[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.

[watwut]

No they are not. These are administrators, plain and simple. Nothing wrong with that, but those positions don't require scientific education nor perform science. Not work for scientific institution nor are part of that process.

Stop lying, frankly.