Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by xamuel 2223 days ago
Amen. And the weirdest part is it seems like whenever people manipulate the data, it's always to support whatever narrative I oppose. Any time the data supports the narrative I favor, said data is reliable and trustworthy. Has anyone else noticed this? Isn't it weird?
1 comments

Even if we have all this math at our disposal, there's always a way to include all data points you have private access to show the outcome you want. It would be useful if we had some kind of open record act, as long as it doesn't reveal PII - if a government agency shows us a graph, we should have the means to duplicate it by getting access to the raw data (clipped of PII - i.e. Date of Birth turns into age range buckets) Probably a no-go, but I'm just saying data can be manipulated if you don't have unfettered access to it. I'm not saying this to support this specific case - just pondering a possible answer to your question.