Recently in the UK, two statistics-gathering bodies announced they would stop making certain health data available to the public precisely because they felt it was being "misinterpreted" to counter the Narrative. The CDC have been making detailed mortality data available annually for decades. I wonder how long this will last now.
I understand. The CDC has also recently advanced some remonstrations about maintaining data access... such as it is and such as it has been. The health authorities in the Anglosphere must be talking in stereo.
I actually took up this point in previous post about a New York Times article on just this point. The NYT made a point of running interference for the CDC. We can't have the unwashed masses downloading data and "misinterpreting" it.
The point of my own piece, however, was the government agencies have always policed access; it's not as though the rest have had privileged access.
That said, it is interesting that systems have been set up to automatically crank out certain data--data that might not always accord with the prevailing, official narrative...
To be sure, we wish we could both be wrong on that count, but it's hard for me not to agree... which, I think, gets to a larger point: The authorities are almost never going to do something interesting or informative if they perceive that it might box them in going forward. They like to withhold data; they like to maintain the option of strategically reporting or leaking data or documents.
An exception, in my experience, might be a report that the competition authorities in the United States put out in 2008. In that year the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice put out its "Single-firm Conduct" report. That report basically committed the Division to analyzing "vertical" contracting practices in a way that would bar the Division from appealing to certain populistic ideas about how business works -- ideas that lend themselves to investigations into business practices that can degenerate into "fishing expeditions". So, whether or not one would agree with the content of the report, it did go some way towards constraining the authorities. Unusual.
Recently in the UK, two statistics-gathering bodies announced they would stop making certain health data available to the public precisely because they felt it was being "misinterpreted" to counter the Narrative. The CDC have been making detailed mortality data available annually for decades. I wonder how long this will last now.
I understand. The CDC has also recently advanced some remonstrations about maintaining data access... such as it is and such as it has been. The health authorities in the Anglosphere must be talking in stereo.
I actually took up this point in previous post about a New York Times article on just this point. The NYT made a point of running interference for the CDC. We can't have the unwashed masses downloading data and "misinterpreting" it.
The point of my own piece, however, was the government agencies have always policed access; it's not as though the rest have had privileged access.
That said, it is interesting that systems have been set up to automatically crank out certain data--data that might not always accord with the prevailing, official narrative...
that proper study will be done when hell freezes over...
To be sure, we wish we could both be wrong on that count, but it's hard for me not to agree... which, I think, gets to a larger point: The authorities are almost never going to do something interesting or informative if they perceive that it might box them in going forward. They like to withhold data; they like to maintain the option of strategically reporting or leaking data or documents.
An exception, in my experience, might be a report that the competition authorities in the United States put out in 2008. In that year the Antitrust Division of the US Department of Justice put out its "Single-firm Conduct" report. That report basically committed the Division to analyzing "vertical" contracting practices in a way that would bar the Division from appealing to certain populistic ideas about how business works -- ideas that lend themselves to investigations into business practices that can degenerate into "fishing expeditions". So, whether or not one would agree with the content of the report, it did go some way towards constraining the authorities. Unusual.