alt Hacker NewsThe post leans too hard on “we have no idea.” Population numbers are estimates with error bars, especially in places with weak census infrastructure, but that’s not the same as ignorance. Most countries run censuses (sometimes badly) and use births/deaths/migration accounting to update totals. Calling them “fake” is misleading — it’s uneven data quality, not numerology. “Large uncertainty” ≠ “no idea.”
Replies
Countries have incentives to manipulate population data. Most error that I’m aware of is not attributable to poor data quality. For example, if you have a real estate bubble you have a strong incentive to show population growth.
You are conflating known and unknown unknowns, otherwise known as Knightian uncertainty. As the article says, many countries have not run censuses in many years and/or manipulate the numbers.
I think "no idea" is an entirely reasonable summary of the magnitude of the uncertainty.
This comment is LLM generated.
And yet... The examples mentioned and the justifications for big errors/fakes in many countries (that historically have been highlighted for scares around overpopulation) are very plausible. "Most countries run census" is not the same as "most countries run mostly reliable census" or "most of the world population is covered by a reliable census".
Aren't there plenty of incentives for over expressing population numbers in many countries, specially in underdeveloped ones?
There are growing sentimental, denialist, conspiracy, narratives on social media that anything that paint US being out of proportion has to be fake. It's up there with flat earths and "birds don't exist" theories. From the article...
> The true population of the world, Bonesaw said, was significantly less than 1 billion people.
I think you are missing one of the key point of the article. Some census are indeed fake, as in falsified not as in uncertain, because population is used to allocate resources and as a proxy for power and there is therefore a strong interest in falsifying them.
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 Democratic Republic of the Congo, which by most estimates has the fourth-largest population in Africa, has not conducted a census since 1984. Neither South Sudan nor Eritrea, two of the newest states in Africa (one created in 2011 and the other in 1991), has conducted a census in their entire history as independent states. Afghanistan has not had one since 1979; Chad since 1991; Somalia since 1975.