zlacker

>>bookof+(OP)
Fake is generally the wrong word. Inaccurate would be much more appropriate. Every population estimate is just that. There is going to be error. The error may be small or large, and it may be biased in one direction or another, but there is a clear chain from data to result. Even if your data sources are fraudulent, if you're making any attempt to account for that, though you may not do a very good job, it's still just inaccuracy. Fake would imply that the people releasing the population estimates have a much better estimate but are choosing to instead publish a made up number. This may actually happen in a few cases, but the claim that it's widespread is both hard to believe and unsupported by this article.

>>jjk166+Iq
> Fake would imply that the people releasing the population estimates have a much better estimate but are choosing to instead publish a made up number

Fake simply means not genuine. It doesn’t require the people reporting it to have a real estimate. It simply requires the people reporting it to just not try finding the real number.

>>darth_+ZD
How can any estimate, even a very poor estimate, be not genuine if there isn't a known better estimate? If I estimate there are 8 alien civilizations in the milky way it may be a truly terrible estimate, and the methods by which I came up with that estimate (eg one per galactic arm) may not stand up to any rigorous scrutiny, but it's as genuine an estimate as any other. To be not genuine, there must be something that is genuine, which it is not.

You don't need to necessarily know the right answer to have a fake estimate, but you have to be doing something to the estimate that you know is making it worse, which is equivalent to having the estimate where you didn't do that, which would be better.