sofiechan home

Ground Truth Demographics

anon_taxu said in #4332 1w ago: received

How many people exist on Earth today? Where are they, and where are they from? On these basic questions, we find a surprising degree of uncertainty.

Some examples:
- How many people live in Mariupol? Pre-war, it was roughly 400k. The Ukrainian official estimate is 120k post-Russian conquest, a depopulated and destroyed city. Meanwhile Russia claims over 300k and has tiktokers posting about how nice it is. Which is closer to reality?
- How many people are long-term residents of the United States? We have detailed census data. We also have various claims floating around that the illegal immigrant population is higher than official reports suggest. If this is even slightly true, then we must have many census tracts whose true population greatly exceeds their reported population. Where are they?
- How many people are in Africa? This is the biggest wildcard. I've seen high-quality, intellectually honest accounts on X suggest error bars in the hundreds of millions.

We have good tools now. Cheap, frequent, high-resolution satellite imagery. Powerful vision models that, given a bit of training data from on-the-ground surveys or surveillance, could accurately estimate how many people are actually living in a given settlement as seen from above. Cell phone location data. A whole range of other, more bespoke data sources.

Who is building the Ground Truth Population Database?

referenced by: >>4334

How many people exis received

anon_jygo said in #4333 1w ago: received

Is the world big, or can more people hide in houses than I expect? I feel like 100k is a lot of people, but towns of 100k look like patches of boxes on Google Maps. 8 billion seems like an overestimate to me but that's merely a guess.

Slightly related: what is the marginal benefit of growing your own potatoes or raising a cow in the suburbs/yard? Assume 0 fertilizer or extra inputs. There is so much uncultivated land in the USA, even on the populated eastern half. It's amazing that cities can dedicate so much space just for cars and roads. From an Old World perspective, places like western Arkansas and the upper Midwest are just begging to be filled up with people. Is it established landowners doing large-scale mechanized farming that prevent the land from being used? Land is a bit expensive near Memphis, but gets cheaper in the mountainous areas further west. Some cheap patches near cities in ND and your occasional 1mil 500 acre lot.

It seems like nobody has figured out a way to get to these remote areas with cheap land and (1) quickly produce manufactures/industry to make up for the remoteness and lack of utilities, (2) produce large amounts of food. I would say (3) creating transportation to some extent because it's probably too difficult to have people locally smelt their own steel so inflow of goods from elsewhere is needed.

People talk about colonizing Mars but nobody has figured out how to colonize Arkansas yet. Solar/water purification/plumbing/housing material/satellite internet/local food might get you pretty far. You could have reasonable quality of life but probably don't expect any scientific breakthroughs and it's not strong enough to survive against an army.

Is the world big, or received

anon_jygo said in #4334 1w ago: received

>>4332

I probably won't even meet 280k people in my life. Hard to fathom so many people just up and left to somewhere else.

I don't think the Africa pop. count even matters anymore, there's lots of people there but not here. Build walls, shoot boats in the Mediterranean. We are approaching a new cycle in the world and it will be different from past ones. I feel like populations are ready to take up arms if governments keep importing more people.

referenced by: >>4336

I probably won't eve received

anon_taxu said in #4336 1w ago: received

>>4334

Sure, but demographic ground truth is still an important input for strategy, for policy, and just for understanding the world.

A related point: Wikipedia 20 years ago proved that you can harness tremendous amounts of latent online autist energy to build a truth machine. (Wikipedia today has been captured and pozzed by militant wokes, but that’s a story for another day.)

This same latent energy feels underutilized today. Where is the Ground Truth Demographic Database? Where is the grand map of the worlds major supply chains? Where is the crowdsourced replacement to the (meticulously woke-gated, closed to interesting research) UK Biobank? Many such cases.

Sure, but demographi received

You must login to post.