Thinking as a historical researcher you get the sense very quickly that all kinds of documentation start from ideology and our current understanding of social ‘realities’.
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Thinking as a historical researcher you get the sense very quickly that all kinds of documentation start from ideology and our current understanding of social ‘realities’. So the concept of being ‘represented’ by officialdom is a really double edged ask.
Put more pointedly. If the Census a hundred years ago, so in the 1920s, had included questions on sexuality and gender identity. Would it be useful to us in its raw form. What uses would it have been out to then. How would we have to interpret it
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Ben Harris-Roxasreplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by
@liamvhogan worth noting that most uses of the census aren't historical though m. It determines a lot of planning and resource allocation.
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Put an even more drastic way, I see the idea being put that one can’t make good policy without data. (I disagree, you can, it’s done all the time). But the idea is once again ideology, it’s another way to express the management-science concept that unless one measures something it can’t be managed.
That point of view puts the State in the role of a manager of lives, which it is of course. But it’s not always a benign manager, and information and data aren’t always tools for happy progress.
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Liam :fnord:replied to Ben Harris-Roxas last edited by
@ben_hr how are we doing with planning and resource allocation with the rest of the Census, taking housing, say. Or the construction of schools. Or the provision of primary health. Or
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Anyway the point is, when you look at data sets historically (which as @ben_hr points out is yes, an extreme minority of the uses the Census is put to) you get a reminder that there’s a real difference between looking at State data as a source of truth and a source of utility. And neither is ideology-free.
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Ben Harris-Roxasreplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by
@liamvhogan great, thanks for asking. My Cybersyn 2.0 is doing excellent work.
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Liam :fnord:replied to Ben Harris-Roxas last edited by
@ben_hr pulling the levers and admiring the numbers, PJK-style
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Ben Harris-Roxasreplied to Liam :fnord: last edited by
@liamvhogan I call my policy "One Nation". I will take no further questions at this time.
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Liam :fnord:replied to Ben Harris-Roxas last edited by
@ben_hr I simply petition the Tsar and he is bound by God to take notice of his subjects