Re:California Spent $17B on Homelessness. It’s Not Working
by nwienert on Saturday June 03, 2023 @04:33PM
(#36180287)
Data is so easy to manipulate and living in SF I saw it manipulated all the time.
For example during the pandemic one week close to the election suddenly there were posters plastered all over the place for getting tested. I’m talking 100 on every block it was crazy. They doubled the pop up testing areas. People came to our door knocking and telling us to get tested multiple times.
Not a week later I see the NYTimes with a front page top headline “surging cases of Covid in San Francisco” with very scary looking data about the spike in cases.
I looked into it. The spike was entirely due to testing. The article didn’t mention it until the very end and only in the most purposefully vague way. CNN and all the others had similar articles.
This is one of so many cases (Lancet article comes to mind), I’m talking literally hundreds I’ve seen of totally misleading data or very sketchy data backing peoples preconceived priors. The replication crisis is no joke.
Honestly I believe what I see, and I believe first hand anecdotes more than most data.
For example during the pandemic one week close to the election suddenly there were posters plastered all over the place for getting tested. I’m talking 100 on every block it was crazy. They doubled the pop up testing areas. People came to our door knocking and telling us to get tested multiple times.
Not a week later I see the NYTimes with a front page top headline “surging cases of Covid in San Francisco” with very scary looking data about the spike in cases.
I looked into it. The spike was entirely due to testing. The article didn’t mention it until the very end and only in the most purposefully vague way. CNN and all the others had similar articles.
This is one of so many cases (Lancet article comes to mind), I’m talking literally hundreds I’ve seen of totally misleading data or very sketchy data backing peoples preconceived priors. The replication crisis is no joke.
Honestly I believe what I see, and I believe first hand anecdotes more than most data.