A previous employer deployed a wireless relay network through the jungle in PNG and had rules to obey to avoid being accused of witchcraft and burned.

Cannot get to the page, from the wayback machine, the link works odd for me, but select "A lot of population numbers are fake" once the page displays.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260129141207/https://davidoks....

    ##article > div:nth-of-type(1) > div

The population numbers of other countries are only relevant when serving an imperial or colonial enterprise. In a way this article reads somewhat like a mob boss complaining that their accountant is skimming off the top.

If I were a rightful leader of all Nigeria I would make sure those numbers would never be accessible for westerners as it’s the fist thing you need to know when you decide to wage war of any kind against some people.

Quoting from the article "But here’s a question about Papua New Guinea: how many people live there? The answer should be pretty simple."

That sounds a very strange expectation. Most of my life post university I realized most of questions have complex answers, it is never as simple as you expect.

If the author would check how things biology and medicine work currently, I think he will have even more surprises than the fact that counting populations is an approximate endeavor.

“The next census, in 1991, was by far the most credible, and it shocked many people by finding that the population was about 30 percent smaller than estimated. But even that one was riddled with fraud. Many states reported that every single household had exactly nine people.”

If I worked in the government of a country like this I’d just throw in the towel.

I was in Chile in 2017 for a census operation and the whole country shut down to conduct the census. It was a pretty big deal while I was there (and also a bit inconvenient because everything was closed). There was a lot of talk about how there had been a previous attempt at conducting the census which had ended up being a huge failure and how getting the 2017 census done right was a point of national pride.

I also worked as a canvasser in 2019 and 2020 for the US census and, while we were about as thorough as you could reasonably get, the whole operation made me somewhat skeptical of official statistics in general. 2020 in particular was a bit of a disaster due to the pandemic and when the statistics were published, a bunch of mainstream news outlets published stories about certain areas experiencing "population decline" and all I could think was that those were actually the areas where the census didn't manage to count everyone.

It's somewhat common knowledge that China's population count has been inflated for some time now, perhaps by 100's of millions. Not hard to believe when you realize how much data out of China is very difficult to verify (like GDP for instance). Evidence typically cited to support this are discrepancies in birth data, reports of 350 million duplicate IDs and fertility rates likely lower than official estimates. It's also reasonable to conclude there are systemic incentives for local officials to exaggerate numbers.

There is a strange pro-China faction on HN that will downvote me for this comment (not that this comment is at all anti-China) However you can ask any honest economist, etc and they will betray at least some suspicion themselves.

I had a coworker who had lived in Nigeria, working for the oil companies, with some pretty crazy stories. Duffle bags full of money guarded by squads of guys with machine guns being a normal day to day practice in some parts of the business. Extreme poverty right next to country clubs for the oil company staff. It wouldn't surprise me that they are up or town tens of millions of people.