US Census Data To Be Falsified by the Government

The link goes to a thread.

The US census is going to stop giving out real data to the public (used for ~12k papers/year) and instead put out fake data they made up to have similar statistical and numerical properties for a fixed list of factors that the government decides should be researched. This will stop the discovery of new things and also the fake data will be bad enough that results will need to be validated against the real data. To do that, you have to apply for the government’s help so you can tell them your hypothesis and math that you developed with the misleading, fake data and then they will check it against the real data and tell you whether you’re right or wrong. If you’re making an unpopular claim or you lack credentials, it will be hard to get a data validation since they don’t have the staff or funding to do enough of them (maybe they’ll get more tax money later though?). If you’re wrong, good luck getting enough info to fix the issue – reminds me of the oracle in FoR saying “no”.

The thread explains multiple things this will ruin.

This is evil and destructive.

I heard something about a proposal that all science with government funding has to be released for free (including raw datasets) because we, the tax payers, paid for it. Something like that sounds good and reasonable to me (with some exceptions for e.g. military science). It sounds fine/good to me for the government to say “if you want our funding, you release the data (even if you get a negative result)”. I don’t want the government to fund science at all, but if they are going to then transparency sounds like a good condition. If you want society to fund your research, then share your results with society. By contrast, the government withdrawing a bunch of data (that we pay for) to prevent people studying reality is going in the other direction and is awful.

My first guess about why they’re doing this is to prevent people from finding correlations related to race, gender, religion, etc., and otherwise studying certain politically-sensitive issues, not for privacy reasons.