10 ms·

The replies here arguing we should publish it all are wild in the worst kind of first-order thinking way. It’s a census: it just asks questions. If you start

by asolove 4mo ago

The replies here arguing we should publish it all are wild in the worst kind of first-order thinking way. It’s a census: it just asks questions. If you start publishing and weaponizing the data against people with various attributes, they’ll just lie or not answer. And then you are left with worse than nothing: bad data people try to act on.

derektank 4mo ago
The entity most capable of weaponizing demographic data is the government itself. If people weren’t previously providing false information to the census, I’m skeptical that this change is what will push people over the edge.
- notfromhere 4mo ago
  Congress passed laws that blocked the federal government from fusing data across departments for this specific reason. the admin decided to ignore those, and a friendly congress is deciding to not act on that. You really, really don't want a government who can build a unified profile on you in that way.
  - r14c 4mo ago
    Isn't the issue here the lack of accountability? Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I don't think its a foregone conclusion that governments are fundamentally corrupt. Ours certainly is and we have a very weak constitution which makes it worse, but that's the US. I think better constitutions are possible, but we have to stop treating it like a sacred document and be practical.
    - Supermancho 4mo ago
      > I don't think its a foregone conclusion that governments are fundamentally corrupt There's a question of what you mean. Is it, can they be corrupt? have they been corrupt? are they currently corrupt (because of the previous, or incidentally)? Plato thought Democracy was corrupt and it's the least inherently corrupt system I know of. I would say they are fundamentally corrupt. The best you can do is try to limit it with a document (like the US Constitution) and setting up a multi-branch power structure capable of adversarial action. As you point out, the US does not have that and it's showing.
tbrownaw 4mo ago
Any use to identify where government resources are best used, will have people thinking they should have gotten more and would have if they'd answered differently. Ie, that their answers were "weaponized" against them.
- glenstein 4mo ago
  I guess the way to optimize is to find an equilibrium between an extreme of specificity and an extreme of vagueness that's still actionable from a high-level policy perspective. Something about this conversation is fundamentally broken if there's no space to iterate towards optimization and instead it's just swinging between maximalist extremes.
bagels 4mo ago
The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data. The most obvious example is the Census Bureau compiling lists of people of Japanese descent to imprison during WWII. That's just the most obvious one that I know of without looking up more. The real push for this now is to form lists of people to disenfranchise.
- conception 4mo ago
  Remember “leftist “ and transgender activists are terrorists now. First they came for…
  - whattheheckheck 4mo ago
    What's the actual antidote to this? 5calls.org?
    - estearum 4mo ago
      Voting and getting everyone you know to vote
      - p-e-w 4mo ago
        Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. Clearly this isn’t the answer. And neither is protesting, considering that 4 of the 5 largest demonstrations in US history happened in the past 10 years and achieved nothing.
        estearum 4mo ago
        Well right... you also need to vote for the correct ("less-bad") people and get your friends to do the same. Voting for the worse people makes things worse.
        gs17 4mo ago
        You also need the option to vote for "less-bad" people. Where I am now, my vote doesn't matter, even if it means the "less-bad" people win with no competition (as opposed to where I moved from where things were skewed the opposite way).
tokai 4mo ago
>It’s a census: it just asks questions. Thats what dutch and french bureaucrats thought until 1940.
ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago
You first gather the data while people don't know or care. Then you weaponize it later. It happened at least once not long ago in another country, seems not overreaction to be concerned about it
- kajman 4mo ago
  If this is a Nazi reference, Census data was used to send people to concentration camps here during the same era. Less awful than death camps, at least.
  - sylos 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - cwmoore 4mo ago
      They didn’t have drones.
    - voakbasda 4mo ago
      We easily could exceed their atrocities, because our modern capacities for inflicting harm are better, faster, and cheaper.
    - Loughla 4mo ago
      That's a very strong statement. I'm absolutely no fan of ICE or indefinite detention of people based on where they were born, but I'm not sure we have camps where we're committing genocide in the states. Nor do I see that in our future.
      - fc417fc802 4mo ago
        So if the death camps hadn't been for the purpose of genocide but rather for disposing of the poor or convicted criminals or perhaps those suspected of being illegal immigrants would that have made them okay? It seems to me that "I'm not sure we have camps where we're committing genocide in the states" is largely irrelevant to the issue at hand.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
mc32 4mo ago
You can’t completely trust what people say anyway. There are stated preferences and observed preferences in economics but it applies to other areas of life.
cyanydeez 4mo ago
have you not been paying attention for 10 years? At the top of the rotting snakehead they know all this, they arn't arguing in good faith.
HumblyTossed 4mo ago
This administration does ... not ... care ... about ... facts.
webnrrd2k 4mo ago
There's a pretty good chance the Elon Musk, plus Russia and China have had more-orless unrestricted access to American's data since the DOGE dismantling of US government. Plus, by intentionally removing security and accountability mechanisms it makes it impossible to accurately determine how bad the damage actually was.
throwawayffffas 4mo ago
The easy solution is to just reduce the resolution and scope of the data to the degree it is absolutely necessary. The census exists to inform representation decisions. All other concerns are addons. You can have all the data on the county or voting district level and strip data as you increase your resolution, to the point you only keep population number at the neighborhood, block level. Knowing the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic background of the residents of a single building block is only useful to discriminate against them.
- jmalicki 4mo ago
  There are plenty of other uses - knowing where to build stores to serve your target market, predicting possible pandemic vulnerabilities, etc.
- elictronic 4mo ago
  Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items. The current admin doesn’t need it to discriminate, you can just access cameras and license plate readers and target easily that way. The purpose is to scare people into misstating or obscuring data to reduce total house representation for an area. It’s to win votes, there are much better ways to do all these things than use this data, but effecting the vote with limited impact is a huge money savings.
  - AnthonyMouse 4mo ago
    > Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items. What does this have to do with the census? A doctor would know the race of their patient without needing to deduce it statistically from their neighborhood. Also, don't we not want financial institutions using demographic data decisions in making loans etc.?
    - fragmede 4mo ago
      How do you show that financial institutions aren't using demographic data unless you have it and run statistical analysis that shows they aren't? Banks aren't the government and can use methods that are illegal for the government to do in order to collect data. Let's say a bank manager is racist in giving out loans, how do you prove it unless you have the data to show it?
vkou 4mo ago
> they’ll just lie or not answer The Harper government actively worked on destroying the efficacy of the Canadian census, to make it more difficult for subsequent governments to make data-driven decisions. In addition to the obvious goal of making it easier to identify and target homosexuals, trans people, minorities, immigrants, it's quite possible that destroying future governments' ability to make good decisions is one of the objectives of the Republican party. Stop voting for the face-eating leopard party, already. They don't use the litterbox, shit everywhere, and actively try to eat your face. For all the very clever people pointing out that this is nothing new, I have two responses. 1. Your cell company may track your location, and your credit rating agencies know how many nose hairs you have, but they doesn't always (or even usually) have the deeply personal information you're supposed to put down in a census. 2. Enough of a change in degree is a change in kind. If you disagree, remember that Imperial Russia had the Okhrana and sent over a million Sybiraks - prisoners and exiles - to Siberia, and then the fucking CHEKA and the NKVD and then the (kinder, softer, slightly less outright murderous) KGB went ahead to send 18 million people into the GULAG system, and outright murdered half a million to a million. This was all the same, right? No difference?
dathinab 4mo ago
Yes. Extremists or in general any fraction willing to engage in systematic discrimination, harassment, terrorizing or similar love highly detailed non anonymized census data. Why? Because it gives them the perfect layout for which areas to harass (areas likely to yield), which to brutalize (areas unlikely to yield or from especially "hated" people), which to best not touch which (areas with too much influence/money or likely to contain hidden sympathizers), which to systematically take apart through other means like building a highway through them (e.g. "hated" communities to strong/connected to brutalize). etc. etc. All of this has a lot of history weather it's from right extremists like fascists or left extremists(1). At which point the question is, if the data you collect is that abuseable. Should you even collect it? Is it even really needed? (1): Like actual left extremists, the a lot of US sources have the habit to label people as left extremists which by EU standards sometimes aren't even left (but centrist) and very far away from extremism...
ilyagr 4mo ago
This might be the point. As long as they think the people who end up under-counted are not people this government would like to have voting power for the House of Representatives.
themafia 4mo ago
It's a census: it's only function is to determine the number of representatives your state should have. Please don't ask about my toilets, my demographics, or my religion. Thanks.
michelb 4mo ago
Imagine the weaponization possibilities when combining the census data with Amazon’s and Meta’s data, and possibly several other datasets readily available to this administration. Whatever is missing from one of them can be inferred or defined from the others. This might already be happening, it can’t be checked. Some (former) dictators would be salivating.
appreciatorBus 4mo ago
Then maybe the data shouldn’t be collected in the first place?
sidewndr46 4mo ago
The real question is why anyone answers these questions in the first place? I just wait until a census worker shows up and tell them how many people live at my domicile. It's needed for proper electoral representation and absolutely nothing else.
doh 4mo ago
[flagged]
cwmoore 4mo ago
The term “first-order thinking” just clicked for me. So revealing. One of today’s lucky 10,000

by asolove 4mo ago

derektank 4mo ago

The entity most capable of weaponizing demographic data is the government itself. If people weren’t previously providing false information to the census, I’m skeptical that this change is what will push people over the edge.

notfromhere 4mo ago
Congress passed laws that blocked the federal government from fusing data across departments for this specific reason. the admin decided to ignore those, and a friendly congress is deciding to not act on that. You really, really don't want a government who can build a unified profile on you in that way.
- r14c 4mo ago
  Isn't the issue here the lack of accountability? Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I don't think its a foregone conclusion that governments are fundamentally corrupt. Ours certainly is and we have a very weak constitution which makes it worse, but that's the US. I think better constitutions are possible, but we have to stop treating it like a sacred document and be practical.
  - Supermancho 4mo ago
    > I don't think its a foregone conclusion that governments are fundamentally corrupt There's a question of what you mean. Is it, can they be corrupt? have they been corrupt? are they currently corrupt (because of the previous, or incidentally)? Plato thought Democracy was corrupt and it's the least inherently corrupt system I know of. I would say they are fundamentally corrupt. The best you can do is try to limit it with a document (like the US Constitution) and setting up a multi-branch power structure capable of adversarial action. As you point out, the US does not have that and it's showing.

tbrownaw 4mo ago

Any use to identify where government resources are best used, will have people thinking they should have gotten more and would have if they'd answered differently. Ie, that their answers were "weaponized" against them.

glenstein 4mo ago
I guess the way to optimize is to find an equilibrium between an extreme of specificity and an extreme of vagueness that's still actionable from a high-level policy perspective. Something about this conversation is fundamentally broken if there's no space to iterate towards optimization and instead it's just swinging between maximalist extremes.

bagels 4mo ago

The US Government is the entity that weaponizes the data. The most obvious example is the Census Bureau compiling lists of people of Japanese descent to imprison during WWII. That's just the most obvious one that I know of without looking up more. The real push for this now is to form lists of people to disenfranchise.

conception 4mo ago
Remember “leftist “ and transgender activists are terrorists now. First they came for…
- whattheheckheck 4mo ago
  What's the actual antidote to this? 5calls.org?
  - estearum 4mo ago
    Voting and getting everyone you know to vote
    - p-e-w 4mo ago
      Turnout in the past few elections was already extraordinarily high. Clearly this isn’t the answer. And neither is protesting, considering that 4 of the 5 largest demonstrations in US history happened in the past 10 years and achieved nothing.
      - estearum 4mo ago
        Well right... you also need to vote for the correct ("less-bad") people and get your friends to do the same. Voting for the worse people makes things worse.
        gs17 4mo ago
        You also need the option to vote for "less-bad" people. Where I am now, my vote doesn't matter, even if it means the "less-bad" people win with no competition (as opposed to where I moved from where things were skewed the opposite way).

tokai 4mo ago

>It’s a census: it just asks questions. Thats what dutch and french bureaucrats thought until 1940.

ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago

You first gather the data while people don't know or care. Then you weaponize it later. It happened at least once not long ago in another country, seems not overreaction to be concerned about it

kajman 4mo ago
If this is a Nazi reference, Census data was used to send people to concentration camps here during the same era. Less awful than death camps, at least.
- sylos 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - cwmoore 4mo ago
    They didn’t have drones.
  - voakbasda 4mo ago
    We easily could exceed their atrocities, because our modern capacities for inflicting harm are better, faster, and cheaper.
  - Loughla 4mo ago
    That's a very strong statement. I'm absolutely no fan of ICE or indefinite detention of people based on where they were born, but I'm not sure we have camps where we're committing genocide in the states. Nor do I see that in our future.
    - fc417fc802 4mo ago
      So if the death camps hadn't been for the purpose of genocide but rather for disposing of the poor or convicted criminals or perhaps those suspected of being illegal immigrants would that have made them okay? It seems to me that "I'm not sure we have camps where we're committing genocide in the states" is largely irrelevant to the issue at hand.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

mc32 4mo ago

You can’t completely trust what people say anyway. There are stated preferences and observed preferences in economics but it applies to other areas of life.

cyanydeez 4mo ago

have you not been paying attention for 10 years? At the top of the rotting snakehead they know all this, they arn't arguing in good faith.

HumblyTossed 4mo ago

This administration does ... not ... care ... about ... facts.

webnrrd2k 4mo ago

There's a pretty good chance the Elon Musk, plus Russia and China have had more-orless unrestricted access to American's data since the DOGE dismantling of US government. Plus, by intentionally removing security and accountability mechanisms it makes it impossible to accurately determine how bad the damage actually was.

throwawayffffas 4mo ago

The easy solution is to just reduce the resolution and scope of the data to the degree it is absolutely necessary. The census exists to inform representation decisions. All other concerns are addons. You can have all the data on the county or voting district level and strip data as you increase your resolution, to the point you only keep population number at the neighborhood, block level. Knowing the racial, ethnic and socioeconomic background of the residents of a single building block is only useful to discriminate against them.

jmalicki 4mo ago
There are plenty of other uses - knowing where to build stores to serve your target market, predicting possible pandemic vulnerabilities, etc.
elictronic 4mo ago
Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items. The current admin doesn’t need it to discriminate, you can just access cameras and license plate readers and target easily that way. The purpose is to scare people into misstating or obscuring data to reduce total house representation for an area. It’s to win votes, there are much better ways to do all these things than use this data, but effecting the vote with limited impact is a huge money savings.
- AnthonyMouse 4mo ago
  > Demographic information is useful for medical, financial, educational, and so many other items. What does this have to do with the census? A doctor would know the race of their patient without needing to deduce it statistically from their neighborhood. Also, don't we not want financial institutions using demographic data decisions in making loans etc.?
  - fragmede 4mo ago
    How do you show that financial institutions aren't using demographic data unless you have it and run statistical analysis that shows they aren't? Banks aren't the government and can use methods that are illegal for the government to do in order to collect data. Let's say a bank manager is racist in giving out loans, how do you prove it unless you have the data to show it?

vkou 4mo ago

> they’ll just lie or not answer The Harper government actively worked on destroying the efficacy of the Canadian census, to make it more difficult for subsequent governments to make data-driven decisions. In addition to the obvious goal of making it easier to identify and target homosexuals, trans people, minorities, immigrants, it's quite possible that destroying future governments' ability to make good decisions is one of the objectives of the Republican party. Stop voting for the face-eating leopard party, already. They don't use the litterbox, shit everywhere, and actively try to eat your face. For all the very clever people pointing out that this is nothing new, I have two responses. 1. Your cell company may track your location, and your credit rating agencies know how many nose hairs you have, but they doesn't always (or even usually) have the deeply personal information you're supposed to put down in a census. 2. Enough of a change in degree is a change in kind. If you disagree, remember that Imperial Russia had the Okhrana and sent over a million Sybiraks - prisoners and exiles - to Siberia, and then the fucking CHEKA and the NKVD and then the (kinder, softer, slightly less outright murderous) KGB went ahead to send 18 million people into the GULAG system, and outright murdered half a million to a million. This was all the same, right? No difference?

dathinab 4mo ago

Yes. Extremists or in general any fraction willing to engage in systematic discrimination, harassment, terrorizing or similar love highly detailed non anonymized census data. Why? Because it gives them the perfect layout for which areas to harass (areas likely to yield), which to brutalize (areas unlikely to yield or from especially "hated" people), which to best not touch which (areas with too much influence/money or likely to contain hidden sympathizers), which to systematically take apart through other means like building a highway through them (e.g. "hated" communities to strong/connected to brutalize). etc. etc. All of this has a lot of history weather it's from right extremists like fascists or left extremists(1). At which point the question is, if the data you collect is that abuseable. Should you even collect it? Is it even really needed? (1): Like actual left extremists, the a lot of US sources have the habit to label people as left extremists which by EU standards sometimes aren't even left (but centrist) and very far away from extremism...

ilyagr 4mo ago

This might be the point. As long as they think the people who end up under-counted are not people this government would like to have voting power for the House of Representatives.

themafia 4mo ago

It's a census: it's only function is to determine the number of representatives your state should have. Please don't ask about my toilets, my demographics, or my religion. Thanks.

michelb 4mo ago

Imagine the weaponization possibilities when combining the census data with Amazon’s and Meta’s data, and possibly several other datasets readily available to this administration. Whatever is missing from one of them can be inferred or defined from the others. This might already be happening, it can’t be checked. Some (former) dictators would be salivating.

appreciatorBus 4mo ago

Then maybe the data shouldn’t be collected in the first place?

sidewndr46 4mo ago

The real question is why anyone answers these questions in the first place? I just wait until a census worker shows up and tell them how many people live at my domicile. It's needed for proper electoral representation and absolutely nothing else.

doh 4mo ago

[flagged]

cwmoore 4mo ago

The term “first-order thinking” just clicked for me. So revealing. One of today’s lucky 10,000