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Comment by biophysboy | Hacker News Reader

The bureau of labor statistics publishes confidence intervals in their reports

Not in their primary news release. A footnote says it is "generally conducted at the 90% interval", but the individual numbers do not have their actual computed error bars.

Yes, they do publish them, but it is disappointing their primary releases do not have them.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

It’s common in scientific/stats publishing to have the headline state the avg/median, the main text plot the errors, and the supplementary give the explicit numbers. They have a big page about std errors.

The main text doesn't plot the error bars, and the full data tables in their release don't have error bars either.

You have to really dig into their website to find their std errors.

bls.gov/ces is the main page for this survey and has a plot.

The error updates annually. Their handbook has a Reliability section where they detail sampling/nonsampling error.

NBC wouldn't know how to navigate bls.gov if you put a gun to their head. And it's all downhill from there

Based on the discussions in this thread, they aren’t alone

I don't think most of the people in this thread are journalists

God help us if they ever become one

Yes! I am aware of this and they are really great. Problem is nobody will ever read that, but they WILL watch Fox News, CNBC, etc. and those outlets never even point out that there are errorbars/uncertainty. Then I hear things like outrage when BLS revises numbers up or down (facepalm).

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