Reminder of something important that is easy to forget - everything has assumptions, but if you peel back those assumptions you realize how shaky some of what we accept to be true actually is. The world is far more complex than we appreciate; the more we understand something, the more complex it becomes.

Population numbers have always bothered me given that the census is infrequent, and this is in a G7 country like Canada. I always did wonder how other countries performed this with such accuracy. Turns out according to David Oks, they don't - at least not in a way that gives us any real confidence.

The final paragraph speaks more broadly that we still know so little, even for things we assume as absolute truths of our physical world:

But it’s good to be reminded that we know a lot less about the world than we think. Much of our thinking about the world runs on a statistical edifice of extraordinary complexity, in which raw numbers—like population counts, but also many others—are only the most basic inputs. Thinking about the actual construction of these numbers is important, because it encourages us to have a healthy degree of epistemic humility about the world: we really know much less than we think.