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Wait what? Public opinion surveys (if that's what you meant) are absolutely still subject to error. This is especially due to getting a representative mix of al

Wait what? Public opinion surveys (if that's what you meant) are absolutely still subject to error. This is especially due to getting a representative mix of all of the different populations. Even without those issues, you still have the issue of people you survey not telling the whole truth... or surveys being poorly designed so that the question people think they are answering is not what was really being asked. Data is hard. Just because you have some survey data and (maybe) did something statistical doesn't at all mean you should listen to it.

conistonwater 10y ago
I think it's generally accepted that unemployment and inflation estimates are based on reliable techniques: what sorts of errors are you thinking of here? I mean, in principle, anything you do could be wrong (you can never reach absolute certainty), but you would always do better by trying to analyse things properly than by giving up. Edit: I didn't mean surveys in general, I meant the specific cases of unemployment and inflation, which to my mind are the two most prominent examples of people going crazy rejecting well-established facts.
- ta_donk_gt 10y ago
  The right tends to prefer to reference labor participation rate, whereas the left tends to prefer unemployment rate. The reason for this is obvious: right now, unemployment rate advances the narrative of the left, and labor participation rate advances the narrative of the right. The argument from the right is that unemployment rate does not include the very large number of people who have given up searching for work (and have found some other way to survive, be it government assistance, or family, or charity, or illegal activities, etc.). This argues that the economy is actually in much worse shape than the unemployment rate would suggest. The argument from the left is that labor participation rate does not clearly indicate who really needs or wants to be working, only who is and is not working. This argues that the people out of the work force don't actually need to be in the workforce and therefore the economy is actually fine. If ever the unemployment rate works out better for the right, and labor participation rate better for the left, you will see the sides switch which metric they prefer to reference. That's how humans work. Calling those who don't subscribe to your preferred narrative "stupid" and "crazy" is probably not helpful.
  - conistonwater 10y ago
    > This argues that the economy is actually in much worse shape than the unemployment rate would suggest. This argument usually doesn't work because if you consider a different subset of the people who aren't working, you must then compare it to a different baseline. So being able to pick a different set of people to call unemployment (e.g., people not in labour force) doesn't actually let you claim the things are much better/worse, you still need to work further. In particular with respect to the labour participation rate, I think it's well known in leftish circles that it went down quite a lot in the GFC and that that represents a problem. I don't really know where you got your impression from. In any case, I disagree that that's the argument they are usually making when questioning unemployment statistics. It could be their argument, but they'd have to actually make that argument. There usually isn't much beyond just rejecting statistics, unfortunately. Furthermore, there is demonstrably a lot of people who think the inflation figures are downright made up (even here on HN), despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. In fact, the inflation example is even clearer, due to how little leeway there is in deciding, for example, what to call inflation. In any case, I didn't call them "stupid" and "crazy" because they "didn't subscribe to my preferred narrative", as you put it. It definitely wouldn't be stupid or crazy to make the argument you are making. There has been plenty of discussion in economics history of which measures best represent the state of the economy. However, if someone, as many politicians do, feels comfortable enough to reject that because they don't feel it's convenient, then, sure, "stupid" and "crazy" are decent enough words to describe that particular behaviour. After all, just because I can come up with a better argument for someone's position, doesn't mean I can substitute the argument they made with a different argument that I find more reasonable (it would be distinctly uncivil). Specifically with respect to unemployment rates, you and I may simply have been reading different things, but I believe what I said was accurate. One further thought: the unemployment rate (not the participation rate) is part of the Federal Reserve's mandate, and it is the rate that has traditionally been used, with perfectly decent theoretical justification, so I feel quite comfortable saying that it's not some kind of left-right partisan divide.
    - ta_donk_gt 10y ago
      > Specifically with respect to unemployment rates, you and I may simply have been reading different things Certainly possible, but what I generally see is: "the unemployment rate is not what [democratic administration] says it is because they redefined the metric to not include those that have given up trying to find work...the labor participation rate has dropped several percent since the beginning of [democratic administration], and the unemployment rate has also dropped several percent in that time, and these cannot both be the case." Often the sound bytes we're shown only show the "I don't believe it" part, but if you dig a bit, at least I, generally find more context and clarification in other statements from the individual (often in an expanded version of the same quote in the sound byte), showing that the above quote is roughly the thought process of most challenging the unemployment rate statistic. What the sides are really arguing about, as is the case with most "statistics" used in politics, is what the definition of "unemployed" should be. Re people dismissing clear facts, again, this is just human nature. The brain finds a way to twist reality around facts that challenge foundational beliefs. The more foundational the belief, meaning the more structure built on top of it and the more decisions you have made based on the belief, the harder your brain will work to twist reality to allow you to dismiss this inconvenient fact. All humans do this, and both political wings in this country do it equally. Somewhat meta, but believing that only the "other side" is victim to this behavior is yet another example of the behavior (and we all do it).
- soVeryTired 10y ago
  The average person has one testicle, one ovary, and less than two legs. I'm being facetious, but my point is that highly aggregated data can lose nuance. Personally I mistrust the inflation numbers that the government publishes, since I think there are major intergenerational effects that aren't captured by the figure. Young people have to contend with enormous student loan bills and massively inflated house prices, while these aren't issues for older people. In short, I don't think it's appropriate to try to describe the evolution of the purchasing power of an entire population using a single monthly figure.
  - ZeroGravitas 10y ago
    You are one of several people whose take on this seems to be "no one trusts statistics, we can fix this by introducing new, more complicated statistics, that better fit my personal argument" Now, I'm personally interested in new ways to look at the data, but in a world where everything is "rigged" what you're proposing sounds even more "rigged".
    - soVeryTired 10y ago
      I didn't actually propose that any new statistics be published, I just said the current ones are lacking. To say that "It's not appropriate to use a single monthly figure" is not the same as saying "We should publish a number of figures broken down by age, location, and other factors". I honestly don't know what the right approach is.
sjg007 10y ago
Well 80% of statistics are just made up... (this is a joke...)

conistonwater 10y ago

I think it's generally accepted that unemployment and inflation estimates are based on reliable techniques: what sorts of errors are you thinking of here? I mean, in principle, anything you do could be wrong (you can never reach absolute certainty), but you would always do better by trying to analyse things properly than by giving up. Edit: I didn't mean surveys in general, I meant the specific cases of unemployment and inflation, which to my mind are the two most prominent examples of people going crazy rejecting well-established facts.

ta_donk_gt 10y ago
The right tends to prefer to reference labor participation rate, whereas the left tends to prefer unemployment rate. The reason for this is obvious: right now, unemployment rate advances the narrative of the left, and labor participation rate advances the narrative of the right. The argument from the right is that unemployment rate does not include the very large number of people who have given up searching for work (and have found some other way to survive, be it government assistance, or family, or charity, or illegal activities, etc.). This argues that the economy is actually in much worse shape than the unemployment rate would suggest. The argument from the left is that labor participation rate does not clearly indicate who really needs or wants to be working, only who is and is not working. This argues that the people out of the work force don't actually need to be in the workforce and therefore the economy is actually fine. If ever the unemployment rate works out better for the right, and labor participation rate better for the left, you will see the sides switch which metric they prefer to reference. That's how humans work. Calling those who don't subscribe to your preferred narrative "stupid" and "crazy" is probably not helpful.
- conistonwater 10y ago
  > This argues that the economy is actually in much worse shape than the unemployment rate would suggest. This argument usually doesn't work because if you consider a different subset of the people who aren't working, you must then compare it to a different baseline. So being able to pick a different set of people to call unemployment (e.g., people not in labour force) doesn't actually let you claim the things are much better/worse, you still need to work further. In particular with respect to the labour participation rate, I think it's well known in leftish circles that it went down quite a lot in the GFC and that that represents a problem. I don't really know where you got your impression from. In any case, I disagree that that's the argument they are usually making when questioning unemployment statistics. It could be their argument, but they'd have to actually make that argument. There usually isn't much beyond just rejecting statistics, unfortunately. Furthermore, there is demonstrably a lot of people who think the inflation figures are downright made up (even here on HN), despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. In fact, the inflation example is even clearer, due to how little leeway there is in deciding, for example, what to call inflation. In any case, I didn't call them "stupid" and "crazy" because they "didn't subscribe to my preferred narrative", as you put it. It definitely wouldn't be stupid or crazy to make the argument you are making. There has been plenty of discussion in economics history of which measures best represent the state of the economy. However, if someone, as many politicians do, feels comfortable enough to reject that because they don't feel it's convenient, then, sure, "stupid" and "crazy" are decent enough words to describe that particular behaviour. After all, just because I can come up with a better argument for someone's position, doesn't mean I can substitute the argument they made with a different argument that I find more reasonable (it would be distinctly uncivil). Specifically with respect to unemployment rates, you and I may simply have been reading different things, but I believe what I said was accurate. One further thought: the unemployment rate (not the participation rate) is part of the Federal Reserve's mandate, and it is the rate that has traditionally been used, with perfectly decent theoretical justification, so I feel quite comfortable saying that it's not some kind of left-right partisan divide.
  - ta_donk_gt 10y ago
    > Specifically with respect to unemployment rates, you and I may simply have been reading different things Certainly possible, but what I generally see is: "the unemployment rate is not what [democratic administration] says it is because they redefined the metric to not include those that have given up trying to find work...the labor participation rate has dropped several percent since the beginning of [democratic administration], and the unemployment rate has also dropped several percent in that time, and these cannot both be the case." Often the sound bytes we're shown only show the "I don't believe it" part, but if you dig a bit, at least I, generally find more context and clarification in other statements from the individual (often in an expanded version of the same quote in the sound byte), showing that the above quote is roughly the thought process of most challenging the unemployment rate statistic. What the sides are really arguing about, as is the case with most "statistics" used in politics, is what the definition of "unemployed" should be. Re people dismissing clear facts, again, this is just human nature. The brain finds a way to twist reality around facts that challenge foundational beliefs. The more foundational the belief, meaning the more structure built on top of it and the more decisions you have made based on the belief, the harder your brain will work to twist reality to allow you to dismiss this inconvenient fact. All humans do this, and both political wings in this country do it equally. Somewhat meta, but believing that only the "other side" is victim to this behavior is yet another example of the behavior (and we all do it).
soVeryTired 10y ago
The average person has one testicle, one ovary, and less than two legs. I'm being facetious, but my point is that highly aggregated data can lose nuance. Personally I mistrust the inflation numbers that the government publishes, since I think there are major intergenerational effects that aren't captured by the figure. Young people have to contend with enormous student loan bills and massively inflated house prices, while these aren't issues for older people. In short, I don't think it's appropriate to try to describe the evolution of the purchasing power of an entire population using a single monthly figure.
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  You are one of several people whose take on this seems to be "no one trusts statistics, we can fix this by introducing new, more complicated statistics, that better fit my personal argument" Now, I'm personally interested in new ways to look at the data, but in a world where everything is "rigged" what you're proposing sounds even more "rigged".
  - soVeryTired 10y ago
    I didn't actually propose that any new statistics be published, I just said the current ones are lacking. To say that "It's not appropriate to use a single monthly figure" is not the same as saying "We should publish a number of figures broken down by age, location, and other factors". I honestly don't know what the right approach is.

sjg007 10y ago

Well 80% of statistics are just made up... (this is a joke...)