 1937, the four main statistical professionals working on
| the Census in TsUNKhU - the chief of the Sector for Population,
| Mikhail Kurman; chief of the Census Bureau, Olimpiy Kvitkin; his
| deputy, Lazar Brand; and the chief of the Sector for
| transportation and communication, Ivan Oblomov, were arrested and
| imprisoned. Soon they were joined by the Chief of TsUNKhU, Ivan
| Kraval, and the chiefs of most of the regional statistical
| centers, and executions followed
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Soviet_census
| robinhood wrote:
| Such an interesting article. Thanks for sharing it. Nothing
| interesting to say apart from this. I'll sleep less stupid
| tonight.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| What are the incentives to either pretend you have more people in
| your household than you do, or pretend you have more people in
| your city/region/country than you do?
|
| What are the incentives to get it right?
|
| Given the balance of incentives, it seems breathtakingly naive to
| think that we are within a few percent of the real population.
| The incentives (different, but present, in both rich and poor
| countries) are greatly mismatched.
|
| The problem is likely much worse than the writer of this article
| believes.
| newsclues wrote:
| As much as I hate it, but digital identity is a solution for
| poor demographic data.
|
| And digital identity and authentication seems to be a very
| important service, should it be in the hands of corporations or
| governments?
| TaoWay wrote:
| A lot of projection numbers on populations are inflated too.
| lurker919 wrote:
| Can't we just do a count(*) on the number of unique mobile
| numbers in every country? And add some estimate for children etc.
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