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.

That is literally what the article describes, though, in Papua New Guinea. And it describes why states in Nigeria have such a strong incentive to fake their population numbers, that it's impossible to achieve an accurate national total.

I do think the headline exaggerates, I doubt "a lot" are fake, but some do seem to be.

>>crazyg+Fr
Any country where there's no robust free press and legal protections for things like criticizing the government is lying about nearly everything, in the direction where the government feels it is advantageous to lie. If they feel they get a benefit from inflating population, they will inflate population, and it won't be subtle. The WHO and other international organizations are not legitimate sources of information; they take direction from their host countries and report numbers as directed.

If you pick any country and look at proxies that have significant cost associated with them, at relative population levels of verified locations, the population of the world differs pretty radically from the claims most countries put out.

If you don't have independent verification free from censorial pressures and legal repercussions, then you get propaganda. This is human nature, whether it stems from abuse of power or wanting to tell a story that's aspirational or from blatant incompetence or corruption.

Population numbers fall under the "lies, damned lies, and statistics" umbrella.

>>observ+dy
>If you pick any country and look at proxies that have significant cost associated with them, at relative population levels of verified locations, the population of the world differs pretty radically from the claims most countries put out.

Can you provide an example that shows a radically different population count?

>If you don't have independent verification free from censorial pressures and legal repercussions, then you get propaganda

Always?

How would you perform a census without massive amounts of money and cooperation from the government?

>>Braxto+lE
China is the best example, its estimated that their population is off by entire countries in some statisitics, either through disppeared girls, hidden covid deaths, local economic fraud. There is also no independently verifiable group in China and is actually explicitly banned to use non-government methods.

>>oyashi+zN
I wonder if the population numbers could be reverse engineered through things like light pollution seen by satellites, or food consumption.

Some people claim that China's population is half of what the officials claim.

>>thijso+PR
Yes, it absolutely can.

I'm sure the various high-end intelligence agencies have a much better view on this than the public does. All kinds of ways of cross-checking the numbers, all by doing things they'll be doing in their normal course of events.

A normal person could probably do a decent job with an AI that isn't too biased in the direction of "trust gov numbers above all else" and tracking down and correlating some statistics too obscure and too difficult to fake. (Example: Using statistical population sampling methodology on some popular internet service or something.) The main problem there being literally no matter what they do and how careful they are, they'd never be able to convince anyone of their numbers.

>>jerf+KZ
Some intelligence agencies endeavor to maintain a profile of every identifiable person on the planet with data acquired by many diverse means. They have enough data to build excellent models of population coverage such that I would be surprised if they could not estimate population with high confidence.

The problem with trying to measure this as a normal person is that you don't have enough access to different types of measurements to build good models of sample bias and selection artifacts.