Whether it’s AI or Social Media, for me at least, the routine is pretty similar. I look to see if something seems interesting or interests me. And if it does, I try to reproduce it or verify it with a human brain, i.e., my own. This morning I saw a tweet claiming that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was moving from collecting the pricing information that goes into building government’s canonical inflation numbers (CPI) to relying instead on a higher percentage “imputed” numbers, i.e., estimates. “Estimates” aren’t all bad. A few years back it became a topic of pretty intense partisan warfare with the Census. As I recall it, the Census was combining data collection with statistical models to get more accurate counts for more marginal and transient populations where underreporting is chronic. (As you might imagine, undocumented people aren’t terribly eager to fill out government forms.) In any case, was it really true that BLS is cutting back on data collection?
Actually it is.