The agency has already removed scientific data from public view. More could follow.
Updated at 5:53 p.m. on January 31, 2025
Last night, scientists began to hear cryptic and foreboding warnings from colleagues: Go to the CDC website, and download your data now. They were all telling one another the same thing: Data on the website were about to disappear, or be altered, to comply with the Trump administration’s ongoing attempt to scrub federal agencies of any mention of gender, DEI, and accessibility. “I was up until 2 a.m.,” Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan who relies on the CDC’s data to track viral outbreaks, told me. She archived whatever she could.
What they feared quickly came to pass. Already, content from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, which includes data from a national survey, has disappeared; so have parts of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry’s Social Vulnerability Index and the Environmental Justice Index. The CDC’s landing page for HIV data has also vanished. And the agency’s AtlasPlus tool, which contains nearly 20 years of CDC surveillance data on HIV, hepatitis, sexually transmitted infections, and tuberculosis, is down. Several scientists I talked with told me they had heard directly from contacts at the CDC that the agency has directed employees to scrub any mention of “gender” from its site and the data that it shares there, replacing it with “sex.”
The full scope of the purge isn’t yet clear. One document obtained by The Atlantic indicated that the government was, as of yesterday evening, intending to target and replace, at a minimum, several “suggested keywords”—including “pregnant people, transgender, binary, non-binary, gender, assigned at birth, binary [sic], non-binary [sic], cisgender, queer, gender identity, gender minority, anything with pronouns”—in CDC content. While these terms are often politicized, some represent demographic variables that researchers collect when tracking the ebb and flow of diseases and health conditions across populations. Should they be reworded, or even removed entirely, from data sets to comply with the executive order, researchers and health-care providers might have a much harder time figuring out how diseases affect specific communities—making it more challenging to serve Americans on the whole.
CDC data’s “explicit purpose” is to guide researchers toward the places and people who most need attention, Patrick Sullivan, an epidemiologist at Emory University and a former CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service officer, told me. As the changes unfold before him, he said, “it’s hard to understand how this benefits health.”
When I contacted the CDC, a spokesperson redirected my requests for comment to the Department of Health and Human Services. After this story was published, an HHS spokesperson said that “all changes to the HHS website and HHS division websites are in accordance with President Trump’s January 20 Executive Orders” on gender and DEI.
The government appears to understand that these changes could have scientific implications: The document directing a review of CDC content suggests that some work could be altered without “changing the meaning or scientific integrity of the content,” and that any such changes should be considered “routine.” Changing other content, according to the document, would require review by an expert precisely because any alterations would risk scientific integrity. But the document does not specify how data would be sorted into those categories, or at whose discretion.
“My fear is that in the short term, entire data sets would be taken down,” then reappear with demographic variables removed or altered to conform with DEI restrictions, Katie Biello, an epidemiologist at Brown, told me. Excising mention of gender and sexual orientation, for instance, from public-health data sets could require stripping entire columns of data out. If the government chooses to define sex as binary, transgender people and nonbinary people, among others, could be effectively erased. In response to the ongoing changes, some groups of researchers are now rushing to archive the CDC website in full.
Acknowledging and addressing health differences among demographic groups is a basic epidemiological tenet, Biello told me, “so we know where to target our health interventions.” She pointed to examples in her own field: Gay men have higher rates of STIs, but lower rates of obesity; transgender women have higher rates of HIV, but lower rates of prostate cancer. More broadly, demographic changes to data sets could limit the country’s ability to identify which Americans are most at risk from an expansive list of conditions including adolescent depression, STIs, even sex-specific cancers. Changing data sets in this way would be tantamount to “erasing our ability to use data and evidence” to care for people, Rachel Hardeman, a health-equity expert at the University of Minnesota, told me.
Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Brown, pointed to mpox as a recent example of how replacing “gender” with “sex,” or ignoring sexual orientation, could limit effective public-health responses. At the beginning of the United States’ 2022 outbreak, neither researchers nor the public had much clarity on who was most affected, leading to widespread panic. “Officials were talking about the situation as if it was a risk we equally faced,” Nuzzo said. By collecting detailed demographic information, researchers were able to show that the disease was primarily affecting men who have sex with men, allowing officials to more efficiently allocate resources, including vaccines, and bring the epidemic under control before it affected Americans more widely.
A scrub such as this could also change how the government allocates funds for long-standing threats to public health, which could widen health-equity gaps, or reverse progress in combatting them. Rates of STIs more generally have recently begun to plateau in the U.S., after decades of steady increase—but altering data that focus interventions on, say, transgender populations, or men who have sex with men, could undo those gains. If no data exist to prove that a health issue concentrates within a particular community, that “provides a justification to cut funding,” one researcher told me. (Several scientists who spoke with me for this article requested anonymity, for fear of retaliation for speaking out about the loss of federal data.) Sullivan, whose work focuses on HIV surveillance, compared the government’s actions to, effectively, destroying the road map to determining who in America most needs screening, pre-exposure prophylaxis, and treatment.
Much of the data on the CDC website have been aggregated from states, so it would be possible for researchers to reassemble those data sets, Nuzzo pointed out. But that’s an onerous task, and several scientists told me they never thought they’d be in a position where they’d have to scramble to squirrel away publicly available federal data. Nuzzo also worried that states might be reluctant in the future to share data with the federal government, or might decide not to bother collecting certain data at all. On the most basic scientific level, changing federal-government data means those data become unreliable. Public-health data are collected with the intention of sussing out which populations most need health interventions; altering those data leaves behind a skewed portrait of reality.
Read the original article
Comments
Removing these records from the public internet could likely be considered illegal under the OPEN Government Data Act, 44 U.S.C. § 3506:
> (d) With respect to information dissemination, each agency shall— (3) provide adequate notice when initiating, substantially modifying, or terminating significant information dissemination products; (4) not, except where specifically authorized by statute— (A) establish an exclusive, restricted, or other distribution arrangement that interferes with timely and equitable availability of public information to the public; (B) restrict or regulate the use, resale, or redissemination of public information by the public
If these datasets were actually permanently deleted then the incident should be investigated by NARA [1]. The people responsible could be charged with a crime under 18 U.S.C. § 2071: > (b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States.
1. https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/resources/unauthorized...
Damage done, mission accomplished... If you do something illegal and can get away with it relatively unscathed, then it isn't in practice illegal.
By dataflow 2025-02-025:03 Who would even prosecute? State attorneys general?
How do you know you've gotten away with it? That takes the rest of your life. (Well, statute of limitations.)
It's going to be a couple months at most. If it's not punished immediately, it's practically legal with the current gov. And the next one will have way bigger things to unfuck than some missing documents.
> And the next one will have way bigger things to unfuck than some missing documents.
Assuming there is going to be a next one which isn’t wholly aligned with the current one. That’s far from a given.
By astrange 2025-02-0322:12 The federal government has no control over the elections that replace it.
By thanhhaimai 2025-02-024:131 reply The question becomes: Is this crime pardonable? If yes, how likely the current administration will pardon those people?
They can't do anything about state AGs. Federalism is kind of silly but it works out here.
By astrange 2025-02-028:17 No, but if it affects someone in the state there's usually something to get them on.
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-0220:44 My understanding is that anyone can sue anyone in theory. Ideally, yes.
In practice, the State AG's are one of the most respectable powers to sue for a federal law being broken, which would then go to federal court. Ideally the SCOTUS would step in itself and injunction all this stuff so it doesn't get to this point, but Trump sure is working them overtime.
By zellyn 2025-02-0414:59 Trump is just going to blanket pardon anyone involved.
By ilrwbwrkhv 2025-02-022:482 reply Lol I think anyone who thinks legal and illegal mean anything, has still not gotten the plot.
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-0220:441 reply Courts are still fighting. Something are being overturned already (which is lightning quick). The moment we throw our hands up and give up is when the administration wins.
By _y5hn 2025-02-0222:13 [dupe]
By dataflow 2025-02-025:02 Yeah that was basically my point with my earlier comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42905289
By throw101010 2025-02-023:222 reply If this was an order from the President as an official act, no scrutiny can be applied here in any court (broad immunity recently granted by the SCOTUS: absolute immunity for actions within his core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for other official acts)... so good luck proving any wrongdoing without any evidence...
If you go after any of the underlings who executed such order, they are likely getting auto-pardonned by Trump if he gave the order (otherwise it will make it harder to find people to execute his "illegal" orders next). There is no such thing as illegal for this administration. Wake up.
That's not true. The restriction applies only to scrutiny of the President himself -- his agents still can be prosecuted.
By chgs 2025-02-029:35 His agents can be pardoned. He’s done that for thousands already.
By trashtester 2025-02-0213:241 reply And he can pardon them, without even specifying what he pardons them for. Indeed, this seems to be becoming the the norm.
The US really needs to reign in the pardoning power. There are 3 areas in particular that need coverage (I'll cover pardons by the President, but the same might apply to Governors):
1) Most pardons come with a political cost, either for the president himself or his party. The main exception is just after an election, especially during the President's last term. This could be solved by outlawing pardons during the last 6 months of a term. At minimum, morally questionable pardons should come with such a cost.
2) All pardons should specificy specifically what actions and potential crimes they apply to. They do not specifically need to be admission of guilt (as they may be for gray zone behavior that could need protection against political prosecution by the next administration), but they do need to specify what actions or allegations they apply to.
3) Congress' ability to specifically contest pardons should be clarified. Specifically, congress should have the ability to contest a pardon, if the pardon is made from personal interest, seriously undermines the rule of law or national security.
Also, since the sitting president's party may controll the Speaker seat at the time, even the NEXT congress should have a chance to start proceedings. This requires that congress retains the right to do this even if the sitting president resigns before the term ends. (Since the new congress starts before the president's normal term ends).
Taken together, the above 3 points would ensure that IF a president is seen by the general public to abuse the pardon power, voters would get one chance at voting for representatives (and senators) that promise to "restore justice".
The time to introduce such a system would be now, while there's still outrage over Biden's pardons among Republicans. Democrats would also want to go along with this to prevent Trump from abusing the power in similar (or worse) ways near the end of his term. In fact, if they're sufficiently scared of this, they may even allow an opening to impeach Biden for potentially corrupt pardon's that were granted during the last weeks of his term.
This would allow Republicans to go after Fauci, Hunter, etc, in congress by impeaching Biden over those pardons, even now, even if they wouldn't actually be able to reach a guilty verdict in the Senate without significant Democrat support.
Still, being able to run this show may be so tempting to Trump and Republicans that they may be willing to make the new law effective immediately, while Democrats
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-0220:501 reply Let him keep pardoning. Sometimes the best way to set new rules is to show the limits of abuse of that power in practice.
I don't think even his packed SCOTUS would appreciate Trump overturning their judgment by pardoning recently convicted agents. They still are the people who are tasked with interpreting the constitution. Push the line too hard and they will push the line back to spite you.
By trashtester 2025-02-0223:161 reply In most cases, I would think the SCOTUS would point to Congress in a situation like this.
It's Congress' role to step up and provide checks and balances for a president that goes off the rails.
As long as a president has support by their fellow party members in congress to be immune against impeachment, I doubt the SCOTUS would step in.
Unless, perhaps, the actions of the president were to be bad enough to introduce imminent risk to the whole system of government. Like pardoning people who (provably) organize large scale voting fraud, etc.
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-034:491 reply SCOTUS can't impreach, but they can make sure the next BS pardon is illegal to do. They can re-interpret the law to limit pardons and deny future ones. That's the extent of their power.
But yes, it's up to congress to actual impreach/convict. The SCOTUS can just keep slapping the president if he keeps overstepping his bounds.
>Unless, perhaps, the actions of the president were to be bad enough to introduce imminent risk to the whole system of government. Like pardoning people who (provably) organize large scale voting fraud, etc.
it would be a very interesting, constitutional crisis. I'm not sure if it has anything built in for that. Even Watergate was simply going to go through the impeachment process before Nixon stepped down.
By trashtester 2025-02-036:57 During Watergate, congress was still aware of it's role as a counterweight to the executive. Nixon would likely have been convicted if he hadn't resigned first, or at least he must have thought so, since he resigned.
But since then, congress has become more and more partisan, with less and less ability to act together in important issues. This was particularily obvious in all 3 impeachment processes that have happened since. In all 3 cases, impeachment was done without the proper bipartisan basis needed for a conviction, basically just to achieve short term political gain.
Like the boy who cried wolf, each repitition means the probability that people will take it seriously next time goes down.
And when the day comes where a president does something that really requires a bi-partisan conviction during an impeachment, congress may be so used to voting along party lines that this becomes impossible.
And maybe worse: presidents may even begin to consider such a conviction an impossibility, and act with fewer inhibitions.
By consteval 2025-02-034:44 Who, I'm assuming, can just be infinitely pardoned by the president because the president has absolute immunity.
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-0220:47 >within his core constitutional powers
Well that's the part to challenge, no? As we've seen much too often, just because one ruling happens doesn't mean that later cases can't overturn that precedent.
I'd rather encourage and cheer on these powers because it's not like you and me are doing anything.
By aurareturn 2025-02-023:373 reply Side question: If Trump just pardons the people responsible, does it matter if it's illegal?
By perihelions 2025-02-024:091 reply I think Trump would fire any US Attorney who forces him to actually write a pardon. The clear expectation of federal prosecutors is that it's off-limits to criminally pursue Trump functionaries carrying out his orders.
He's fired 30+ AUSA's just *this week*, because they had previously prosecuted Trump allies.
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-0220:52 I guess it's up to the states to sue the government then. Trump can't fire publicly elected state AG's.
If he's gonna try to privatize everything with "state's rights", we gotta use those state's powers against him. Using the rulebook he's bound by.
By llamaimperative 2025-02-023:461 reply I have a sneaking suspicion that pardons aren't going to mean much at the end of this term.
By spencerflem 2025-02-024:18 if the term ends ...
By vkou 2025-02-024:06 I'm afraid you're not going to get an answer that you're going to like.
By breadwinner 2025-02-0120:5910 reply Data is the ultimate Fact Check. This is a President that's adamantly opposed to fact checking [1] and has even coerced Facebook to drop fact checking. Of course they don't want data on government sites that disprove their "alternate facts".
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4920827-60-minutes-tru...
By SeptiumMMX 2025-02-0121:577 reply Well, fact-checking works if it's done impartially. So, if you want to fairly fact-check a political debate, each side should have their own team of researchers/fact-checkers being equally able to object to an argument made by the opposing party. Due process, sort of, kind of.
But I don't think I've ever seen that done actually. Usually, fact checkers are akin to Reddit moderators. Technically independent, but with one important twist. These are people that have a lot of free time and are willing to spend it doing unpaid (or underpaid) work. And that's a huge bias. Big enough to question impartiality, if you ask me.
Having two parties with opposing biases and incentives doesn’t magically cancel out and become impartial. That’s the opposite of impartiality.
By SeptiumMMX 2025-02-0123:155 reply That's the problem. Real humans in real world cannot be impartial and will always have biases. So if you expose the public to many different biased opinions and let them learn to recognize the biases and see past them, the "cumulative mindset" will be more objective and less prone to manipulation.
But if you let one biased group decide what the majority is allowed to see, the public opinion will inevitably align with the interests of that group, and won't be necessary beneficial to the public.
Have you noticed how in the past decade or two we have totally abandoned the pursuit of happiness through self-reliance and independence? How being depressed and outraged is normal, and is all but encouraged. This is all coming from the media actively shaping what gets into one's attention span and it will only be causing more and more misery with no end in sight.
And this comes down to a very simple formula. Media likes people who will create content for free. People who are willing to do are often unhappy and have a mindset that causes unhappiness. Media broadcasting their content (to their own profit, of course) is popularizing that mindset and making more people miserable. Bingo!
> Have you noticed how in the past decade or two we have totally abandoned the pursuit of happiness through self-reliance and independence?
No.
By SeptiumMMX 2025-02-021:591 reply Interesting. If you don't mind me asking, at what age do you plan to retire, what funds to you plan to use to cover the living expenses, and what skill set are you trying to pass to your kids so they will be able to afford moving out and staring their own families?
I'm asking because things things are getting harder every year and the media has a permanent blind eye on them.
"Things" are not getting harder every year; if you only see negative things in the world, this is a sign you have depression more than anything.
By iugtmkbdfil834 2025-02-023:512 reply Hmm.
If things are not getting harder then either they stay the same or get better. I would find it hard to argue for either of those positions, but I would welcome you to try to defend that "things are not getting harder". In just about every possible metric outside of maybe "few really, really wealthy individuals make more money" things are not getting better or are stable.
Are you maybe suggesting that what is good for an individual is not good for society?
Income inequality in the US hasn't increased since 2014 and is sharply decreased since 2019. Lower income people are making more money than ever. There was a period of no income growth for upper-middle class people, however, which probably made them unhappy.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w310...
What did happen in the last two years was there was a "vibecession" where everyone decided to pretend the economy was bad even though everything about it was objectively good. You can see this in surveys, because everyone answered them with "I'm personally doing well, but I know everyone else is doing badly because I heard it on the news".
First described here:
https://kyla.substack.com/p/the-vibecession-the-self-fulfill...
Note, this was written at the tail end of the inflation period and none of the predictions of bad things quoted in the article actually happened.
Of course, that's the story up to the end of 2024. All kinds of bad things can happen now - I can't tell you about the future, but the present is easier.
By iugtmkbdfil834 2025-02-0315:371 reply Ok. First, the 1st paper is interesting, but I can't digest it now. Added to the list for later.
That said, temporarily ignoring the paper, income in absolute terms may have well increased, but from 2014 to 2024 we also had ~33% official CPI inflation ( edit: which is well above FED's goal ), which effectively eroded any gains average person may have managed to eke out. In other words, it is not a vibe whem that 100k+ is getting you ~33% less. It is simply what things are.
<< Of course, that's the story up to the end of 2024. All kinds of bad things can happen now - I can't tell you about the future, but the present is easier.
I am not hopeful, but I am willing to accept it as a possible outcome.
Don't insult my intelligence like that. I would never quote nominal income to you. My post was inflation adjusted.
By iugtmkbdfil834 2025-02-0518:13 << Don't insult my intelligence like that. I would never quote nominal income to you. My post was inflation adjusted.
Apologies. Let me look at the link provided.
I am going through the paper now and the things that did jump at me that while you state that your post was inflation adjusted and I will admit that I am not sure it says what you claim to think it says. Lets go over relevant passages.
From quoted paper[1]:
"Wage compression was accompanied by rapid nominal wage growth and rising job-to-job separations—especially among young non-college (high school or less) workers. Comparing across states, post-pandemic labor market tightness became strongly predictive of real wage growth among low-wage workers (wage-Phillips curve), and aggregate wage compression."
In other words, higher absolute values were considered to be good predictors for wage-phillips curve ( which shows a relationship between the unemployment rate and wage growth ). I worry that you saw word real wage and made an assumption that it measures real wage. It doesn't. We can argue whether it is a good proxy, but from get go it is tougher sell. In other words, if methodology for attempting to derive real wage is off, the whole premise falls apart from where I sit.
"Moreover, despite substantial post-pandemic inflation–measured with the benchmark Consumer Price Index for all Urban Consumers (CPI-U)–real hourly earnings at the 10th percentile of the wage distribution rose by 7.8% between January 2020 and June 2023."
Ok. This is where it does get messy, because I genuinely do not want to get into the weeds here, but lets... for the sake of the argument assume all that including methodology is fine.
"Real US hourly wages rose by approximately 10 percentage points at all percentiles during the first quarter of the Covid-19 pandemic, from March through June of 2020. (As we show below, much of this spike reflected a change in composition of the workforce as low-wage workers disproportionately lost their jobs.) Thereafter, these quantiles diverged. The 10th wage percentile held its real value over the next three years, while the 50th and 90th real wage percentiles fell by around 6 and 8 percentage points, respectively. In net, the 90/10 ratio declined by about 8 percentage points over these three years "
In other words, for the period of time listed, assuming we accept the premise, methodology and so on, wages rose above inflation. And then, those same real wages fell on average of 8% between July 2000 and 2024. I don't know man, it sounds me, again if we accept premise, methodology and so, as if things got briefly better and got worse again. So my example of 100k became 92K..
FWIW, I am really curious of how you will defend it.
[1]https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w310...
By coding123 2025-02-0210:05 [dead]
By lucb1e 2025-02-024:37 > Are you maybe suggesting that what is good for an individual is not good for society?
I don't read any such suggestion into the person's post; to me, it seems to mean what it says. As to whether individual needs and societal needs always align, I would guess you probably know the answer is "no" -- but also far from "never"
Really? Maybe its my bias showing through, but my memory of the last couple decades is largely an exercise in most people looking to outside authorities (governments, corporations, titled experts, etc) to fix problems rather than dealing with it individually.
Well in an attempt to at least show where the bias, if that's what it is, comes from:
- Affordable Care Act - the entire Covid response - GDPR - the "TikTok Ban" act
To name a few, those are all examples of us having granted larger powers to the government in hopes that they will fix problems for us that we won't fix ourselves.
By jakelazaroff 2025-02-0215:001 reply Let’s take the ACA. That was designed to fix the problem “healthcare in the US is insanely expensive and insurance companies can deny coverage if you have a pre-existing condition.” How could you fix that problem individually?
My argument there wasn't actually that all of those could have done bottom up, only that they are examples of us granting the government more power and asking for a collectivist solution. That isn't always a bad thing, but it does point to the trend that I recognize (potentially due to my bias as pointed out above).
By consteval 2025-02-034:50 Personally I think the US going from extremely hyper-individualistic to the point of self-destruction to slightly less hyper-individualistic is not a sign of a shift, but rather a return to normalcy.
We forget that the US has been far, far more collectivist in the past, particularly from the 20's - last 70's. The shift towards hyper-individualism is, in my opinion, a wealth extraction mechanism masquerading as a strength. It is highly beneficial to every wealthy person to have low regulations and low requirements for care. The ACA is just common sense - the reason we didn't have it isn't because of individualism, but rather because by not having it you can make a lot more evil and consequently make a lot more money as an insurer.
By jakelazaroff 2025-02-031:45 Okay, but… if there’s no feasible individual solution, it really undercuts your argument here.
> if you expose the public to many different biased opinions and let them learn to recognize the biases [then good stuff]
Is that an assumption, or based on research?
Based on the last couple years of elections, I'd guess that exposing the public to every opinion ever makes people vote for the most catchy sound-bite. I don't follow american news enough to echo whatever people echo over there (perhaps "pro life"? Not sure that I have enough context on that one), but in the Netherlands one might recognize rhetorical statements like "do we want more or fewer muslims in this country?" from what is now the biggest party. We even have an organization that works out different parties' plans into expected economic impact per income group, but the resulting spreadsheet isn't very clickbaity and so I never heard anyone even be aware it exists. For a lot people it's simple: the foreigners use up all the benefits, jobs, and cause the high rent; if they would read reliable sources, however, they would see that the parties that don't try to stop immigration or leave the EU collaboration ("increase our independence" and fuck our tiny country's trade economy for decades) are the ones that yield the highest expected welfare across all income brackets
Of course, this (unfiltered opinions drowning out actual information) is also just my guess, I could very well be wrong. After all, I can't explain why we don't already live in a world where everything burns because such statements are the ones that get disproportionately echoed around. I'm just not sure that releasing the opinion floodgates further will make things better without indications thereof
By trashtester 2025-02-0213:441 reply Hmm, I'm not sure the "do we want more or fewer muslims in this country?" question is as rethorical as you say.
Also, I don't think the main real reasons for such a question are the economical ones, even if that DOES matter to some.
It appears that the main concern for the populist right is that the people (ethnicity + culture) they identify with will become a minority or even disappear at some point.
One can always discuss if this is a realistic threat or if it is, if it's really such a bad thing.
But I think it's pretty obvious that for as long as Northern Europe has the kind of generous welfare states they currently have, there will be a LOT of people in the "Global South" that really would like to come, easily enough to overwhelm some of these countries, if there are no restrictions on immigration.
Which is what makes "do we want more or fewer muslims in this country?" a valid question to ask, as far as I can tell. Either that, or "What is the maximum number of <insert minority group> we want to have in our country?"
If even asking this question is a taboo, well then that's almost like deleting datasets that your political group doesn't like.
By lucb1e 2025-02-0316:51 > if there are no restrictions on immigration
But there are. I'm not aware that even the most pro-"share the love" party thinks we can unilaterally make the decision to let just anybody into Schengen (the EU-related freedom of movement area), or that it would be a good thing if they could. The problem is that the fascist parties want to deny people entry, and evict people who built lives here, who can prove that they fear for their life in the country of origin (such as war refugees), which seems inhumane to me and the european convention on human rights iirc aligns with that as well. It's not something you can just stop doing under national or european law, but by framing it in the right way they create a boogeyman where it's not mainly war refugees but religious terrorists and gold diggers coming into the country
> "What is the maximum number of <insert minority group> we want to have in our country?" If even asking this question is a taboo
That is not taboo. This topic is discussed by every party, of course, and a topic of negotiations between European countries ("will you take this many then we will do this other thing"). The taboo is discrimination, verbal in this case. It harms minorities for no benefit and that's why that is illegal per (what I think is in English called) the constitution ("grondwet")
---
To me it feels like you're approaching this from a forced neural point of view. That feels very odd to say, because of course neutrality and objectivity is good; not sure I'm expressing this right. Maybe it's like... feels like searching for a way to frame it as neutral no matter how extreme (inhumane, uncommon) it really is to say that you would close the door on someone who shows up at your doorstep in mortal peril. No human would do that if personally faced with that choice. The inflammatory statement I gave as example is meant to rile people up against a minority group and gain votes, it's not aimed at starting a rational discussion because that has already been ongoing since time immemorial
By NewJazz 2025-02-0123:42 That's a whole lot of conjecture.
By ecocentrik 2025-02-022:05 There is some honesty with this argument. You can admit that your own bias overrides your ability to be impartial. The dishonest bit is that by attempting to refute a premise of impartiality, you're really making a case for the dominance of your personal bias against impartially. It's a posture that seeks a win condition in the form of a society that has abandoned impartiality, and with it ideas of justice, democracy, self rule, scientific progress (basically everything that depends on the pursuit of impartiality).
Your siren's song to a new and better dark age, isn't as appealing as you think it is. Get psychological help.
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0213:52 > let them learn to recognize the biases and see past them, the "cumulative mindset
Is there any evidence that most people are capable of this?
By Clubber 2025-02-021:51 >Having two parties with opposing biases and incentives doesn’t magically cancel out and become impartial. That’s the opposite of impartiality.
No, but it's close. It's similar to a courtroom where you have a plaintiff and a defendant. Each party plays a roll on each issue that is up to debate. They plead their side and ultimately the citizenry is the jury. Unfortunately, in the political arena there aren't any rules for speech like in a courtroom; perjury for example.
It's imperfect, but you won't ever find an impartial person or group, nor should you blindly take their word for it. It's an appeal to authority fallacy.
Although true, it isn't a very useful observation. "How do I find someone impartial to this matter?" is one of the great unsolved questions that the lawyers have to deal with. Up there with "what is true?".
If anything that is one of the big promises of AI systems. Maybe we can have adjudication that is both extremely intelligent and provably biased towards consistency, facts and evidence. SHA256sum-ed and torrented around for inspection. It'd be a game changer for fact checking instead of the highly falliable groups that we have right now.
> Although true, it isn't a very useful observation. "How do I find someone impartial to this matter?" is one of the great unsolved questions that the lawyers have to deal with. Up there with "what is true?".
Although true, this isn't a particularly useful observation either. It turns out we can define "true" very well for a lot of really useful stuff. We know the sky is blue. We know the sun rises. We know that two plus two equals four. And we know that anthropogenic climate change is a real thing that exists and is likely to have a large impact on our world.
There are some things that we're less confident about, such as different projections for exactly how large an impact we're likely to experience, what the most efficient way to limit that impact is, who bears the responsibility for implementing those changes, and so on. Reasonable people can quibble over some of those details, and there are multiple valid ways of interpreting those facts. But we can very definitely - and completely objectively - fact check statements like "anthropogenic climate change does not exist" and "fossil fuels do not have an impact on our climate and environment".
A lot of those are technically not true - the sky is frequently not blue, the sun doesn't actually rise and there are number systems where 2+2 does not equal 4 (eg, 2+2 = 1 in a mod 3 arithmetic).
That sounds pedantic until people start disagreeing or implementing legal requirements that result in people needing to use the definitions. Eg, if there is a legal requirement to recognise that 2+2=4, is it ok to teach modular arithmetic? Especially if someone has a grudge against the teacher. Lawyers are more than happy to punish someone over a technicality.
By myvoiceismypass 2025-02-022:001 reply We are fucking doomed.
We cannot even agree on the basics any more.
By chrsig 2025-02-025:00 if it's any consolation, when the sky isn't blue, it's mostly because the ground is on fire. a situation which is exacerbated by anthropogenic climate change.
so i mean, it's hard to agree on the basics when the basics are changing, I guess.
By margalabargala 2025-02-020:33 As you will see if you ask DeepSeek about notable events which happened in Tiananmen Square, AI systems are perfectly capable of failing to provide impartiality or facts. Any model that claims to do so simply is failing to state the biases of the person who trained it, and the biases of the data upon which it was trained.
By myvoiceismypass 2025-02-022:01 AI just regurgitates what it learned from non experts.
By theendisney4 2025-02-025:52 One will have a strong tendency to leave the easily challanged out.
By w0m 2025-02-0214:37 > Well, fact-checking works if it's done impartially. So, if you want to fairly fact-check a political debate, each side should have their own team of researchers/fact-checkers being equally able to object to an argument made by the opposing party. Due process, sort of, kind of.
IIRC, This is mostly what Facebook did after the 2016 election; put together a non affiliated board and made sure it was populated by all sides - Facebook itself had no/minimal control over what said board did/decided; but all decisions were public.
Zuck just gave in to 'community moderation' instead because "actual solutions" are considered a negative in today's political climate.
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0123:022 reply The Trumpian opposition to fact checkers is not based on some principled disagreement of substance. Trump, and by extension Republicans, oppose fact checking because the facts are in contradiction to their goals. Trump himself exists in some post-modern environment where "facts" aren't real and all that matters is spin. He wants what he says to go unquestioned. That's why instead of having a debate about facts, supported by evidence, he simply seeks to remove facts from the discussion entirely.
By anigbrowl 2025-02-0123:32 So why are they taking so much data offline?
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0123:301 reply > Trump and the Republicans are very much in favor of checking facts. It is the opposite of censorship: Expose everything.
You know that you're writing this in a post about how the current Republican administration has been scrubbing massive amounts of scientific data from government websites, right?
I don't see how Greenpeace is at all relevant here.
By grepfru_it 2025-02-0123:401 reply I'm not saying this is right, but after every party change everything on the government websites change and links/data disappear. This is not limited to this one election, we just happen to notice it now because someone brought it up. Kinda like small chips on your car's windshield.
Notice how things like eg the federal reserve data does not disappear because it is protected by legislation. We should be asking not why is it disappearing, but why didn't we enshrine preservation of data in law?
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0123:431 reply False equivalence. This is not some cosmetic change. No administration has ever done a bulk removal of scientific data from all government websites solely because it conflicts with their policy goals.
This removal expresses not just a differing policy but a contempt for facts themselves.
By grepfru_it 2025-02-0123:461 reply When Bush took office all of the data about climate change disappeared from government websites. So this is not a post about false equivalence but a question why the previous party did not protect this specific data like other government agencies. I think the answer to that question is more nuanced than we may like to believe
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0123:551 reply Now you're just gaslighting. There is no "protection" that can prevent a new presidential administration from modifying government websites as they see fit.
> I think the answer to that question is more nuanced than we may like to believe
What is this, the X Files? Vague allusions like this don't make you look wise, they make you look like you're making stuff up to win internet points.
By grepfru_it 2025-02-020:031 reply Ok this is getting a little too...hot for HN so just a heads up I will not reply after this one. You are absolutely right that there is no protection that can prevent administrations from modifying websites, otherwise websites would never get redesigned! However, there is a federal law that requires government agencies to retain records and different agencies have different requirements. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader on what could facilitate a records retention change within different agencies.
By hackyhacky 2025-02-020:431 reply As you surely know, the legal requirement to retain records does not extend to a requirement to maintain those records on a public web site. You are not arguing in good faith. Please stop muddying the waters with your buffoonish rhetoric. Thanks.
In case it helps you to have someone chime in besides the person you're arguing with, "You are not arguing in good faith" applies a lot more to "stop muddying the waters with your buffoonish rhetoric" and "What is this, the X Files? Vague allusions like this don't make you look wise" than to anything the person you're arguing with said. I don't know the answer to the point you're arguing and I can't tell who's right from this thread either (neither side posts sources or disproves the other side's central claim, from my point of view), but this isn't how to go about it
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0213:471 reply I strongly disagree.
When someone is wrong, you can correct them. When someone is lying, i.e. knowingly spreading falsehood in an effort to manipulate an audience, it's vitally important to call them out on it. People need to recognize who is using misinformation as a weapon. The points of highlighted are manipulative rhetorical techniques, not merely bad arguments. These people need to be identified and shunned, especially in a place as committed to dialogue as HN.
Sorry you don't like my phrasing. What method would you suggest to call alarm to a dishonest actor in a public space?
Consider your own ignorance. It is impossible to be certain of anything because of unknown unknowns. You merely assume they are lying, but you could never prove that.
A righteous condemnation with no proof and all feelings is exactly the soil the grows facism.
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0218:47 > Consider your own ignorance. It is impossible to be certain of anything because of unknown unknowns. You merely assume they are lying, but you could never prove that.
Good point. In fact, I can't even prove that America exists. I can't prove that you're real person, or that I'm typing on a computer, or that I even exist. My own eyes could be deceiving me. I am condemned to a universe full of impenetrable doubt.
I should probably just ignore reason and logic, and instead spend my days shivering and alone, unable to interact with a world where so much is forever unknowable.
Of course, you can't prove that I can't prove that grepfru_it is lying, so really it would be you who should consider your own ignorance. I assume that a sage like yourself has already internalized your own advice and that you strictly avoid engaging in news or debate, since all externalities are unproveable. Right?
By ourmandave 2025-02-0123:29 Really? Greenpeace says it's because X platforms conspiracy theorists and climate change skeptics. [1]
“But this tool, initially perceived as a new arena for free speech, has become a serious danger to it and to the respect for personal dignity,” point out organizations such as Cimade, France Nature Environment, Greenpeace France, and APF France Handicap in an op-ed published in Le Monde.
Their primary concerns include “the lack of moderation and the configuration of algorithms” which “encourage the spread of hateful content and the circulation of conspiracy and climate skeptic theories.”
[1] https://glassalmanac.com/87-french-groups-including-emmaus-g...
I don't believe that is a one party issue. Life is messy and politicians attempt to smooth that over with grandiose, but hollow, visions for the future and data points taken out of context to paint a picture.
It's a fundamental problem of scale, you either become so bogged down in details and nuance that you get nothing done or you lose so much context that your statements are false without a massive list of caveats.
By hackyhacky 2025-02-023:131 reply > Life is messy and politicians attempt to smooth that over with grandiose, but hollow, visions for the future and data points taken out of context to paint a picture.
Your point is: politicians lie. Of course they do. They always have.
What's new in our era is not the lying, but the utter contempt for facts. A study in contrasts:
* A "traditional politician" will lie. If they are caught, with plain evidence that contradicts their claim, they will evade, or reframe, or apologize, or blame someone else.
* A "Trumpian politician" will lie. If he is caught, with plan evidence that contradicts their claim, he will flatly oppose the facts. He'll invoke a vague conspiracy of evildoers who concocted the alleged facts. People believe him because he is charismatic and he talks like a regular person. He gaslights: believe me, he says, not your common sense and lyin' eyes.
So we're in a conundrum where many people have lost their ability to believe in facts, and instead believe a con-man. The problem is not just dishonesty, it is demoralization (in the psychological warfare sense of the word[1]).
EDIT: I read somewhere that Trump's superpower is lack of shame. A weaker politician concedes to facts out of respect for his audience: to deny a plain truth would be embarrassing.
> People believe him because he is charismatic and he talks like a regular person.
I'm not so sure many people really believe him very often. I live in a part of the country that heavily supported Trump, even diehard fans of his that I talk to consider him a shit talker and support him only because he throws a wrench in the system.
Even those I know who do seem to believe him cave pretty quickly when asked any slightly substantive question. They know tariffs raise prices for example, that we aren't going to buy Canada or take over Greenland, and that Trump in fact had no plan to end Russia's war on day one.
By hackyhacky 2025-02-023:531 reply > support him only because he throws a wrench in the system.
Interesting insight, thanks.
Well, if that's what they want, that's what they get. I guess I can't understand an attitude that leads you to want to destroy your own country.
By CamperBob2 2025-02-025:57 I guess I can't understand an attitude that leads you to want to destroy your own country.
The voters that call themselves "conservatives" these days will saw off their feet at the ankles, if it means that a member of a class they hate loses their legs.
Pretty confident that now that critical thinking has been thrown out the window and accountability has disappeared in political discourse this would just result in endless objections in any debate deliberately used to add noise and misdirect conversation.
I don't know what the solution is in today's climate, but I suspect it no longer matters. America is post-truth and he who controls the data and pathways to information (Murdoch, Meta, Google) directly influences a large percentage of the people.
By worksonmine 2025-02-0314:09 > Pretty confident that now that critical thinking has been thrown out the window and accountability has disappeared in political discourse
Politicians and the media have always lied about big and small details. The difference is that social media has made it easier to dispute, and now we started noticing it more. Now that they can't gatekeep the information anymore they adopted the word "misinformation" to deal with the problem. "It may be true, but it's misinformation, trust us, we have your best interests in mind".
Remember the trusted news initiative from covid? That was an attempt to continue gatekeeping, anything from any other sources was considered false and unverified, and the global media all had the same talking points at the same time. It was terrifying to see how easy everyone conformed.
By theendisney4 2025-02-025:49 I like it, the legal system might be more suitable for putting the "truth" on trial than its current application.
It will cost a bunch of money but we get something out of it.
The fact checkers’ own employer said that the fact checkers didn’t work because they were so heavily biased that the audience noticed it.
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0123:461 reply Translation: the audience is so biased that they automatically reject facts in conflict with their biases.
No amount of showing you the mistakes in your papers works. “Women earn 52 cents on the dollar!” Same job? “Yes” No, look here.
“But there is still this argument” — No, there isn’t, it’s been studied in that other study.
You guys just always come back and cast doubt, but it’s only this: Doubt and finally, falsehoods.
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0213:24 > You guys just always come back and cast doubt
If that's your attitude, maybe you're the one with the preconvieved biases.
Let's first work on eliminating political parties altogether, then let's work on eliminating bias.
By gadflyinyoureye 2025-02-023:18 I like this idea, but doubt it works. People naturally coalesce around ideas. That cohesion is then call a political party. The only way to get rid of parties is to get rid of freedom of organization.
By chgs 2025-02-029:42 The Republican Party has been eliminated, it’s been replaced by a dictator cult.
Interestingly increasing numbers of young people want this.
> Data is the ultimate Fact Check.
This is wrong IMO. Data can be missing, incomplete, biased, skewed, and even just plain wrong. Cherry-picked data can be worse than no data.
The ultimate fact check is a scientific process of collecting data, modeling it, scrutinizing it and its methodology and the entities involved, contextualizing it, cross-checking, replicating, etc.
What media likes to call "fact checking" to me feels more motivated by punchy headlines and chyrons.
By breadwinner 2025-02-0122:182 reply > Data can be missing, incomplete, biased, skewed, and even just plain wrong.
All true of course. The solution for that is more data, not less.
Maybe. It needs to be the right data, and interpreted correctly. More of the wrong data isn't particularly helpful.
I think what I'm arguing is that just having data isn't good enough, and it's dangerous to accept data at face value. It needs to be the right data, and interpreted correctly.
Data is always lacking. More data may help you be more confident in your conclusion, but it will never be certain.
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-0221:061 reply Many of us here are engineers. Similar to our work, databcollected by scientists will eventually get to "good enough" in that interpretations are nearly indistinguishable from the truth. We don't need to understand every atom in the atmosphere to predict rain coming soon, for example. We don't need to do a full body scan to see visible breast cancer lumps.
I agree with you, but that wasn't my point. The post I replied to simply said the answer is more data. Without any more context about what kind of answer it is or how it should be used, it seemed important to me to remind whoever passes by that data alone does not make truth and its always worth keeping in mind that what we "know" today may be considered false tomorrow.
What you're talking about is more a question of scape, impact, and how accurate a prediction really needs to be. Of course we don't need to measure every atom to predict the weather - weather predictions are wrong all the time and rarely is that more than an inconvenience.
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-0222:53 Naturally, garbage in, garbage out. Anyone who's worked any job should under stand that. And no data is ever perfect when measuring nature.
But I'm giving a best faith interpretation that the ones collecting the data are competent and have goals on what the data is collected for. We have too much talent flowing to assume the worst. We'll see how the next 4 years challenges my assumptions, though.
>What you're talking about is more a question of scape, impact, and how accurate a prediction really needs to be
Yes. That goal of data is to approximate the truth. More (good) data helps those who can interpret it to make better guesses. So the base truth of "we need more data then" is true. With a good faith interpretation.
By irrational 2025-02-0123:041 reply Fact checking is things like Republicans claiming that people in a certain town are eating cats and dogs or their are pedophiles in the basement of a certain pizza place. There isn't any need to model and scrutinize data to fact check the majority of nonsense Republicans spout.
By cheema33 2025-02-020:41 Generally speaking, the responsibility of proof falls on party making the claim.
If I claim that you beat your wife, you are not expected to prove your innocence by showing that you don't do it. Proving a negative is difficult if not impossible in some cases. I have to show evidence to back up my claim.
By defrost 2025-02-020:29 It's a big claim that "immigrants are eating the cats and dogs in specific town in Ohio" (note the plural).
What was readily checked is the source of such a claim (where did Trump get that from?) and what evidence was provided?
The trace back on that stupidity was unsubstantiated rumours triggered from a walked back local area posting and a slew of images that didn't come from the place in question, etc.
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-0221:03 >What media likes to call "fact checking" to me feels more motivated by punchy headlines and chyrons.
True. It's a good thing media doesn't collect data on that case. Just interprets it to various levels of accuracy. Those who want a better interpretation can read the data itself and learn the mechanics behind it.
By gopher_space 2025-02-024:51 Similarly, everyone feels like a camera captures truth except the people who operate cameras for a living.
Data isn't the ultimate fact check - it's just numbers waiting to be twisted. Bias, bad sources, and cherry-picking turn 'facts' into fiction. Real fact-checking needs brains, not just bar graphs.
By darth_avocado 2025-02-021:044 reply > Data isn’t the ultimate fact check
But it is. Numbers can be twisted, but it they can easily be verified. Bias, bad sources and cherry picking can allow you to tell stories, but the data will allow you to verify those stories are indeed facts. Brain can’t really fact check things that don’t have any data.
Numbers alone will always lack context. You can absolutely verify where the numbers came from, weren't altered, and the math was done right. What you can't do is verify the numbers alone accurately portray what was happening in the real world, or what has happened in the real world since the snapshot of those numbers was taken.
Numbers are extremely useful, but numbers alone mean absolutely nothing.
By lelandbatey 2025-02-024:541 reply True, numbers alone mean nothing. And the surrounding context alone also doesnt paint a sufficient story. You need both, for without both you can't be effective. Unless said data/context is fabricated, trying to suppress either seems like a clear case of acting in bad faith.
By _heimdall 2025-02-0223:04 Sure, I didn't mean to say data is unimportant or not needed at all. My point was just that data solves nothing without context (among other things, pike discernment and critical thinking).
By tombert 2025-02-021:18 I'm not sure I agree.
Even if the numbers are accurate, nearly any situation has a nearly infinite number of potential data points, and deciding which ones are relevant isn't as straightforward as people act like it is.
This is easy to see play out; you can look at the same stories being reported on both Fox News and MSNBC. Usually both sources' raw facts will be basically "correct" in the sense that they're not saying anything explicitly false, but there can be bias in determining which facts are actually useful or how they're categorized.
You can see how the reporting of the January 6th stuff varied between news outlets.
Disagree. Numbers don't exist in a vacuum - they are collected, framed, and interpreted by humans with biases, agendas, and limitations. Verification isn't just about checking numbers; it's about scrutinizing methodologies, sources, and context. Data can affirm falsehoods when selectively presented or measured poorly. Brains aren't secondary to fact-checking; they are the ultimate tool for discerning whether data reflects reality or is merely a well-dressed distortion.
By lelandbatey 2025-02-024:49 True, though in order for brains to do that at all, they need data to analyze. Data is a necessary prerequisite for trying to understand things at all. Removing said data means there is not even the chance to achieve understanding or change. Which is kinda the point.
Barring said data being fabricated, deleting data seems to be a sign of bad faith.
By listenallyall 2025-02-021:582 reply Can data, or AI, tell me definitively who the MVP of the NFL was this season? Allen, Lamar, Saquon? The numbers certainly help when making comparisons, but they aren't the entire story, different people will come to different conclusions based on the exact same set of facts.
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-0220:56 In theory, yes. But we're more approaching philosophy with Laplace's demon at this point.
A more realistic example: we can theoretically predict the weather weeks in advance. In reality, it's pointless because there so much data needed to collect for that, and so many events to away the weather, that's its impractical past a few days in the future.
Who cares about the NFL? The issue here is that, and mark my words this almost this exact conversation will play out in the very near future:
Scientists: X number of people died of Covid in the US according to CDC data.
US Government: you can't prove that number. That data doesn't exist on government servers, the data in the copies is fake and can't be trusted.
By listenallyall 2025-02-022:581 reply > Who cares about the NFL?
It's a simple example, that's why it's relevant. All the facts are available for anyone to see, to process, to analyze. There is no disputed or hidden data. And yet nobody, including any AI, can produce a "true" answer to the question, because it's reliant on one's personal biases.
Even with Covid, did a 92-year old die because of Covid, or because of a multitude of existing conditions that Covid triggered? Probably impossible to know medically, and AI isn't going to tell you definitively one way or the other.
It's not relevant because the person who is MVP in a sport is an opinion. Or, to put it more bluntly, it's a marketing scheme to keep people talking about it. There's no correct answer when it comes to opinions.
If the question was who scored the most points in the year, that can be answered factually by data.
If the NFL was deleting all their data at the end of the season with the goal of creating arguments and sowing disinformation, that would be a more relevant example.
By listenallyall 2025-02-025:061 reply Lol - "cause of death" is often an opinion as well. Or no opinion at all - "natural causes."
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-0220:59 No, cause of death is objective. Whether or not we have the data to figure out the truth doesn't deny the truth.
That's the point of data. To get us closer to the truth. Gravity will keep making you cling to the earth no matter your opinion. Even though as we speak we are still trying to develop models to properly understand the particles or forces behind gravity.
You are proving my point. The CDC has faced several instances where its data was inaccurate or misrepresented:
- COVID-19 Death Overcount: In 2022, a coding error led the CDC to overcount 72,277 COVID-19 deaths across 26 states. Source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/24/cdc-coding-err...
- Maternal Mortality Data: Changes in death certificate reporting, particularly the addition of a pregnancy checkbox, resulted in overcounts of maternal deaths due to false positives. Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/08/materna...
- Lead Exposure Report: A 2004 CDC report underestimated the impact of lead-contaminated water in Washington, D.C., leading to criticism over its data accuracy. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morbidity_and_Mortality_Weekly...
- Property System Data: An audit revealed that the CDC's property system data was neither accurate nor complete, with an estimated $29.2 million of property at risk of being lost or misplaced. Source: https://oig.hhs.gov/reports/all/2016/centers-for-disease-con...
These instances highlight that data, even from reputable sources, can be subject to errors, misinterpretation, or manipulation, underscoring the need for critical analysis beyond face-value acceptance.
So one of the most important things to "fact check" in this election for me was the clear elder abuse of someone with advanced dementia.
How do you fact check that?
Because almost everyone has a grandparent and has seen what it looks like. When push comes to shove and you lie about something everyone can see and has such a visceral reaction to, it's hard to move past it.
And even seeing clear as day for months it kept being denied. If you can't solve for that, there's no point.
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-0221:01 Meanwhile Biden has one bad day and everyone's saying "he's too old". While voting in the oldest president in history months later.
You can fact check it. No one wants to for whatever reason.
But surely, the answer to 'data can be twisted' is not to remove the data? We have enough of a problem already with wilful misinformation.
Having the data is the first step towards a reasonable discussion. Otherwise, you have to resort to 'I feel ....' vs 'Based on this interpretation....'
I agree that the first kind of debate is already the dominant form today, however I think we can all agree that it's not been good for society overall.
This isn't a new problem unfortunately. Data and research during the pandemic response was being horribly mishandled, largely by the Democrats at the time.
This isn't a one party or one person problem. It sure seems like a problem more correlated with our government structure and/or climate, or authority structures themselves.
By lucb1e 2025-02-026:18 There not being another pandemic during the information age to compare with, it's hard to say whether The Democrats mishandled it or not. Perhaps one could look at aspects where there was consensus within at least one of the opposing parties about what should happen (before the outcome of any path could be known) and compare that against hindsight. If you have specific examples where others clearly knew better than the ruling party, that would be relevant to consider if it's chance or a pattern, but otherwise it feels like the age-old opposing of the current ruling force
By marxisttemp 2025-02-024:401 reply I’m sorry, I’m no fan of the dems but if you think Trump isn’t above and beyond when it comes to lying and twisting truth you’re either a shill or just ignorant
By _heimdall 2025-02-030:04 Oh he is bad about it, don't get me wrong. That doesn't excuse other politicians though, and attempting to weigh and compare the relative lying and truth twisting seems like an extremely difficult thing to do.
Bush Jr blatantly lied to the country and rallied us around a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people minimum. How do we weigh that with Trumps ridiculous lies?
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0213:511 reply > largely by the Democrats at the time.
Who was president in 2020?
By hackyhacky 2025-02-031:01 Nope, it was not. But 2020 is when it was first addressed by the US federal government (through various means including the CARES Act), and the US federal government was run by one Donald Trump. So it seems disingenuous of you to place the blame specifically on Democrats without citing what the Democrats did wrong but Donald Trump did right.
By uncomplexity_ 2025-02-0121:162 reply lol if you watch zuck's take on it his problem is the fact checkers ended up being biased.
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0123:042 reply Maybe they are. The solution to this is to provide evidence in favor of your argument. That's how we used to resolve conflicting opinions: debates supported by evidence.
Now, instead, we're simply getting rid of any attempt to decide what is factual, and instead let demagogues decide for us what is fact and what is not, without any evidence at all. Since evidence is now superfluous, why waste government money by providing it?
I think the problem there is the powers granted to government rather than how today's people decide to wield it.
Facts are never really decided, things can always change if we learn something new or just consider what we know from a different angle.
The problem here is that anyone in charge can decide what they believe is fact and make very real, very impactful changes that they force on everyone else.
By hackyhacky 2025-02-023:081 reply > The problem here is that anyone in charge can decide what they believe is fact and make very real, very impactful changes that they force on everyone else.
Sure, such is the nature of power. Thus has it always been.
What's novel is not that people in charge can broadcast their favored view of facts, but that anyone can broadcast their favored view of facts, which has to led to the current demoralization crisis: in the presence of conflicting authorities, no one believes any facts anymore.
Of course, some of the "facts" being broadcast are not, in fact, facts. The problem is that the flood of misinformation is so large, the force of echo chambers so strong, and the cynicism of consumers so great, that it is infeasible to produce persuasive evidence sufficient to make the truth more appealing than lies.
> but that anyone can broadcast their favored view of facts
Some blame, if not a majority, belongs on whoever actually hears those views and facts though. Knowing someone's intent is extremely hard, it really shouldn't matter whether they intend to mislead or believe what they are saying. Just because someone shares what they may honestly believe to be a fact doesn't mean we have to take it as fact.
We lack critical thinking and somehow landed in a spot where we're highly skeptical of anyone in charge but completely believe what a random person writes online. It honestly doesn't matter what facts are being shared or whether they are accurate, without critical thinking and the ability to discern for ourselves how could this ever play out well?
By hackyhacky 2025-02-023:401 reply > Some blame, if not a majority, belongs on whoever actually hears those views and facts though. Knowing someone's intent is extremely hard, it really shouldn't matter whether they intend to mislead or believe what they are saying. Just because someone shares what they may honestly believe to be a fact doesn't mean we have to take it as fact.
I don't think that casting blame on individuals here is productive. I agree, lack of critical thinking skills is a major factor. Who is responsible for ensuring that a plurality of the population of a democracy learn critical thinking? We've gotten by without critical thinking for so long because we mostly don't need it: when you get all your news from Walter Cronkite, what good could come of further analysis?
So it's not an individual failure, but a societal one. Susceptibility to misinformation is like a plague, or a meteor strike, or some other natural catastrophe that we just haven't prepared for. Maybe we'll find a solution; maybe we won't, and the future of humanity belongs to those with the boldness to lie most effectively.
Oh there are societal issues here as well, no argument there. They all roll down hill from individuals' choices though.
Society didn't force Walter Cronkite on us. People chose to listen to him and a small number of other trusted sources, and they began choosing to take what was said by those sources at face value. I'm not even saying that was a bad thing or wrong, at the time news did seem to be reported in better faith.
We choose our sources though, and we choose how deeply to consider what they say. I don't see how this could have started as a societal issue rather than individual choice first.
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0213:591 reply > I don't see how this could have started as a societal issue rather than individual choice first.
really? I'd say it's clearly a matter of education. Critical thinking and media analysis just isn't part of American public schooling. If anything, people are taught to believe authority figures.
Regardless of how it "started", blaming the individual isn't helpful, because that suggests there's nothing to be done. "Well," you say, "folks made a bad decision, c'est la vie." Instead, we should be looking for solutions to media illiteracy, and that solution is certainly social in nature.
Sounds like we just have a very different view the relative merits of individual vs collective (or societal) approaches.
I very much shy away from control, and that generally means trusting the individual to generally do what is best or at a minimum accept that the result of that will at least be more resilient than the result of a collectivist or top-down approach. Both have risks for sure and there are absolutely times where individualism are a bad idea in my opinion, this just doesn't meet that bar for me.
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0219:171 reply Since we're talking about the functioning of democracy, which necessarily requires a plurality of people, I don't see how anything other than group- or society-level action could possibly make any difference.
Oh we were a very individualistic nation for much of our history. That does come and go over the years, and like anything it has pros and cons, but it can be done.
If group or societal solutions are the only viable option we might as well cut to the chase and go full socialist. I don't mean that derogatorily, if collectivism is the only solution when individual choices inevitably lead to bad outcomes why bother trying individual at all?
The challenge with individuals making choices that ultimately move in us a better direction is fear. That is really embracing uncertainty and trusting the average person to do what they think is best or "right." Its my opinion that we should absolutely embrace that uncertainty and trust people, but that doesn't land well for most people today.
A group or collectivist solution sounds much safer. As long as we have a good plan and trustworthy people in charge, we just need to empower them to do what they know we need. That can run into just as many, and just as dangerous, end points as an individualist model.
Both are risky. Both can work, and both can go horribly wrong. I just prefer the one where I get to trust myself and everyone around me to think for themselves and do what they think is best. I also personally prefer the bad result of reaping what we sow rather than it going wrong because the well intended leader was wrong or the ill intended leader was right (I.e. got what the evil end they wanted).
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0223:281 reply I'm talking about public education. I don't know what you're on about.
By _heimdall 2025-02-0223:59 This whole chain was you pushing back on the relative merit or feasibility of an individualist approach to this problem. You mentioned education very briefly a few posts up but that didn't seem to be the main point of that comment and definitely not of this back and forth.
The internet was designed to be robust in the event of nuclear war. Maybe it’s time for distributed data caches. Maybe we encode it all in crypto currency.
By tialaramex 2025-02-0316:131 reply No, it wasn't.
By theGnuMe 2025-02-094:33 Yes it was. Prove me wrong.
They sometimes are. If you're using a biased source to fact-check, you're just transitively applying that bias.
I do feel like there is a limit to how biased a source can be when it tries to be based in evidence, though. Nobody would disagree that 1+1=2, basic physics tells one that COVID is not spread by 5G towers, the climate has warmed enough that you can dump weather records into a spreadsheet and see the effect without needing to measure CO2 at all. That COVID causes disease and a warming climate causes more extreme weather is also rather easy to corroborate. Accepting the obvious is already a good starting point for deciding whether climate policy XYZ is good or not (combined with other basic facts and every party's proposals), but it seems to me that the current striving for unbiasedness leads to giving lunatics equal air time. Any amount of fact checking would at least remove this level of misinformedness
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0213:492 reply > Nobody would disagree that 1+1=2, basic physics tells one that COVID is not spread by 5G towers,
But yet people believe these things, and will believe a source that supports them. What's obvious to you is not obvious to others.
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-0221:101 reply Okay? Then you disprove their claims and their bad sources. If they don't want to understand that, there's nothing to do. They are not a reasonable audience to debate with logos at that point.
Them denying nature's truth doesn't allieve them from nature's forces.
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0223:042 reply Do you honestly think that people who believe these things will be swayed by facts and evidence?
Go watch some flat earther videos on YouTube. Lots of people are very committed to a particular conclusion and have developed elaborate processes for disregarding evidence that would persuade a rational person.
The US political system right now is built on believing easily disprovable lies. Unfortunately, their bad choices affect everyone.
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-034:431 reply >Do you honestly think that people who believe these things will be swayed by facts and evidence?
No I do not:
>They are not a reasonable audience to debate with logos at that point.
but if people insist on arguing, that's your approach.
I just don't debate on Youtube. The people who matter aren't there anyway. Those people have to go through a slower process but one that doesn't care about the feelings of youtube comments complaining about Hilary emails (iroinc, isn't it?)
By hackyhacky 2025-02-035:161 reply > The people who matter aren't there anyway.
The people who matter are the ones who vote.
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-035:45 We're past voting. The people who matter now are those who can stop the country from falling apart.
But sure, if anyone feels they can change minds in 2 years before midterm, go for it. That is not where I am useful.
By lucb1e 2025-02-0316:14 > Do you honestly think that people who believe these things will be swayed by facts and evidence?
I've got two data points to offer!
For one, some research from last year showed that
> Over three rounds of back-and-forth interaction, [a tuned version of GPT-4 Turbo], also known as DebunkBot, was able to significantly reduce individuals’ beliefs in the particular theory the believer articulated, as well as lessen their conspiratorial mindset more generally — a result that proved durable for at least two months.
https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/mit-study-ai-c...
It's not like the chatbot gave them a beating or something, so it must be appeals to reason and evidence that did something? At least, that's my takeaway
Second data point is an anecdote. I somehow ended up on this flat earther youtube video where they had gotten their viewers to fund them an expedition to the south pole (wtf is a south pole if the earth is flat? Where did they fly out to? Idk, they seemed to have an alternative hypothesis in case the earth really was flat, such that this "experiment" mattered) to, and I shit you not, observe that the sun does not set during summer. Why they didn't just ask someone living beyond the (ant)arctic circle, I don't know, but so they're stood there watching the sun, waiting for it to set. It didn't, and after another glance at a wristwatch that it really is midnight, they now said they believed that the earth is in fact round because their alternative hypothesis had been disproven
Whether many of the viewers on youtube believed it, I have no idea. Also conspicuously missing from the video was any sort of remark hinting at "gee, what everyone outside of our little community said turned out to be right, I wonder if maybe this could mean that there isn't some big conspiracy going on", so perhaps they'll go on to believe the next useless thing now and it was all for naught? I'm not deep enough into conspiracy theory, but it does seem to me that: if you get them to work it all out (whatever that means for them) to a point where there is an experiment you can sensibly do, or evidence they can obtain or so, they'll actually be swayed if given that evidence. Or at least some of them are. (Or maybe these are just really good actors and getting a free holiday to the most exclusive continent by becoming famous was their long con all along, who's to say, but I'm inclined to apply occam's and hanlon's razors.)
Nah come on, what you've cited is obvious to everyone but a delusional 0.001%. They do not need a podium for that
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0220:112 reply You're not an American, so maybe you aren't aware how widespread conspiracy theories are in the US and how much they influence the public discourse. As a trivial example, the American Senate is currently interviewing the nominee for the head of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, CDC, and FDA, among other agencies.
The nominee, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has been very outspoken in his opinions, some of which are:
This nominee will likely be approved. These opinions are shared by a significant body of people who voted for the president who nominated him.Wi-Fi causes cancer and "leaky brain" Chemicals in the water supply could turn children transgender Antidepressants are to blame for school shootings AIDS is not be caused by HIV the Covid is designed to target white and black people but not Ashkenazi JewsBy lucb1e 2025-02-0315:35 Are they so widespread because of this "both parties/sides' views need to be represented" perhaps? And is that why they influence discourse so much, because they have to be brought up again and again?
Of course, you're right that I'm not an American, it may be that I'm missing something that would have been clear to me. Not meaning to pretend to know it all, just hoping that an outside perspective (from a place where, from my POV, it works better even if far from perfect) might be helpful
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-0221:121 reply To give a much undeserved BOTD: I don't think he'll be approved because people really believe nor even trust RFO Jr. He will be approve to upkeep the status quo. A status quo to appeal to their voter base or to appeal to Trump or something like that.
Almost nothing on the RFO appointment is rooted in facts.
By hackyhacky 2025-02-0221:221 reply > He will be approve to upkeep the status quo. A status quo to appeal to their voter base or to appeal to Trump or something like that.
No, RFKJr will be approved because he was nominated by Donald Trump and Donald Trump has a total control of the Republican Party. That's all there is to it.
By johnnyanmac 2025-02-0222:47 I don't think it's that blatant. Even R's have limits when Gaetz got rejected. I don't think it's as rank and tow as implied.
But yes, a lot of policy for R's will ba passed. We'll see how much insanity they Will tolerate when it comes to Trump destroying the economy. Rich people kinda need that.
By adamtaylor_13 2025-02-020:16 Data is not the ultimate fact check. Data can be skewed in infinite ways to represent whatever you want.
By worksonmine 2025-02-0313:55 During covid links to the CDC that could be used by vaccine skeptics were flagged on Facebook. There was an actual problem with the fact-checking and it was often judged by who benefited from the information rather than the truth behind the information.
By JumpCrisscross 2025-02-0123:05 Going out on a bit of a limb here, but I’m guessing the data will find their way to xAI.
My hypothesis is Musk is following a South African playbook. That involves, in part, privatising the commons.
Hope to be proven wrong.
By breadwinner 2025-02-0122:161 reply If you look at people who have been losing in court for lying recently, such as Rudy Giuliani, InfoWars, Fox news Dominion (settled for $787M), they are all conservatives. Maybe that proves that reality indeed has a liberal bias.
By naikrovek 2025-02-0122:27 It’s not even a bias in that situation. Conservatives have an interest in denying reality because denying reality lets them have more of what they want.
Reality is what it is. Reality isn’t biased. It looks like a bias because of how far conservatives have pulled everyone to the right, by moving further right while demanding that everyone meet in the middle.
Certainly this sort of data isn't disappearing because it makes Trump look good.
Anyway, he's pissed about COVID-19 and instead of working to prevent future epidemics he's working to retaliate against those who embarrassed him. Pretty simple stuff. The man does not have the depth that he and his followers believe he has.
By ryandrake 2025-02-0122:05 It's pretty much as simple as this. Everything he's done so far has been a petty attempt to get revenge on people he perceives as his political enemies. This isn't some vast conspiracy to avoid fact checking. He's got a checklist of the people and institutions who he thinks made him look silly last time, and he's just going down the list. Somehow, none of this vengeance is improving the price of eggs, either.
By calculatte 2025-02-0121:143 reply [flagged]
By craftsman 2025-02-0121:20 I understand you to be saying that these insiders who wanted to remove evidence waited nearly three months after the election, and more than a week after inauguration to do this. Do I understand this correctly?
By lemon_zest 2025-02-0121:23 Wait, so they waited until yesterday to remove incriminating evidence? Just when Trump’s staff also came in to purge data? What a coincidence!
By honestSysAdmin 2025-02-0121:20 [flagged]
By cmriversepi 2025-02-0114:555 reply I’m an epidemiology professor and I write a weekly “weather report” outbreaks [1]. These communication and data blackouts are coming at a bad time. We’re having an unusual flu season—activity has rebounded unexpectedly. I’ve been having to scramble for data, last week by visiting each state health department website. It’s really troubling and consequential.
This is intentional. They're mad about the covid response, and want to prevent mask mandates or lockdowns at any cost. At any cost. Including suppressing information about bird flu for as long as possible.
I’m curious about what will happen if they get to the parts of this Project 2025 like agenda that involves telling people to do things, or banning things people like.
We already see that abortion bans are unpopular. When they are put to a vote they lose, even in very red states.
How much more will people take? How will the Joe Rogan dudebro crowd react to banning porn? That’ll be interesting.
I’ve been predicting for years that it’s these guys — the Christian Nationalists / NatCons — who are going to mass confiscate guns. Would that be the third rail?
I mean the current game plan, from what it seems, is to make porn a shameful and taboo thing. Same as abortions as well.
There’s a heavy pro-natalism push for obvious reasons, and I have no idea why, but it feels like current government is trying to fix it through wrong methods. They know they’re royally fucked if people having 0-2 kids max.
Zero effort is going into addressing any of the top reasons people cite for not having kids: housing prices, unaffordable college, child care, etc.
Those definitely affect the choice, but ultimately, there’s just no real cultural push to have more kids nowadays. Rich people aren’t having kids either, as you can see in top 10%, 1% brackets. Like, I don’t have a single girl friend that even wants 3 kids. Anyone whom I’ve talked to always has a range between 0-2. Can’t blame them. Giving up at the minimum 6 years of your life for no real benefits kinda sucks.
By api 2025-02-0214:29 It's a complex issue. IMHO it's only a real problem when birth rates are consistently below replacement or when they fall way below replacement as they are in a few places like Korea.
In that case, step one is to remove obvious barriers like insane housing prices and pervasive workaholism so that people who want to have kids find it easy to do so. Create a culture that is a supportive environment for families.
I don't see the Project 2025 crowd doing much of that. Many of the billionaires backing the project are pushing work cultures and social policies that will have the opposite effect. Think Musk's "hard core" work cultures are conductive to family formation?
I think it's because their real goal is fundamentalist theocracy and/or fascism. Just like the climate protestors who are actually hard-core Marxists or anti-industrial Neo-primitivists hoping to collapse society to realize their vision, these people are "problemists." The problem is a good thing because it's a hook they can use to sell a whole agenda. Solving the problem without implementing that whole agenda would be, to them, a failure.
Christian Nationalists don't want to fix declining birth rates without implementing Christian Nationalism any more than the people throwing paint on works of art in Europe want greenhouse gas emissions fixed without collapsing capitalism.
By llamaimperative 2025-02-023:49 > I mean the current game plan, from what it seems, is to make porn a shameful and taboo thing. Same as abortions as well.
Uhhh no, they're pushing to make these things illegal. One is a social norm, the other is utilizing the power of the state to assert a specific opinion.
By ocschwar 2025-02-0115:07 Reach out to the developer behind 91-DIVOC. That won't cover red states that go dark when and if they do, but it was invaluable to me during the covid pandemic.
I'm a CS professor who used to write and develop the software behind a daily and weekly Pennsylvania covid report. I get the pain here. It's a messy, incompatible jumble without the CDC.
Would you like me to see if there are some CS folks here to provide programming support to help with what you're doing?
I -hope- this is transient but I'm not holding my breath either.
(feel free to reach out at dga@cs.cmu.edu)
By dgacmu 2025-02-0123:39 Relieved to see it's back online. Hopefully it remains reliable in both senses of the word.
By cka 2025-02-0123:10 Definitely troubling. Not a replacement, but you might be interested in EHR derived communicable disease data available here:
https://www.epicresearch.org/data-tracker/communicable-disea...
By Scottn1 2025-02-029:22 Your Twitter was one of several I followed to get trusted information during most of Covid. Just wanted to say "Thanks".
