1. Population Mobility: Generally speaking, in economically developed areas, population figures are often underestimated because a large number of people freely migrate into these regions, and local governments are actually unclear about the exact increase in population. In contrast, in less economically developed areas, population figures are often overestimated because many people leave to work in cities, only returning to their hometowns for brief periods each year.
2. Mortality Data: China’s birth data is already quite accurate. Nowadays, the vast majority of babies are born in hospitals, unlike decades ago when midwives would come to homes to assist with deliveries. Moreover, birth certificates must be issued immediately after a baby is born. However, China’s mortality data is not precise, primarily because burials are still common in many rural areas, and these death records are often delayed.
For example, my city conducted multiple rounds of mass COVID-19 testing in 2021. Each time, more than 4.4 million people were tested, but our small city's 2020 census results only showed a population of 3.7 million.
China's and India's population numbers always boggle my mind.
Made several friends during my master that were from China. One of them was from Shenyang. Never heard the name before and I'm usually pretty decent with geography. Around 8m inhabitants. Not even in the top 10 population wise. There isnt a single city in the 100 largest cities in China that is below 1m.
My hometown has a population of 3.4 million (prefecture level city or 3rd tier as people call it). But it has an area about 6000 km^2, easily reaching the total size of London. At its core the central town has roughly a population of 700,000. And there are 4 more towns after the central one, each has smaller villages and suburbs under them. People living in these towns wouldn't consider they are living in the same city.
I would have imagined that the data could be used to get mostly accurate numbers.
That's one source of bias that is present at a specific time. Mostly you would have competing incentives. There is usually more than one agency that runs does the counting. Vital records registration, voter rolls and tax payers lists, for example are separate agencies in some countries. Not every tax payer is a voter and not everyone who was born still lives in the country. The sources are sometimes cross-referenced too. Then there is usually a place that needs to do macroeconomic forecasting and needs to have some numbers to do it's job.
1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
This study published in Nature [0] says that rural populations in particular are typically UNDERCOUNTED (exactly like the Papa New Guinea in the OP's article), and that this happens at similar rates across poorer and wealthier countries: "no clear effect of country income on the accuracies of the five datasets can be observed."
https://human-settlement.emergency.copernicus.eu/ruralPopDis...
> The true population of the world, Bonesaw said, was significantly less than 1 billion people.
Aren't there plenty of incentives for over expressing population numbers in many countries, specially in underdeveloped ones?
That's why somme statistics look weird. That's also why things heavily relying on demographic data need to be question. It's particularly significant when it comes to green house gas emissions for example and climate modeling.
The US Census is "de jure" (based on where you live and sleep most of the time), not where your mail goes, so the SD nomad population can go uncounted. The Census Bureau generally does not mail forms to PO Boxes. They use a Master Address File (MAF) based on physical residential structures. If you are an RV'er and you were at a campsite in Arizona on Census Day (April 1st), you were technically supposed to be counted there, not in South Dakota. Many truckers are "transient" and difficult for the Bureau's "Non-Response Follow-Up" (the people who knock on doors) to catch.
Many are not counted. This creates a fascinating paradox: South Dakota has a high number of legal residents (on paper/licenses) but a lower enumerated population (on the Census). South Dakota might have enough "licensed residents" to clog their DMV and insurance systems, but because those people weren't "counted" in the physical state during the Census, the state doesn't get the federal highway or healthcare dollars to support the infrastructure they use when they do pass through.
It’s a bizarre irony: In PNG, the government "invents" people (overcounting) to get more aid; in South Dakota, the system "loses" people (undercounting) because the administrative tools (physical addresses) don't match the modern lifestyle.
That sounds a very strange expectation. Most of my life post university I realized most of questions have complex answers, it is never as simple as you expect.
If the author would check how things biology and medicine work currently, I think he will have even more surprises than the fact that counting populations is an approximate endeavor.
>But it’s good to be reminded that we know a lot less about the world than we think. Much of our thinking about the world runs on a statistical edifice of extraordinary complexity, in which raw numbers—like population counts, but also many others—are only the most basic inputs. Thinking about the actual construction of these numbers is important, because it encourages us to have a healthy degree of epistemic humility about the world: we really know much less than we think.
Everything is basically a theory only judged on predictive capabilities. Even the idea that Earth is not at the center of the solar system is a judgement call of what we define as the solar system and center.
The math is simpler sure, but its arbitrary how we define our systems.
If you don't have a definition of the solar system, the question about its center is meaningless. If you have then you can answer it according to that definition.
I used to focus so much on finding "elegant" proofs of things, especially geometric proofs. I'd construct elaborate diagrams to find an intuitive explanation, sometimes disregarding gaps in logic.
Then I gave up, and now I appreciate the brutal pragmatism of using Euler's formula for anything trigonometry-related. It's not a very elegant method, if accounting for the large quantity of rote intermediate work produced, but it's far more effective and straightforward for dealing with messy trig problems.
[0] https://astronomy.stackexchange.com/questions/40782/where-is...
Put another way, there's a reason we use latitude/longitude for terrestrial positioning, instead of Cartesian coordinates with Sol being at (0, 0, 0). For one, it keeps the math time-invariant.
For further reading, I like Early Wittgenstein, but warning, he is a meme for a reason, you will only understand 10%...
Imagine we have a table with black and white splotches. We could use a square fishnet with a fine enough resolution to accurately describe it. But why use a square fishnet? Why not use hexagons? They both can accurately describe it with a fine enough resolution.
All of science is built on this first step of choosing (squares or hexagons).
Maybe something easier than Wittgenstein, there is Waltz Theory of International Politics, specifically chapter 1. But that is more practical/applied than metaphysical. I find this a difficult topic to recommend a wikipedia article, as they are too specific to each type of knowledge and don't explain the general topic. Even the general topic gets a bit lost in the weeds. Maybe Karl Popper too.
But they don't. We know they don't. Not unless you use a weird definition of orbit that is very different from the one lotsofpulp was using. And if you do that you're not countering their argument, you're misconstruing it.
And our universe has tons of matter with gravitational mass everywhere, few other types of interaction beyond gravity, and a vacuum that just doesn't want to stay empty.
--
[0] - Not sure if this was mathematically proven, or merely remains not disproven.
Actual orbits being slightly off ellipses isn't what I meant.
All of science is like this. Change your frame of reference/theory. Why did we pick one system vs another? Its arbitrary.
First we have to live. That has implications; it's the base for all knowledge.
Knowledge is developing all the time and can be uncertain, sure, but the foundations aren't arbitrary.
You are doing an idealism.
The problem I have with this literary device is that I think it works if most / many questions would fit it then he would go to disapprove it. Using it, for me, kind of indirectly reinforces the idea that "there are many simple answers". Which I came to loathe as it is pushed again and again due to social media. Everything is "clear", "simple", "everybody knows better", "everybody did their research".
How did this literal device make you feel? Interested? Curious? Bored? When I read it my initial instinct was "no, it's definitely not simple, so if that's what are you going to explain me, I will not bother".
anyway it is just a writing style. if you don't like it, fine. If you can't parse it, well, now you can.
I find the complication comes from poor definitions, poor understanding of those definitions, and pedantic arguments. Less about the facts of reality being complicated and more about our ability to communicate it to each other.
Apparent simplicity usually comes from weak definitions and overconfident summaries, not from the underlying system being easy.
Complexity is often there from the start, we just don’t see it yet.
~1200 - omg chess is so amazing and hard. this is great.
~1500 - i'm really starting to get it! i can beat most people i know easily. i love studying this complex game!
~1800 - this game really isn't that hard. i can beat most people at the club without trying. really I think the only thing separating me from Kasparov is just a lot of opening prep and study
~2300 - omg this game is so friggin hard. 2600s are on an entirely different plane, let alone a Kasparov or a Carlsen.
Magnus Carlsen - "Wow, I really have no understanding of chess." - Said without irony after playing some game and going over it with a computer on stream. A fairly frequent happening.
If you're always chasing the next technicality then maybe you didn't really know what question you were looking to answer at the onset.
This sounds like someone who has never studied physics.
"Oh wow, I figured out everything about physics... except this one little weird thing here"
[A lifetime of chasing why that one little weird thing occurs]
"I know nothing about physics, I am but a mote in an endless void"
---
Strong or weak definitions don't save you here, what you are looking for is error bars and acceptable ranges.
If you think I'm saying that the world is not infinitely complex, you are missing the point.
Sure, you can put it this way, with the caveat that reality at large isn't strongly definable.
You can sort of see this with good engineering: half of it is strongly defining a system simple enough to be reasoned about and built up, the other half is making damn sure that the rest of reality can't intrude, violate your assumptions and ruin it all.
What's missing more often than not, across fields of study as well as levels of education, is the overall commitment to conceputal integrity. From this we observe people's habitual inability or unwillingness to be definite about what their words mean - and their consequent fear of abstraction.
If one is in the habit of using one's set of concepts in the manner of bludgeons, one will find many ways and many reasons to bludgeon another with them - such as if a person turned out to be using concepts as something more akin to clockwork.
Reality is such that, without integrity, you can prove almost anything you want. As long as your bar for "prove" is at the very bottom.
Beginner: I know nothing and this topic seems impossible to grasp.
Advanced beginner: I get it now. It's pretty simple.
Intermedite: Hmm, this thing is actually very complicated.
Expert: It's not that complicated. I can explain a simple core covering 80% of it. The other 20% is an ocean of complexity.
I also worked as a canvasser in 2019 and 2020 for the US census and, while we were about as thorough as you could reasonably get, the whole operation made me somewhat skeptical of official statistics in general. 2020 in particular was a bit of a disaster due to the pandemic and when the statistics were published, a bunch of mainstream news outlets published stories about certain areas experiencing "population decline" and all I could think was that those were actually the areas where the census didn't manage to count everyone.
Especially anything that's self reported or whatnot. People lie. People misunderstand questions. No process is perfect.
Unfortunately, this extends to research studies. My mother enrolled me in the Growing Up Today Study (https://gutsweb.org/). I eventually stopped responding to that, as I couldn't see how any child (or even adult) could answer their questions on estimated food consumption remotely accurately, making the whole thing seeming dubiously ethical.
It's cited constantly in the research on ultra-processed food you see these days.
If for example you have poor compliance with the law then the law is mostly useless (in the US you do have to update your ID in 30 days, but huge numbers of people dont).
And that doesn't count if your country has a huge undocumented population, like some places in the US do.
"Wow, why are the roads wearing out twice as fast as we expect?!"
Where is this magical land with no homeless people?
"Just" is doing a lot of work in that sentence!
A human female can have sex once and pop out a new human 9 months later regardless of her connection to any official social systems or state apparatus. She could disappear into the woods as a hermit and produce a completely uncounted unknown new person.
To the degree that that doesn't happen, it's because a country has spent generations building a giant high trust society with good widely available medical infrastructure and a culture where almost everyone believes it is better to use that than to go it alone. Building that system requires the powerless to organize themselves and counterbalance the powerful elite who otherwise have a tendency towards despotism and corruption. That in turn requires a lot of shared culture so that the powerless feel they are all one tribe and not fractured out-groups (a reality the elites are constantly incentivized to manufacture). You need good education, mobility, safety.
An easy census is the very pinnacle of a successful society and only in a few places in the recent past has any country reached it.
frankly I don't think in any even half modern country you can go at it alone. I struggle to imagine how someone would physically manage to evade public authorities here in Germany where schooling is mandatory and any kid not in the education system would sooner or later be caught. There's barely even a place so remote authorities or other citizens would notice you and report you. You couldn't go to the doctor or anywhere really without identification or insurance.
So I think it's less of a function of trust and more simply of modernity, you're not going to escape attention for too long unless you're a trained spy or something
And how long does it take for that central registry to be informed when somebody has emigrated from the country without informing the government? Five years? Ten?
In e.g. Germany that requires a signed statement from the landlord, and the ability to receive mail at that address. If you can't receive mail at your own address, it'd be noticed and reported within at most 5 years. I actually believe it'd be the national health insurance that'd be the first to notice & report you missing, as having health insurance is mandatory (even if you continue paying them, they'd notice it once they can't send you a replacement card).
While I agree that the claim that world population is under 1 billion is bonkers, I also think he grossly underestimates how frequent and large the fraud is.
Take Venezuela for example, the UN and several NGO's have confirmed a diaspora caused by chavismo of well over 7 million people. This is not recognized by the venezuelan government and is not reflected in any of the stats pages you can find.
That's a 20-30% difference in the real vs reported population of the country.
And yes. They do fake the elections.
Yea, that would leave the US and Japan with about half the world population assuming our counts are even close to correct.
That's a bold assumption. States get more representatives if they inflate the population count: https://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/congressional-ap...
Huh? Chavismo began in 1999. So if you're claiming that chavismo caused a lot of migration, you'd need to come up with data that correlates with that time period.
The reality is, the big migrations from Venezuela began in 2017, which correlates with the very harsh economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Venezuela, which caused a hyper-inflation that lasted too long.
It has nothing to do with Chavismo and everything to do with American economic terrorism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuelan_refugee_crisis
In 1998, when Chávez was first elected, the number of Venezuelans granted asylum in the United States increased between 1998 and 1999.[30] Chávez's promise to allocate more funds to the impoverished caused concern among wealthy and middle-class Venezuelans, triggering the first wave of emigrants fleeing the Bolivarian government.[31]
Additional waves of emigration occurred following the 2002 Venezuelan coup d'état attempt[32] and after Chávez's re-election in 2006.[32][33] In 2009, it was estimated that more than one million Venezuelans had emigrated in the ten years since Hugo Chávez became president.[2] According to the Central University of Venezuela (UCV), an estimated 1.5 million Venezuelans (four to six percent of the country's total population) emigrated between 1999 and 2014.[15]
The Venezuelan refugee crisis has a lot to do with Chavismo.
It says the number of Venezuelans living abroad was 700,000 in 2015, and it skyrocketed from that point onward.
What happened around that time? - December 2014: Obama signed the first set of unilateral US sanctions on Venezuela - March 2015: Obama issued an executive order classifying Venezuela as an "unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security of the United States"
Sure, there may have been slow migration before the sanctions, but it could have been explained by a multitude of reasons, not necessarily Chavismo. For example, the frequent U.S.-backed riots and coups are surely a factor that encourages migration. People value security and stability.
truly HN approved content
I worked at an NGO in the region and made several duty travel trips to PNG. The office building I was working in had a platoon of security guards and metal detectors in the lobbies of every floor. A local employee kept an M-16 and ammunition locked in the server room. We had to have security escorts to travel anywhere outside of downtown Port Moresby. Coworkers shared stories of being carjacked like you or I might relate losing a phone.
It’s true that westerners visiting nations like PNG for work are often cloistered behind elaborate security. This is in part because the organization has legal responsibility for sending those workers, and the deterrent security measures are way less expensive than the legal and PR headache of an incident. In addition, well-funded and highly organized foreign businesses attract local ire in ways that random individuals do not.
In any one of those countries at any given time there are also foreigners passing through on travel or less organized work (e.g. academia) who experience the country without that thick security layer… and are perfectly fine.
Forever?
I heard people are switching to an Australian clone app called Upscrolled? The same way people switched to rednote for a while until tiktok was unbanned the first time.
Can you blame them? I personally can't.
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.
No it doesn't. It says the UN came up with a different estimate, which the UN wound up not adopting. There is no evidence that the UN estimate actually used better methods.
> I do think the headline exaggerates, I doubt "a lot" are fake, but some do seem to be.
I am strictly arguing against "a lot" being fake, and specifically that an isolated example is not evidence of "a lot."
The article certainly argues that the UN used better methods. Do you have evidence to the contrary? See:
> So the 2022 population estimate was an extrapolation from the 2000 census, and the number that the PNG government arrived at was 9.4 million. But this, even the PNG government would admit, was a hazy guess... It’s not a country where you can send people to survey the countryside with much ease. And so the PNG government really had no idea how many people lived in the country.
> Late in 2022, word leaked of a report that the UN had commissioned. The report found that PNG’s population was not 9.4 million people, as the government maintained, but closer to 17 million people—roughly double the official number. Researchers had used satellite imagery and household surveys to find that the population in rural areas had been dramatically undercounted.
The fact the UN didn't adopt this report would certainly be an argument against it.
If you disagree, it's up to you to provide additional evidence to the contrary. The article devotes a paragraph on why the UN didn't release the report. If you want to argue that the UN shelved it for reasons of accuracy rather than for political reasons, please provide the explanation for why the article is wrong and why you're right.
I mean, maybe you're right. I certainly don't know. But the article is going into a degree of depth to defend its reporting, and you're not.
And if it merely cited the 20 page research analysis someone else did, that would be fine, but it doesn't.
The article also is rather disingenuous, leaving out a lot of context. Looking closer, this was not some isolated UN estimate. Instead the UN was generating estimates every year, and the 2022 study was conducted differently because of covid. Subsequent UN estimates also went back to the original numbers. Also it wasn't a report that was buried, the numbers were released in 2022, they were revised down in 2023 after the UN conducted its next study. Seems like quite the omission.
> If you disagree, it's up to you to provide additional evidence to the contrary, not just arguments.
While arguments presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, sure here's the CIA estimate for the population which is in close agreement with both PNG's internal estimate and the actually adopted UN estimate. While the CIA is hardly the ultimate source of truth, the arguments that PNG pressured the UN to change its estimates for its own internal political reasons can't possibly explain the CIA coming to the same conclusion.
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/archives/2023/c...
> The article devotes a paragraph on why the UN didn't release the report.
The article spends a paragraph insinuating an ulterior motive while giving no evidence it is anything other than pure speculation.
> But the article is going into depth to defend its reporting, and you're not.
The article throws claims against the wall. It is obliged to defend them and it fails. That I can find contradictory evidence with a 30 second google search is convenient but irrelevant. Even if would take a year of extensive research to refute the claim, it does not change the fact the claim was never supported to begin with.
> Looking closer, this was not some isolated UN estimate. Instead the UN was generating estimates every year, and the 2022 study was conducted differently because of covid.
It seems it was indeed an isolated UN estimate, done in conjunction with the University of Southampton, conducted because the country's census was cancelled, supposedly due to COVID. Yes the UN provides yearly estimates, but it looks like this was a separate, one-off research project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Papua_New_Guin...
You can see the sources Wikipedia links to.
> Subsequent UN estimates also went back to the original numbers. Also it wasn't a report that was buried, the numbers were released in 2022, they were revised down in 2023 after the UN conducted its next study. Seems like quite the omission.
No, it looks like the report's numbers were never officially adopted at all. You can see the yearly figures here, there's no bump at all:
https://population.un.org/dataportal/data/indicators/49/loca...
As far as I can tell, all reporting states that the report remains publicly unavailable. The numbers weren't "released", they were leaked. That certainly seems "buried" to me.
> While arguments presented without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, sure here's the CIA estimate for the population which is in close agreement with both PNG's internal estimate and the actually adopted UN estimate.
The CIA World Factbook isn't trying to independently maximize accuracy using new techniques. They're mainly relying on official data provided by the countries themselves:
> Estimates and projections start with the same basic data from censuses, surveys, and registration systems, but final estimates and projections can differ as a result of factors such as data availability, assessment, and methods and protocols.
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/about/faqs/
Again, I'm not an expert in any of this. But nothing in the article appears to be contradicted by public reporting I can find. It provides additional information, you're right that I don't know how the author got it. You say you "can find contradictory evidence with a 30 second google search." But you haven't, you've actually given a bunch of wrong or irrelevant information.
Yeah, a one off research project that used different methods from every year before or since got totally different results. That was the point I was trying to make.
> No, it looks like the report's numbers were never officially adopted at all. You can see the yearly figures here, there's no bump at all:
That's what revised means. They updated it prior to publication in July 2023.
https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/fix-we-still-r...
> As far as I can tell, all reporting states that the report remains publicly unavailable. The numbers weren't "released", they were leaked. That certainly seems "buried" to me.
The report was leaked several months prior to publication. You'll note that every source claiming it was leaked was from early december 2022. You are engaging in exactly the same baseless speculation based on incomplete information that the article is.
> The CIA World Factbook isn't trying to independently maximize accuracy using new techniques.
They are trying to maximize accuracy using well accepted best practices. They adopt different numbers from either PNG's government or the UN. They are starting with the same data and doing their own analysis to reach an independent conclusion. If they knew the official data was highly skewed , they would account for it. Likewise there have been many other independent estimates, and an entire new census in 2024, all of which are nowhere near the 17 million estimate. Not utilizing a new technique that yields a radically different result from many different independent estimates and which is viewed with skepticism by experts is to be expected.
https://islandsbusiness.com/news-break/png-head-count-begins...
It's still possible that the one UN study was right and everyone else was wrong, but that claim can't be taken as a given, and it's certainly not supported in any way by the article.
> But nothing in the article appears to be contradicted by public reporting I can find.
How is every other independent estimate disagreeing with the 17 million figure not a clear contradiction of the article's implicit claim that the 17 million estimate is more accurate?
But even if you don't feel I've contradicted the article, again, I don't need to contradict the article. The article is the one making the claim, it has to prove it true.
> But you haven't, you've actually given a bunch of wrong or irrelevant information.
Everything I've said is backed up by sources. I'm not an expert, the sources could be wrong, but I'm going to go with all of them over a random article which makes incredible claims with no evidence.
I've already pointed out a bunch of claims you made that are directly contradicted by sources.
> They updated it prior to publication in July 2023.
That Lowry Institute link is unclear. It says it "revised down", but the first link says the original report was leaked, and many other sources say it was leaked as well. I can't find anything saying it was ever officially released. If it was officially published as you claim, then please link to it.
> and an entire new census in 2024, all of which are nowhere near the 17 million estimate.
Right, the whole point is that the census methodology is potentially massively undercounting the rural population, for the entirely plausible reasons given. Flawed results that are more recent aren't less flawed just because they're more recent.
> How is every other independent estimate disagreeing with the 17 million figure not a clear contradiction of the article's implicit claim that the 17 million estimate is more accurate?
Because they're all implicitly based on the official census numbers and they can't even read the report, since it was buried. If they can't even read it because the report was suppressed, then they're going to have a hard time incorporating its estimates, aren't they?
> I'm going to go with all of them over a random article which makes incredible claims with no evidence.
The article is repeating the same claims based on this academic study/report that have been reported extensively elsewhere. You can trust whichever you want, but the claim that PNG is faking their population data seems entirely plausible from current reporting. The author isn't making it up out of thin air. It's been extensively reported. It's in Wikipedia. They don't seem to be "incredible claims", just repeating mostly well-known information.
* Afghanistan
* Nigeria
* Congo
* South Sudan
* Eritrea
* Chad
* Somalia
* South Africa
Enough that "a lot" seems to be a fair characterization.
Also - while he implies this, I think it's important to mention explicitly - there's obvious fakery in the number of significant digits. If the numbers are approximations to the nearest ten million (or worse), it's a form of scientific fraud to provide a number like "94.9 million".
> there's obvious fakery in the number of significant digits. If the numbers are approximations to the nearest ten million (or worse), it's a form of scientific fraud to provide a number like "94.9 million"
The numbers aren't approximations to the nearest ten million. Just because they're inaccurate doesn't mean they're imprecise. For comparison if my bank statement is missing a large transaction it may be off the true value by hundreds of dollars, but that doesn't mean they didn't count the cents for the transactions they're aware of.
The headline is more fake than the numbers are.
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.
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?
“entire countries” of population spans a range from single-digit hundreds to over a billion, so this could describe anything from an imperceptible error to an enormous one in China’s case.
Some people claim that China's population is half of what the officials claim.
With modern technology/knowledge, we have a lot of high-density calories lying around, in the form of grains, potatoes, oils, etc.
It might be possible to get a rough picture tracking the perishables that are often animal products but poor countries don't use a lot of it because, well, they are poor. So it makes everything very complicated.
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.
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.
Some people claim that the Earth is flat. I’m rather more inclined to believe China’s official statistics than what ‘some people’ on the internet have to say.
That's not scientific. There's no verification or validation of data.
Your default assumption should be to question authority, especially if authority claims sole dominion over claims of fact, like "this is our population, because we say so."
They are humans with power, therefore they lie. If you don't have accountability feedback, you can never, ever check those lies, so you rely on proxies and legitimate models.
I highly recommend researching proxies you understand and can trust, and developing an understanding of the models that exist, and how to estimate confidence over a bounded range of values.
I don't think China has only 500 million people - that's a little silly. But I also don't think they have 1.4 billion, either, especially since one of their main justifications for that is "hey, we have this many phone accounts!" - their population control policies, their population decline, their cultural preference for male children and infant femicide, and so on don't jive with simple models of population growth based on human population growth constraints. If there's a deviation between properly error bounded models of populations over time in the hundreds of millions over the highest reasonably bounded value, something is suspicious.
You can take your reasonably bounded model and correlate with proxies - if the verifiable evidence supports the model over the claims, you can be more confident in the model than the claims.
Reliable proxies that can't be faked are difficult, and better models are going to be needed in the future as we get into AI slopageddon territory, where you can trivially fabricate entire identities and histories for billions of nonexistent people, even establishing social webs and histories for all of them, statistically indistinguishable from real people.
To perform a census, you need models constructed from verifiable data and first principles reasoning, with Bayesian certainty attached to each and every contributing factor, and then you need to set probabilistic bounds based on known levels of variability in things like population growth rates. Once you have an upper and lower bound, you can assign a certainty measure to the official claims - something like "this has a .01% chance of being true" - that's a good indication that reality diverges from those claims. It's not proof, it doesn't give you 100% certainty that some other number is precisely the case, but it's evidence.
The US government varies wildly in population counts, too, depending on which party is in power, which locales are being counted, the intent of the count, such as census, or estimation of population of illegal immigrants versus legal immigrants, etc. This is why census laws in the US forbid estimations or models or extrapolations; you need firsthand, auditable data collection, or fuckery occurs. The 2020 census was corrupted and then this was discovered by media and third party verification, for example. If you don't have a free press, things like that don't ever get revealed and confirmed, and authority is never held to account (in theory. In principle. In practice, power is rarely held to account anyway.)
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.
I'm trying to think of a definition, and the best I can come up with is this: fake means the number was modified at some point without an auditable trail. For example, if I see 1 deer on a sq km and I extrapolate linearly to a 100 sq km area that there are 100 deer in that area, then the number is fake if I don't disclose the extrapolation -- and this is true even if the actual number is in fact 100 in reality.
Actually, I don't even think this covers all the bases, because it assumes there was an initially factual measurement. For example, if it that one observed deer was in fact a statue, the numbers are all fake even if everyone documented everything and acted in good faith and accidentally came up with true correct number at the end...
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.
This is amusing. If you think population numbers are fake you absolutely do not want to see how they come up with GDP estimates.
Well, for some people - there's a notable tranche of people who are sounding the alarm bells about the demographic problems of low birth rates and an aging population leading to ever-fewer workers being squeezed by an ever-growing cohort of retirees who are hoarding wealth and real estate.
If I worked in the government of a country like this I’d just throw in the towel.
You are part of the system, so if the guy that gave you the job (and may fire you as easily) asks you to "make it so that the population is X millions" of course you do it.
I was thinking more to a "I am grateful to my father's cousin for giving me a comfy job where I don't have to do much of the day, of course I am going to return a favor" kind of situation. Of course it is not always this way, but it is fairly frequent.
This is in particular true for those countries whose borders where designed not around ethnic lines but arbitrarily by external forces. The loyalty is to the clan, not to the state.
Look at the size of the country (around 1/3 of USA) and the number of people living there (112M according to wikipedia), also 1/3 of USA. So the density should be about the same but when you look at satellite photos it's one giant city (18M), several smaller cities and the endless forest. Can it support other 90M people?
Also keep in mind the US is very sparsely populated after all. You can easily drive hours in parts of the western US (never mind the parts you cannot even drive through, or Alaska) without encountering a single human settlement.
People forget how rural the US can be.
Doesn't that describe many US states? (although sometimes desert/plains/etc instead of forest)
So yea, DRC can easily be like that. Especially if they don't subscribe to 4-6 people living in a house thing that the US does.
If you looked at US infrastructure and based the population we should have on how a developing nations population works, then you'd come up with a number like 750 million to a billion people... because 6 to 10 people live in a house, right? FYI, average US household is 2.5 people.
Simply put you cannot make any of your assumptions without more knowledge.
Or I should say, it's hypocritical in an article about population numbers being fake to generate your own fake set of numbers and say it's better.
What we have is a large university with almost half the population being college students.
https://censusreporter.org/profiles/16000US1805860-bloomingt...
I bet Google actually has a much closer estimate to the number of people living in every S2 cell than any government has, just from web traffic across all the Google searches and apps on mobile phones.
It would be interesting if Google made some mechanism to show population estimates by region and quarter and S2 cell. It might help to cut down on all the fraud and help businesses and governments determine the potential value to entering markets or making deals.
In the author's example of PNG, dare I ask "why does it matter what the population is"? If the bulk of the people are living their own lives beyond "civilization", speaking unknown languages, without the government providing any kind of infrastructure or services, then why is it important how many people there are?
War is hell. And I don't think anyone comes out untouched by it. The stats on vets are brutal.
- after 2014 the official numbers include the annexed parts of Ukraine
- since 1992 the natural change is negative (with a small interval around zero in 2013-2015), yet the total population was 148 million then and is 146 million now?
- there is some migration but officialy not enough to replace the decline of natural change ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Russia ). The numbers just don't add up, and that's not even counting emigration.
I haven't actually found any credible estimate what the 'true' numbers could be.
And like the article suggests it can be deliberate too. Am extremely skeptical of population figures in some parts of former Soviet Union. The official demographic loss figures in WW2 had tripled since 1945 but post-war census figures were never revised. That could easily account for the "demographic collapse" of 1990s.
If you're the neighbor of some country that has a number of natural resources you'd like to get a hold of then you want to do things like formulate battle plans. If you have to make a plan to conquer 10 million people, it's going to be a bit different than one for 5 million people. The 10 million one is going to take longer. And then when you figure out that country is using deception to bolster its population numbers you have to figure where they lied about these numbers. Is it everywhere, is it in the place you want to invade. Is the population actually higher where you want to invade but lower in the rest of the country. Now you have to invest in doing your own general population and capability counts to make sure you don't step 10 feet deep in a 2 foot deep pool.
Edit: changed world-wife (which sounds interesting demographically) to world-wide
Large cities are inherently inimical to living in large families. And yes, it was apparently the case even in the Roman Empire.
1) Government wants to know its own population so it knows how much tax revenue to expect.
2) Government wants to appear larger to appear stronger to both enemies and friends.
The official fertility rates for that period was 1.3. For reference: 2.1 is the replacement rate.
If anything their total population went down during one child policy.
Even if I take your numbers at face value, it is absolutely possible for this math to math. To simplify massively, if the average person dies at 80 years old, the population growth today depends on the number of births 80 years ago, compared to today. Not 30 years ago. The population may have grown massively between 30 and 80 years ago, so that the absolute number of births remains high, despite a low birth rate.
And this fits for China where the standard of living has massively increased. What would throw off most Americans is that in 1962 the average life expectancy in China was only 50 years old, and has increased to roughly 78 today. 28 additional years of life is huge and it was so rapid that it would create a massive increase in population.
This also reverses causality on the one child population rule. They didn't add the rule because their population was huge at the time, it was added because increased life expectancy with nothing else would have increased their population now to something like 1.7 to 2 billion.
Imagine this scenario: tomorrow the Ukrainian front collapses, and Russia rapidly captures a significant part of Ukraine. Then the Ukrainian government gets Venezuellaed by Putin (maybe with Trump's help), and the new government becomes loyal to Moscow.
Then a new charismatic military leader deposes Putin and forms an alliance with the Ukrainian army against Europe. With rhetoric like: "Look, Europe just used you. They never gave you enough weapons to win against Russia but just enough for a stalemate. They were giving Putin hundreds of billions for gas and oil, too afraid of cold weather while you were dying on the front lines. They hoped to kill both of our countries. Now let's join together and show them how the war should be fought properly". And then a battle-hardened 500000-strong army marches towards Kaliningrad, locking Poland and the Baltics behind the front lines.
It's an exceedingly unlikely scenario. But not impossible. And it's not the _only_ similar scenario anymore. There's also Turkey with a dictator dreaming about writing his name in history books. Serbia is getting more anti-EU.
Different population distributions. In particular, the population of China is concentrated in the eastern half of the country, with very few people living in the western half. Contrast to Europe, which from what I understand is more evenly spread out.
It is both funny and sad that we have more accurate number of the size of the Lebanese diaspora than the actual number of people living in Lebanon.
Funny how similar it is to Belgium's situation, the "language border" was established through census and then was revised as few times with census results, but since not everyone was happy with it it was essentially fixed and stopped being revised.
Today it's which side of the border you live in that determines which language you officially "speak".
I remember my political economy prof talking about when he was in the Prime Minister's office of some African country and they were "estimating" the GDP numbers for the OECD.
Collecting statistics is hard when your basic systems don't function well and there are plenty of incentives for "optimistic projections." And in many countries statistics collection doesn't occur or are inaccurate because cheating is rampant. I mean, why tell the government your income when they're just going to tax you on it?
You can see that in the US' import values. Everyone who imports knows that you can ask the shipper to fudge the invoiced amounts so the importer pays less in customs fees/taxes. The assumption by the statistics people is that it all "averages out." But they have no way to prove that assumption. And it's well known that transfer pricing is a total fantasy.
So - lots of numbers are fake. In the West fewer numbers are fake, probably.
What are the incentives to get it right?
Given the balance of incentives, it seems breathtakingly naive to think that we are within a few percent of the real population. The incentives (different, but present, in both rich and poor countries) are greatly mismatched.
The problem is likely much worse than the writer of this article believes.
And digital identity and authentication seems to be a very important service, should it be in the hands of corporations or governments?
Much easier to calculate population numbers in countries with a population register, but those are usually smaller countries like those in the Nordics. I don't think censuses are even held around here...?
A few years back in Austria there was a small scandal as a newly introduced government app to notify about changing residence was used by a member of parliament to declare they moved into the Parliament.
Joking obviously, but only just.
>The true population of the world, Bonesaw said, was significantly less than 1 billion people.
Even if we assume Bonesaw is correct and China has 500M people, India has 300M people in the cities and 0 rural population... that's only 200M left to reach 1B between all of the Americas/Europe/Africa and the rest of Asia.
For reasons I can't remember, I decided to go on a camping trip out in the deep desert. I had made friends with some of the locals and I guess I figured it would be a good way to get to know the local culture.
I met a few of the townies out on the desert rocks. And then a few more. Eventually I realized I had met a lot more. There were A LOT more locals than the imperial rep was telling people.
A lot of population numbers are fake. Amen, brother.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260129141207/https://davidoks....
##article > div:nth-of-type(1) > divOf course that's why I use firefox now.
For any counting exercise of middling complexity there are multiple methods to perform it that will generate different numbers. There's not one way to count even lecture attendees!
A count is always objective. It's fine to disagree with the method used, but one can't just say the number is wrong and not propose a better method.
Just don't fall into the trap of thinking you can't use these values if they are not perfectly accurate.
For example you couldn't use the same algorithm that you would on US or Japan as you would on a non-developed/developing country, you'd get nonsensical numbers.
Regardless, I live in a place that, according to the magazines and blogs, has a very high level of crime. I don't actually believe it does.
One sort of confirmation of this. One study I saw was counting crimes that happened here per population -- but the college students were not counted in the population; and this was a time where yeah, e.g. college students stealing each others TV's and or getting in fights etc, was prevalent.
No true. All that is required is for incentives to be roughly aligned for people to tend in a similar direction.
To be clear, the linked article is actually quite balanced apart from the click bait headline, I'm talking about the sort of thing it references from Twitter.
I took those trains for a decade and the math doesnt add up. The capacity of the carts and speed they operate through the tunnel suggests less than a million at most.
[0]:https://www.mta.info/agency/new-york-city-transit/subway-bus...
[1]: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/travel-in-london-2025-consolidate...
[2]: https://www.mtr.com.hk/archive/corporate/en/investor/annual2...
There is a strange pro-China faction on HN that will downvote me for this comment (not that this comment is at all anti-China) However you can ask any honest economist, etc and they will betray at least some suspicion themselves.
>perhaps by 100's of millions
More than 10%, i.e. PRC actually only 800m-1000m (20-30% undercount) is when claims become statistically retarded. There's proxy indicators like PRC ag imports, especially animal feed (soybeans), if they were 100s of millions short then per capita caloric consumption reach biologically impossible levels (like 200 grams of protein / 5000 calories per capita) meanwhile key policy CCP (Xi personally) hammers is food security / wastage. This when demographic skepticism becomes unhinged.
TBH PRC over reporting pop, UNDER reporting GDP is sensible. PRC entire history has been trying to underreport GDP (specifically per capita gdp) using accounting methods to stay under high income status for development perks, literally since initial IMF negotiations to set PRC per capita baseline, PRC insisted on something like 50% lower than what IMF calculated. Of course the anti PRC faction won't accept the logical out come is that PRC that is much richer it claims, with less people than it claims, i.e. PRC per capita much higher than it claims only makes PRC system look stronger. Then factor in demographic income disparity (i.e. tertiary educated newer gen make multiples more) and realize as PRC demo phases out undereducated/unproductive elders in next few generations and PRC per capita is statistically locked into doubling/tripling. Then factor in PPP / potential future FX moves, i.e. PRC appreciating rmb is another multiplier on PRC per capita. Not many "honest" economist talks about how PRC is actually incentivized to look statistically weak (somehow people forgot about hide/bide when it comes to economy), because muh authoritarians like to look strong, leading to plenty of PRC doomer economists who keep being wrong.
There's an even stranger anti-China faction on HN.
> However you can ask any honest economist, etc and they will betray at least some suspicion themselves.
Those same "honest" "economists" have been saying china was lying the other way. Did you know that people like you were saying "the ccp" was intentionally UNDERCOUNTING their population not so long ago? That china couldn't be trusted and china's real population was near 2 billion.
Strange people like you say shit like china is buying up all our real estate and then turn around and say china's economy is a fraud and they are about to go bankrupt? China's military is about to expand around the world and then say china's corrupt and they are a paper tiger?
Sometimes strange people like you contradict yourselves within the same thread. Strange.
You peddle standard anti-china propaganda and you know no one like you? Strange.
> I have been following reports of China's population being overcounted for at least 25 years.
25 years? Amazing. Are you a professional anti-china propagandist or something?
And in your 25 years, you haven't heard anything about china undercounting their population? Even stranger.
If I were pro-China, that would by this standard, mean that I refuse to believe unsubstantiated rumors and or didn't qualify every undeniably real Chinese achievement with either skepticism or 'at what cost'.
Some anarchist types don't like giving the government info on themselves either, especially when there is evidence that census data is sometimes put to commercial use.
This is wildly incorrect and is intentionally narrow minded - obvious by the end of the paragraph. All there has to be is financial incentive. There were multiple, for decades. Aligned incentives are far more effective than coordinated deception. Ofc this assertion comes right after acknowledging that an island nation literally miscounted by HALF. I'm not sure there's anything in this blog post worth remembering. It seems ill-considered.
Stopped reading here. The author claims magical knowledge and deep ignorance at the same time.
It would take a very involved conspiracy to make these numbers fall in line with where they should be given a certain pop cap, and I'm not sure what would be the benefit.
Like all conspiracy theories, if it requires a coordination of large unrelated organizations over long timeframes, which seems impossible even over the table, its almost certainly fake.
Like you can fake census data, but not how many cans of beans does a US-headquartered supermarket chain sells.
What we consider developing nations can quite often just go without these items. Economies in these countries can have rapid swings that cause massive changes in consumption. Shortages of medicines in one year can massively increase child deaths in the first year, where as the next 5 years don't have an issue with that.
With the last one, maybe there is a tik-tok trend that makes beans popular for a year, and then it dies out and half as many beans are consumed. This also isn't counting the average calorie consumption in a country. 10 cans of beans in the US might feed 20-30 people in another country when supplemented from locally grown items.
Shit's hard, yo.
Then there's also Occam: if you're a poor nation and you'll get more foreign aid if you inflate your population, you will inflate your population, full stop.
same mistake - westerners keep on making - mostly of the liberal kind when they don't want to face reality.
all countries have the same problem - whether developed | high trusting | low trusting or not.
observe what happens during elections - now suddenly a rural village it could be in bumwhat Alabama or middle of nowhere Africa - numbers are suddenly inflated -
same thing happens during humanitarian disasters - Side A accuses Side B of atrocities - then side A says XX number of people were killed | displaced - later on down the years we find out Side A made up the number the people would not have up x hell not even large X.
it's just human nature - lie, deceive and make up reality!!
If I were a rightful leader of all Nigeria I would make sure those numbers would never be accessible for westerners as it’s the fist thing you need to know when you decide to wage war of any kind against some people.
You need to know military, not population size (how quickly can a militia be raised, how long can it be sustained, how well they are armed, who can be persuaded to defect, etc.). This is related to population size, but not linearly.
Population counts get only interesting for military and tax potential during administration of a territory.
GP's point is valid, though, imho.
Is this statement not in direct contention with this statement:
>If I were a rightful leader of all Nigeria I would make sure those numbers would never be accessible for westerners as it’s the fist thing you need to know when you decide to wage war of any kind against some people.
Surely the leader of the colonisation target country would like to know the population of the coloniser, so that they can get an understanding of how many soldiers to keep in the defence force?
You can easily get an estimate of the number of buildings and especially vehicles, which tell you two important things. Not to mention that as a matter of course the first thing to do is photograph everything that looks like a piece of military equipment, which has been a purpose of satellite photography from the beginning.
Various kinds of countries get paranoid about letting people have maps or accurate geographic data. This makes very little difference militarily but causes real inconvenience for the locals.
Besides, nobody wages wars for labour exploitation any more. It's all about what's under the ground.
Anyway with underdeveloped countries - you only need to bribe couple of people and you effectively run the country. Which once again is fixed cost.
Why do they do these things? Because that is how they are as a society and this world currently rewards that more than it does the secret lab.