Population much more than 8.2B, rural areas underestimated

[jdietrich]

>"When dams are built, large areas are flooded and people need to be relocated," Láng-Ritter said in a press statement. "The relocated population is usually counted precisely because dam companies pay compensation to those affected."

Sure, "we've been systematically undercounting population for decades" is a more plausible explanation than "large infrastructure projects in rural areas of underdeveloped countries are a bonanza of corruption".

[zamadatix]

Concerningly, they acknowledge accuracy of the numbers reported by the dam projects under limitations... by only highlighting the opposite, that it could be under-reported by them. I feel like I'm missing a lot for this to have been published but I'd expect such a paper about limitations of existing studies to be especially heavy on what the limitations of this new method might be.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-56906-7#:~:text=L...

[kristjansson]

A dollar per dead snake, you say?

[pessimizer]

Are you saying that large infrastructure projects have been systematically overcounting population in order to pay more compensation? That there's an interest in making them seem more disruptive, and as if they displace more people?

If that's an obvious conclusion, I need more explanation.

[rendang]

I've typically heard it rumored that populations get overestimated, as corrupt local officials in developing countries want to get more resources/power allocated to their district

[TwoPhonesOneKid]

That seems like the kind of behavior that would drastically vary from place to place and culture to culture. Just compare Rwanda with the DRC, for instance—neighboring countries with nearly polar-opposite reputation of how corruption is expressed. The DRC's corruption (aka Tshisekedi) means very low centralized control and an incredibly brutal multi-front civil war. Kagame's style has led to one of the most authoritarian countries on earth, albeit one with very low crime rates. That these are bordering countries with overlapping cultures and peoples and these places produce such wildly different expression of societies (as of today, that is) is quite illustrative.

There are certainly some ways that the behavior of countries can be painted with a wide brush, but each country still has unique dysfunctions and strengths. It's very difficult to say anything broadly applicable that doesn't have glaring exceptions undercutting the premise.

This is especially, especially true in places with great restrictions on freedom of the press—Rwanda's image is almost certainly partially fabricated, but it's very difficult to interpret the state of affairs from outside the country.

Corruption is certainly a constant across all countries, but the form the corruption takes is very dynamic.

[oliwarner]

Twice the stated population, half the expected tax revenue, no explanation or corroboration for population growth.

Sounds like a suspicious mix.

[teaearlgraycold]

The article doesn’t really give much scientific information. But wouldn’t areas flooded by dams be much higher in population than other areas? They would be by rivers and within valleys. Protected land with a fresh water supply. What relative population increase did they assume for these regions?

[lenerdenator]

Well, is it a few million, or a billion?

It doesn't really say in the article.

[wongarsu]

If the paper is accurate and not falling prey to false assumptions or some other error we are talking about billions. If we just generalize the deviations claimed by the paper out to the entire world there are about another 3-5 billion humans. If the paper is accurate but doesn't generalize to other countries we are still talking about a billion people.

[johnea]

I had the same question.

I thought reading the paper in Nature would give some more insight, but no.

I was looking for at least an estimate of what they thought world population should be, but that doesn't seem to be included in any of the text...

[wongarsu]

The original paper is discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43398308

[Traubenfuchs]

Don‘t they pay taxes? Have a social security number?

How could a significant amount of people escape that? Is it all in third world countries?

[Newlaptop]

Frustratingly problematic headline, I'd expect better from Popular Mechanics.

The title "Oops, Scientists May Have Severely Miscalculated How Many Humans Are on Earth" is entirely misleading- it's not "scientists" who have miscalculated this, it's government bureaucrats in various countries who are responsible for collecting and reporting census information in their region.

This matters, because we live in a world where many people get much of their information only from headlines, and a recurring narrative of "Scientists make mistakes" or "Scientists can't be trusted" has real impact to policy on climate change, vaccine hesitancy, and other areas where distrust of scientific knowledge or expertise causes uninformed people to make decisions harmful to their own well-being or harmful to those around them on everything from nutrition to pollution to evacuations before hurricanes.

[lurk2]

What distinction are you drawing between government bureaucrats and the scientists who use their data? If the thesis is correct, then most demographers are wrong about the world’s population. The bureaucrats themselves might not be scientists, but the demographers surely are.

This is a thinly-veiled ode to the “trust the experts” paternalism that dominated the early 2020s. This attitude isn’t scientific, it destroyed the trust in the scientific method it claimed to want to preserve, and it resulted in many policies that courts have since ruled to be illegal.

[casey2]

The government bureaucrats in this case are usually scientists employees by the government. And as far as I'm concerned anybody using the scientific method is a scientists, and if they aren't then they aren't, job title is meaningless here.

Stop pretending that scientist should be trusted. The recurring narrative you complain about is true and it's what separates science from dogma.

Scientists are experts in incredibly narrow fields and almost always speak about topics they have no knowledge of, even more dangerous, they convinced themselves and others that they have knowledge of these topics because they are superficially similar to something they know well.

[insane_dreamer]

Doesn’t every country or at least major country conduct censuses? Assuming there are some countries that can’t or don’t due to conflict, lack of resources etc. it seems these would be limited and therefore whatever estimates are made for those countries would be off my millions but certainly not billions.

[Ekaros]

No. Some countries don't need "census" as every citizen is sufficiently tracked and must report their official address. And so would most migrants. Meaning that with modern computer databases you can track births, deaths, immigration and emigration down to single person.

[juniperus]

I’d imagine it was accounted for that these dam surveys are conducted for populations near a river, and they’re just comparing the dam survey of that area to administrative population estimates or whatever. Either way, this data might only be relevant for estimating riverside populations. Also, I’d say it’s more likely population estimates are overestimating the human population by a billion, not underestimating by a billion. That’s just my view of that though