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Hi, first time poster, long time lurker, so apologies in advance if I break any rules.
I was watching a recent debate between Destiny and Actual Justice Warrior (AJW) and around 1 hour 24 minutes Destiny fact checks a claim from AJW on the federal budget/spending in Kentucky.
Here is the fact check from Destiny on federal spending in Kentucky:
I'm not going into the argument between Destiny and AJW since my question is more on Kentucky federal spending data and fact checking. I believe the data Destiny mentioned comes from usaspending.gov which by all accounts is a reputable and reliable source, that provides information and transparency on federal spending in the United States. But where I start running into issues with this data is that this numbers here don't necessarily match up with numbers I see in other sources:
Usafacts.org says Kentucky received $3576.43 per capita in federal assistances in 2020, their source is the US Census Bureau.
According to the urban institute, which seems to be a pretty reputable nonpartisan thinktank:
If you take 32.20% (the percentage of state revenue that is federal funds of Kentucky in 2020) and multiply that against the $10,203 per capita number from 2021 (yes I know 2021 and 2020 is not the same but there shouldn't be that large of a gap between the two years) you get $3570.014 per capita, which closely matches up. Other articles on Kentucky state funding seems to match this value much more than the value that you see on usaspending.gov.
So I looked more at the data from usaspending.gov and I start to see data that seems to bring up more questions. The data suggests that per capita, Kentucky people receive $34,552 YEARLY in federal assistance. This is an absurdly high value! Most of that amount comes from the Department of Health and Human Services. I looked at other state's data that rank high in terms of federal assistance:
I only looked at the top 10 states based on their dependency on the federal government and Kentucky is a clear outlier. On the dependency ranking Kentucky ranks 5th, which is pretty high, but based on the numbers here I'd imagine it should be even higher.
As I examined Kentucky's data, I start to see other things that seem off. Jefferson county received $110.40B, or 71.73% of the entire state's funding. The next highest was Fayette county, at $2.61B. Jefferson county has a population of around 770,000, while Fayette has around 320,000. So I should expect to see a roughly 2:1 ratio, but here we see a 42:1 ratio instead. That means people in Jefferson county are getting roughly $152,857 per capita. The occum's razor answer would be that there is missing data, somehow the award counts got misattributed 100% to Jefferson county rather than being allocated properly, but in light of the extremely high $34,552 value I'm wondering if the data is correct at all. I did a quick spot check on the other states and their county percentage to population ratios seemed to match up.
So what am I missing exactly? Why are the numbers in USASpending.gov so high compared to other numbers that I've seen? Why is Kentucky's numbers so high? There must be something obvious I'm missing but I don't know what that something is. Is the US Government really spending that much money on Kentucky, and specifically Jefferson county?
This leads into my second question on knowledge and fact-checking in general:
How do you decide that the information that you know or take for granted is in fact, correct?
I like to think I'm a somewhat intelligent guy, but this exercise has shown just how untrained I am in information gathering and fact checking. I supposed to the next step is to call or contact experts or at least the authors of these articles but honestly I feel like that is a lot of work for something that at the end of the day is just a result of me wanting to find the source of a fact mentioned in a random two hour debate from the internet. I suppose for informal discussions this level of research is more than can be reasonably expected, and if you were trying to write a book or video or anything that you want to share to the public, you should do your due diligence to make sure you aren't spreading misinformation.
But in every speech and conversation, we are constantly referencing a bank of information we have accumulated in our life times. And we shouldn't have to walk around having to fact check every little thing we come across, because knowledge is near limitless. I think Destiny is one of the more reasonable twitch streamers when it comes to political content, and for him a 30 second google search was enough to decide on the facts for a point in a debate, while I spent 15 minutes looking into the data only to come up with more questions than answers. I'd rather not have to go through this exercise every time I'm questioning what someone is saying, and perhaps the answer is stop listening to that person, but at the same time I'd also rather not disengage in conversation just because I'm being lazy.
And furthermore, there is so much wrong information online now. Whether it's a genuine error or deliberate attempt at misinformation, it's becoming more and more difficult to find the truth. A recent example comes to mind with the photo of the burnt baby in the Israeli/Palestine conflict. The website flagged that picture as AI generated, but other users used the same website and posted pictures of the website saying it wasn't. Well someone took it a step further and replaced the burnt baby with a picture of a puppy. To me the puppy picture seems extremely fake and it originates from 4chan of all places, but I saw people in twitter threads using the 4chan picture as proof that the burnt baby picture was fake. And let's not forget the fake Mr. Beast deep fake video that went viral a while back. I know the topic has been discussed at length here already but we have reached the point where AI generated pictures and videos is good enough to fool a good number of people, and that technology is only going to keep improving and improving.
Perhaps I'm better equipped to deal with comparing these realistic videos/photos to my previously accumulated bank of knowledge, but as I pointed out earlier even this bank of knowledge is unreliable. And as future generations grow up spending more and more time on the internet, where there seems to be more and more misinformation easier to generated, what defenses do we have against truth seeking versus falling victim to lies and falsehoods? I'd like to be a father one day, and there is a very high possibility that my future kid will grow up in a world where at a click of a button someone can create a video of someone they never met will be able to make that person say/do whatever they want. I don't want to be someone that completely shuts my kid off the internet, but at the same time I worry about how someone that will grow up with access to the internet will formulate their knowledge base on the world. Perhaps the best answer is spend time with your kid, take them out to real world events, make sure they have in real life friends, but I think you'd need a high trust society for that, and personally I feel like in the United States we are shifting more and more towards a low trust society. I lived in Los Angeles up until 9 years ago and spent half a year in San Francisco around 2017, but for many reasons I don't want to go back to either city despite friends and families in the area. So I guess this leads to a third question: If you had a job that was 100% remote, which US state/city in your opinion would be a good place to try to start a family?
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