5 ms·

You ask in effect: 'How is it that a data collection - whose cardinality is well into the hundreds of millions, likely close to half a billion (500,000,000);

You ask in effect: 'How is it that a data collection - whose cardinality is well into the hundreds of millions, likely close to half a billion (500,000,000); - which has been maintained for now just about exactly a hundred years; - which predates birth certificates and birth records being common across large swaths of the country (not predates their systematization or encoding, but predates their reliable existence); - which for a lot of its history has been maintained by hand, should come to have occasional inconsistencies?' So framed in knowledge of the Social Security Administration's history, I confide the question may reveal its own answer.

mike_hearn 2y ago
That's not what he's asking. He's asking why there apparently isn't a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation, assuming that's the issue. Bear in mind that social security fraud is a major problem in many countries and impossibly old people is a usual indicator. The famous "blue zones" that were once studied for their long lived people are now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud.
- thecopy 2y ago
  >now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud Im genuinely curious about this, would you mind sharing references?
  - throwanem 2y ago
    See my nearby comment [1] with links and context on the study to which GP is referring. Tl;dr: the claim is not supported. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076455
- zettabomb 2y ago
  >a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation I understood GP as saying that this data is the best, cleanest data available. If nothing better exists, then record what you have. If that means some fields are blank, well then they're blank - you'll have to deal with this for country-sized databases, one way or another.
- throwanem 2y ago
  > That's not what he's asking. He's asking why there apparently isn't a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation, assuming that's the issue. If that's what he was trying to ask, then I have, as detailed above, some notes on the attempt. But the myth that Social Security numbers were ever designed to work even half-assedly well as a single national ID number will never die, I suppose. > Bear in mind that social security fraud is a major problem in many countries and impossibly old people is a usual indicator. The famous "blue zones" that were once studied for their long lived people are now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud. I can't really evaluate Newman's preprint [1] with much confidence, but it's only been out since September, and the Ig Nobel isn't peer review. Given also that the US state with the largest count of "supercentennarians" in Newman's data, Iowa, has a whopping 37 [2] of them, you're stretching this piece of un-peer-reviewed research far past anything it could reasonably be asked to support - hence, I suspect, the "are now believed" passive-voice weaseling in your claim quoted above. [1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3 [2] As given "1.25e-05" (p. 5, ibid.) or 12.5 per million, for a population just over three million. I've taken the liberty of rounding down on the assumption we are not meant to be counting fractional supercentennarians.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    SSNs were designed to act as a national ID number for the purposes of the social security system. It's in the name. Why are you describing this as a "myth"? Do you think the people who designed that system sat down and said, right boys, how can we half-ass this? Peer review hardly means anything in these sorts of fields but seeing as you asked, the same guy has previously published peer-reviewed papers on fraud in Blue Zones research. Here's a press release with some references: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/2024/sep/ucl-demographers-work-debunking-blue-zone-regions-exceptional-lifespans-wins-ig-nobel-prize https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/2024/sep/ucl-demographers-wor... > Dr Newman has previously disproved a 2016 study published in Nature on extreme-age research that accidentally rounded off a substantial amount of its data to zero. His peer-reviewed paper demonstrated that if corrected, this error eliminated the core findings claiming that human lifespan had a defined limit. Then, Dr Newman also countered a 2018 paper which made the opposite claim and, in the process, demonstrated a theoretical result predicting that patterns in old-age data are likely to be dominated by errors. In investigating this theory, Dr Newman demonstrated fundamental and comedic mismatches between longevity claims and observed patterns. In the process, Dr Newman revealed that the well-publicised “Blue Zones” claims for the secrets of longevity are infallibly flawed. Dr Newman showed that the highest rates of achieving extreme old age are predicted by high poverty, the lack of birth certificates, and fewer 90-year-olds. Poverty and pressure to commit pension fraud were shown to be excellent indicators of reaching ages 100+ in a way that is ‘the opposite of rational expectations’.
- cm2187 2y ago
  But mostly given that the primary condition for receiving social security is age, it doesn't inspire confidence that they are making payment without having any age data.
  - Muromec 2y ago
    They probably do have reasonabke checks in place, likely done manually when applying. Just because the computer doesn't have it in a searchable database doesn't mean the system as a whole doesnt know
    - fallingknife 2y ago
      Why would they not add a birthday to the DB after making the age check?
      - Muromec 2y ago
        I obviously can't know why, but apparently the system allows to keep receiving benefits without the date being present in the database and maybe even claim benefits without the date being present, which is why. Maybe the data was there initially, but was deleted or lost for technical reasons, for example the date was incomplete, e.g. only the year of birth was known, but not the exact day and then was dropped to null as invalid during some kind of upgrade. Maybe the data was not possible to enter into the system for technical reasons -- somebody didn't have access, something was down, the next shift was supposed to enter it once the system was back up. Maybe the same, but for process reasons, for example setting the date requires attaching the birth certificate and the birth certificate is lost. Maybe the data was intended to be entered, but somebody forgot to actually do it, was waiting for birth certificate to be produced, but approved the benefits provisionally. Maybe the birth certificate was shown to the official, but was of the wrong kind (handwritten extract, foreign document without consular legalization, damaged, illegible or incomplete date), so it was legit enough to start paying benefits but not legit enough to upload to the server. Maybe the date was conflicting with other records somehow. Maybe there was a court decision involved which determined eligibility for benefits but didn't determine exact date of birth. The key point here -- the system allows for this kind of inconsistency (benefits are being paid, but the date is not present) and relies on a human process to eventually reach a consistent state, but the process failed and nobody really cares to rectify it as long as benefits are being paid. That's assuming the benefits are actually paid to those people and the organization is not aware of this data issue and not investigating those people for fraud right now. In an organization big enough there is always this kind of stuff happening (see "seeing like a bank"), which is tolerated as long as statutory task is not compromised.
- tpm 2y ago
  > social security fraud is a major problem in many countries It is not a major problem, it is a minor problem blown completely out of proportions by right-wing propaganda to cover much bigger problems caused by power-grabbing, tax-evading plutocracy. > a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation What would that process look like assuming you are e.g. trying to establish a DOB of a person born long time ago in a country that does not exist anymore under wartime conditions? Would that be cost effective?
londons_explore 2y ago
Inconsistencies make sense. But it also seems to fine to say "we aren't paying out any more money for any inconsistent records till the person comes forward and gives us the info to fix the records". Obviously, if such a thing is done at scale, you need to have the staff to handle all the phone calls etc in a timely manner.
- Muromec 2y ago
  It's not the fault of the person, there is no legal basis to do so and it simply doesn't matter. Eventually everyobe just does anyway.
- bawolff 2y ago
  Until what? The person produces records that don't exist? Someone born in a cabin in the middle of the woods 90 years ago is not neccesarily going to have "info" to fix their birth records (especially if non religious, so there are no church records). They could give you a date, but they aren't going to be in a position to prove it.
  - londons_explore 2y ago
    In which case you review the details they can provide, and if it looks likely legit you re-enable it. However if their name is "bobby tables" and their date of birth is 35th January 1806, and their only proof of that is a handwritten note with star signs, you disable it till either more proof is provided or a court makes a final decision.
    - throwanem 2y ago
      Meanwhile here in the real world, when the US government arbitrarily refuses to honor its agreements - obligations it has in good faith entered into, and which no other party first violated - the dollar cracks. Only a very stupid American (or Englishman) wants that. I concede there are many very stupid Americans (and Englishmen) to the fore just now. They are sadly no less stupid for such prominence.
    - 2y ago
SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
> which predates birth certificates and birth records being common across large swaths of the country All true, but you underestimate severity of the problem by a large margin if you assume that it is confined to the USA, a fairly affluent and bureaucratically stable country. People in USA databases aren't necessarily born in the USA. Refugees by definition don't come from situations with stability.
- throwanem 2y ago
  I can't tell what argument you're trying to advance here.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
    " large swaths of the country" -> Internal to the country. it's worse, it's not purely an internal problem. I mean that people in USA databases aren't necessarily born in the USA. That the USA's record-keeping is better than many countries. And that many people go to the USA because of instability that is incompatible with good record-keeping. Same with UK, EU or any other western country. Western culture makes more of a persons "Birthday" than some others. I have edited the above comment to clarify.
MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
According to the Social Security database there are 20,789,589 living people over the age of 100. According to the last US census that number was about 90,00. Are you ok with sending social security checks to 20 million dead people?
- loktarogar 2y ago
  Do we send Social Security checks to everyone in the Social Security database?
  - MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
    There is a flag that marks an entry as active. If that flag was set to inactive, there wouldn’t be an issue.
    - loktarogar 2y ago
      I'm not worried about Social Security knowing if everyone in their DB is alive or not. I am only worried about dead people still receiving funds. How many of those 20 million are receiving funds? If someone is marked alive incorrectly and is not receiving funds, I do not care if that data is bad. It's not ideal, but it's not an actual problem.
      - MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
        Yes, the issue is if there is social security fraud, not if someone is incorrectly filed as alive. We will see how much of it was fraudulent once the suspicious database entries have been investigated.
        loktarogar 2y ago
        So it's not 20 million checks, then?
        2y ago

mike_hearn 2y ago

That's not what he's asking. He's asking why there apparently isn't a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation, assuming that's the issue. Bear in mind that social security fraud is a major problem in many countries and impossibly old people is a usual indicator. The famous "blue zones" that were once studied for their long lived people are now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud.

thecopy 2y ago
>now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud Im genuinely curious about this, would you mind sharing references?
- throwanem 2y ago
  See my nearby comment [1] with links and context on the study to which GP is referring. Tl;dr: the claim is not supported. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076455
zettabomb 2y ago
>a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation I understood GP as saying that this data is the best, cleanest data available. If nothing better exists, then record what you have. If that means some fields are blank, well then they're blank - you'll have to deal with this for country-sized databases, one way or another.
throwanem 2y ago
> That's not what he's asking. He's asking why there apparently isn't a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation, assuming that's the issue. If that's what he was trying to ask, then I have, as detailed above, some notes on the attempt. But the myth that Social Security numbers were ever designed to work even half-assedly well as a single national ID number will never die, I suppose. > Bear in mind that social security fraud is a major problem in many countries and impossibly old people is a usual indicator. The famous "blue zones" that were once studied for their long lived people are now believed to mostly be an artifact of undetected pensions fraud. I can't really evaluate Newman's preprint [1] with much confidence, but it's only been out since September, and the Ig Nobel isn't peer review. Given also that the US state with the largest count of "supercentennarians" in Newman's data, Iowa, has a whopping 37 [2] of them, you're stretching this piece of un-peer-reviewed research far past anything it could reasonably be asked to support - hence, I suspect, the "are now believed" passive-voice weaseling in your claim quoted above. [1] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/704080v3 [2] As given "1.25e-05" (p. 5, ibid.) or 12.5 per million, for a population just over three million. I've taken the liberty of rounding down on the assumption we are not meant to be counting fractional supercentennarians.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  SSNs were designed to act as a national ID number for the purposes of the social security system. It's in the name. Why are you describing this as a "myth"? Do you think the people who designed that system sat down and said, right boys, how can we half-ass this? Peer review hardly means anything in these sorts of fields but seeing as you asked, the same guy has previously published peer-reviewed papers on fraud in Blue Zones research. Here's a press release with some references: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/2024/sep/ucl-demographers-work-debunking-blue-zone-regions-exceptional-lifespans-wins-ig-nobel-prize https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/2024/sep/ucl-demographers-wor... > Dr Newman has previously disproved a 2016 study published in Nature on extreme-age research that accidentally rounded off a substantial amount of its data to zero. His peer-reviewed paper demonstrated that if corrected, this error eliminated the core findings claiming that human lifespan had a defined limit. Then, Dr Newman also countered a 2018 paper which made the opposite claim and, in the process, demonstrated a theoretical result predicting that patterns in old-age data are likely to be dominated by errors. In investigating this theory, Dr Newman demonstrated fundamental and comedic mismatches between longevity claims and observed patterns. In the process, Dr Newman revealed that the well-publicised “Blue Zones” claims for the secrets of longevity are infallibly flawed. Dr Newman showed that the highest rates of achieving extreme old age are predicted by high poverty, the lack of birth certificates, and fewer 90-year-olds. Poverty and pressure to commit pension fraud were shown to be excellent indicators of reaching ages 100+ in a way that is ‘the opposite of rational expectations’.
cm2187 2y ago
But mostly given that the primary condition for receiving social security is age, it doesn't inspire confidence that they are making payment without having any age data.
- Muromec 2y ago
  They probably do have reasonabke checks in place, likely done manually when applying. Just because the computer doesn't have it in a searchable database doesn't mean the system as a whole doesnt know
  - fallingknife 2y ago
    Why would they not add a birthday to the DB after making the age check?
    - Muromec 2y ago
      I obviously can't know why, but apparently the system allows to keep receiving benefits without the date being present in the database and maybe even claim benefits without the date being present, which is why. Maybe the data was there initially, but was deleted or lost for technical reasons, for example the date was incomplete, e.g. only the year of birth was known, but not the exact day and then was dropped to null as invalid during some kind of upgrade. Maybe the data was not possible to enter into the system for technical reasons -- somebody didn't have access, something was down, the next shift was supposed to enter it once the system was back up. Maybe the same, but for process reasons, for example setting the date requires attaching the birth certificate and the birth certificate is lost. Maybe the data was intended to be entered, but somebody forgot to actually do it, was waiting for birth certificate to be produced, but approved the benefits provisionally. Maybe the birth certificate was shown to the official, but was of the wrong kind (handwritten extract, foreign document without consular legalization, damaged, illegible or incomplete date), so it was legit enough to start paying benefits but not legit enough to upload to the server. Maybe the date was conflicting with other records somehow. Maybe there was a court decision involved which determined eligibility for benefits but didn't determine exact date of birth. The key point here -- the system allows for this kind of inconsistency (benefits are being paid, but the date is not present) and relies on a human process to eventually reach a consistent state, but the process failed and nobody really cares to rectify it as long as benefits are being paid. That's assuming the benefits are actually paid to those people and the organization is not aware of this data issue and not investigating those people for fraud right now. In an organization big enough there is always this kind of stuff happening (see "seeing like a bank"), which is tolerated as long as statutory task is not compromised.
tpm 2y ago
> social security fraud is a major problem in many countries It is not a major problem, it is a minor problem blown completely out of proportions by right-wing propaganda to cover much bigger problems caused by power-grabbing, tax-evading plutocracy. > a standard process to locate and clean missing data through investigation What would that process look like assuming you are e.g. trying to establish a DOB of a person born long time ago in a country that does not exist anymore under wartime conditions? Would that be cost effective?

londons_explore 2y ago

Inconsistencies make sense. But it also seems to fine to say "we aren't paying out any more money for any inconsistent records till the person comes forward and gives us the info to fix the records". Obviously, if such a thing is done at scale, you need to have the staff to handle all the phone calls etc in a timely manner.

Muromec 2y ago
It's not the fault of the person, there is no legal basis to do so and it simply doesn't matter. Eventually everyobe just does anyway.
bawolff 2y ago
Until what? The person produces records that don't exist? Someone born in a cabin in the middle of the woods 90 years ago is not neccesarily going to have "info" to fix their birth records (especially if non religious, so there are no church records). They could give you a date, but they aren't going to be in a position to prove it.
- londons_explore 2y ago
  In which case you review the details they can provide, and if it looks likely legit you re-enable it. However if their name is "bobby tables" and their date of birth is 35th January 1806, and their only proof of that is a handwritten note with star signs, you disable it till either more proof is provided or a court makes a final decision.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    Meanwhile here in the real world, when the US government arbitrarily refuses to honor its agreements - obligations it has in good faith entered into, and which no other party first violated - the dollar cracks. Only a very stupid American (or Englishman) wants that. I concede there are many very stupid Americans (and Englishmen) to the fore just now. They are sadly no less stupid for such prominence.
  - 2y ago

SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago

> which predates birth certificates and birth records being common across large swaths of the country All true, but you underestimate severity of the problem by a large margin if you assume that it is confined to the USA, a fairly affluent and bureaucratically stable country. People in USA databases aren't necessarily born in the USA. Refugees by definition don't come from situations with stability.

throwanem 2y ago
I can't tell what argument you're trying to advance here.
- SideburnsOfDoom 2y ago
  " large swaths of the country" -> Internal to the country. it's worse, it's not purely an internal problem. I mean that people in USA databases aren't necessarily born in the USA. That the USA's record-keeping is better than many countries. And that many people go to the USA because of instability that is incompatible with good record-keeping. Same with UK, EU or any other western country. Western culture makes more of a persons "Birthday" than some others. I have edited the above comment to clarify.

MrBuddyCasino 2y ago

According to the Social Security database there are 20,789,589 living people over the age of 100. According to the last US census that number was about 90,00. Are you ok with sending social security checks to 20 million dead people?

loktarogar 2y ago
Do we send Social Security checks to everyone in the Social Security database?
- MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
  There is a flag that marks an entry as active. If that flag was set to inactive, there wouldn’t be an issue.
  - loktarogar 2y ago
    I'm not worried about Social Security knowing if everyone in their DB is alive or not. I am only worried about dead people still receiving funds. How many of those 20 million are receiving funds? If someone is marked alive incorrectly and is not receiving funds, I do not care if that data is bad. It's not ideal, but it's not an actual problem.
    - MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
      Yes, the issue is if there is social security fraud, not if someone is incorrectly filed as alive. We will see how much of it was fraudulent once the suspicious database entries have been investigated.
      - loktarogar 2y ago
        So it's not 20 million checks, then?
        2y ago