alt Hacker NewsQuoting from the article "But here’s a question about Papua New Guinea: how many people live there? The answer should be pretty simple."
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.
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> Most of my life post university I realized most of questions have complex answers, it is never as simple as you expect.
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.
Nitpickinging is a quaint obsession.
"It shouldn’t be new to anyone that population data in the poor world is bad" from the same author and same article. but cherry pick away if it makes you feel intelligent.
Most people believe that most things are knowable, and happily defer to published statistics whenever possible.
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This is a literary device. The article continues to explain why this isn’t a simple problem, and it’s clear from the conclusion that the author understands the complexity.
>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.