This is an institutional reflection of the individual tendency to talk about problems rather than solving them. Or, an important variant, where the urge to help those in need is expressed as directing them to "appropriate resources", which are also services that direct those seeking help to other appropriate resources, ad infinitum. The net result is a whole army of people who's expressed goal is to help people but who's effect is to send needy people into a loop of endless communication. We'd all be better off if they all quit and helped out at a soup kitchen, volunteered to visit with house-bound elderly, or something similarly physical and real. (This is in part driven by an individual need to "scale". We praise this desire to "change the world", but we pay no heed to the cost when ONLY world-changing action is praised.)
As someone who's done a lot of volunteering at soup kitchens and such as well as things like public policy research, my take is exactly opposite.
Typical soup kitchen volunteering is pretty low impact. It's the first thing a lot of people think about when it comes to volunteering, and people like that they get to interact with the less fortunate. So they show up with their church group a few times, ladle some soup and that's about it. Running a soup kitchen is different and higher impact.
The things the UN is doing matter to millions of people. If you work with the UN food program, you're dealing with food by the truck load instead of by the spoonful.
Completely agree. The important corollary to that is that policy, in many cases, matters a lot more than boots on the ground (obviously good policy and manpower together are usually required).
I've volunteered with a prominent animal rescue charity for over 2 decades. While the work does require a lot of people, after you do it long enough you quickly realize bad policy is a giant contributor. For example, Texas is the only state in the US where it's illegal for shelter vets to do care on animals unless the animal is fully surrendered: https://www.humananimalsupportservices.org/blog/why-cant-vet... . So there are a lot of poor people who can't afford vet care, and then their only option is to surrender the animal at a shelter, where in many cases the animal may be euthanized. If your goal is to reduce the unnecessary killing of pets in shelters, fixing this policy is worth like thousands of volunteers.
> So there are a lot of poor people who can't afford vet care, and then their only option is to surrender the animal at a shelter, where in many cases the animal may be euthanized. If your goal is to reduce the unnecessary killing of pets in shelters, fixing this policy is worth like thousands of volunteers.
The problem is, Texas is ran by Republicans. And if there is one cornerstone of modern Republican politics, it is: the suffering is the point. Be it poor people who are denied care for their pets, pregnant women who are denied abortions, immigrants - even those with legal status - being snatched up by ICE... doesn't matter.
> And if there is one cornerstone of modern Republican politics, it is: the suffering is the point
This sort of deliberate mischaracterisation has no value in discussion. Republicans have definitely ridden high on stopping the suffering - perceived or otherwise - caused by objective, Democrat-led encouraging of illegal immigration across the southern border of the US. And even they wouldn't be as bad faith as you and claim that Democrats wanted that suffering.
They changed. Most "Trump is a Nazi" policies are 2008 Obama policies, but that's indicative of how far to the left the Democrats have shot in the last 10 years. That's why people voted for Trump even though they didn't like him. He was still the lesser of two crazies.
It's not a mischaractisation just a plainly self evident reading of fact and reality and the current situation. Just cause you don't like it doesnt make it untrue.
> And even they wouldn't be as bad faith as you and claim that Democrats wanted that suffering.
Tell me as what else than deliberate want for suffering I should perceive the actions of ICE? There are rules and processes to deport people that are deliberately being broken by masked thugs not identifying themselves.
A discussion about enforcement of rules or even if these rules make sense (with the conclusion, say, of handing everyone who has legally worked and stayed out of trouble for anything but traffic tickets and smoking pot a permanent residence) might be had, I don't deny that. But the way the current administration runs rampant? That doesn't answer any of the multitude of questions, it just makes life hell for everyone affected - children that are US citizens who come home only to find out their parents got snatched by an ICE raid on their workplace, people who get deported to CECOT or other hellholes with no due process at all on sometimes not even evidence but outright fabrications, employers who have half their work force either snatched up and deported over night or the work force just vanishing because they are afraid of ICE even though they have legal status...
Oh and even before that, 'member Covid? People trying to apply for unemployment benefits who got stuck in bureaucracy?
With the current Republicans I am far beyond giving them the usual excuse of "don't assume malice when stupidity is sufficient".
I recently had an experience at a soup kitchen. It was my first time in an entirely new group and new place. Naturally I found that everybody only interacted with each other - the volunteers, not the people lining up for food. I realised it was more like a social gathering but there was a clear divide between the volunteers and the people getting the end product. In that sense I'm not really sure that soup kitchens do much besides allow a surplus time of the more fortunate to gather socially together for a pro-social benefit (hard to see if it's actually pro-social for those consuming the food).
> I'm not really sure that soup kitchens do much besides allow a surplus time of the more fortunate to gather socially together for a pro-social benefit
You say this like it is a bad thing, which confuses me
It must be said that as far as that goes, the UN is designed to be a place to talk about problems, to air grievances, and the idea of it as a universal problem-solver and half-assed world government isn't particularly a part of how it started. Unfortunately as we're seeing what the UN has become is a plodding bureaucracy that occasionally has good intentions, and rarely sees them through. Mostly the UN is a clearing house for NGO organization and directing aid, which isn't a terrible thing, although their history of corruption, abuse of locals, ineptitude, and so on doesn't inspire confidence.
There's also the reality that the UN suffers from being an open forum, it means that the Qaddafi's of the world get to air their... unique perspectives as well. The rise of China and the decline of Russia has also created a pretty grim dynamic, but IMO the worst of the present state of affairs is the travesty of having countries like Iran chairing the Human Right's Council!
All in all I don't think I have a better idea for a substitute, and any ideas I did have would probably just reflect my own beliefs and desires rather than some universal principle. All in all I feel like the state of the UN does at least mirror the state of the world pretty well though. The US is all over the place depending on administration, Western Europe just plods along, Russia is a butcher, China is extremely complex in both its internal and external dealings (I don't want to generalize and I'm no expert, obviously there's some problems there however), and the Middle Eastern countries like the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia use the limitless power of vast wealth to warp and twist everything they touch.
> countries like Iran chairing the Human Right's Council!
I don't think this is bad because you want to influence these countries in particular and inclusion here has a domestic effect. It isn't meant for grandstanding on certain values.
You could pick the most social countries for such a position, but that is more like preaching to the choir.
> countries like Iran chairing the Human Right's Council
Council chair is a more or less ceremonial position, so it doesn't really matter all that much who's holding it. The irony of the chain being Iran is immense though.
> UN is designed to be a place to talk about problems
Uhm, my understanding is that the main UN purpose is to prevent WW3. It was thansformed from the League of Nations that was created after The World War, but obviously failed on its mission with the WW2.
Nope, the UN charter predictably was pretty concerned with war, but all the equality and progressivism is in there too. As the very first paragraph of the original 1945 UN charter reads:
"WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom"
I don't think that works anymore, UN can only issue "deep concerns" (c).
The real prevention starts when the collective body deploys troops (or authorize the deployment). The last such real deployment, authorized by UN, was for Iraq (Saddam Hussein), who really could start the WW3. But you know how it's portrayed now by authoritarians, so I doubt we will see any real action from UN anymore until the WW3 happens.
The UN is operating at a different scale doing something quite unique, and the reports don’t need to be widely-read to be important or influential. I ran kitchens at a series of homeless shelters for ten years and the difference between cooking/serving food, and actually procuring supplies and dealing with the supply chain - was the difference between something that took one hour and something that took nine months. It is much like this with the UN and other international trans-governmental organizations, they work with ridiculously complex systems and get real shit done, even if it’s not as visual as handing out a plate of food.
Having worked with WHO and ILO in Geneva... so much this. People have no idea - literally no idea - how mind-boggling the bureaucracy is inside the UN.
There are a lot of other contributing factors too. If a potential reader pre-assumes bias from the report, they may just choose not to invest the time. It's the same way bad faith political discussions play out with people making assumptions about the stance of a person voting the opposite way.
That's a great way of phrasing it, thank you. People have confused talking about the thing with doing something about the thing. It's an endemic in the liberal mindset. It's nice to have good ideas, but it needs to be followed through with actions. Otherwise the words simply amount to empty gestures.
This sounds exactly like “work” today. Certainly matches my experience in big tech.
It reminds me, tangentially, of something I did a while ago. I scraped hundreds of environment non-profits and NGO websites from around the world. Many of them are UN affiliated to some degree.
I tried to find 3 things: 1) what the non-profit does, 2) what the non-profit produces, 3) what the non-profit accomplished.
My ability to glean these details, by scraping and double-checking manually, had a very very low hit rate.. at least via website content.
Organizations are oblique and very little is clear/available. [The same problem exists for websites for places (restaurants, venues, athletic events, etc). By and large, they all hide their addresses.]
I’m guessing these efforts and reports would produce a similar translucency if audited from outside.
I don't think it's fair to compare the UN and NGOs. The UN is a platform for diplomacy between nations. Of course it's going to be process heavy and not make a lot of progress, as these nations have fundamentally misaligned incentives. An NGO that exists as the project of nepobabies is fundamentally different.
The UN is many things. I guess most reports are a product of the secretariat/bureaucracy and the independent agencies more than the UNGA and the UNSC which is where the diplomacy happens. Although as usual the journalists failed to cite the @#*&#@(! report so I could read it myself.
Honest question, is the UN bureaucracy that different from the big international NGOs? They're both large well-meaning bureaucratic organizations staffed by a wide variety of people, a lot of funding by governments, a decent amount of authority to do these reports but not a lot of authority to actually do things.
> Honest question, is the UN bureaucracy that different from the big international NGOs?
It very much depends on the bureaucracy but there are quite a few UN agencies with actual authority far beyond what any NGO would have (with the exception of the International Committee of the Red Cross which is explicitly given authority by the Geneva Convention).
For example the WHO is backed by other international treaties like the International Health Regulations (~196 signatories) that give it various powers like declaring a public health emergency. Its executive board is full of Ministers of Health, Directors-General of national health services, and other high ranking public health officials that directly exercise their powers within their respective governments.
There’s also the International Court of Justice, IMF, International Atomic Energy Agency, ICAO (aviation), IMO (maritime), and ITU (telecom) with various powers ranging from allocating spectrum to handing out billions in bailout loans.
The UN may not be able to enforce many of its rulings and decisions without a standing army but for the most part, many agencies do have a lot of authority backed by international law to actually do stuff beyond coordinating its member nations and few countries ever rock the boat. Out of the agencies I mentioned above the ICJ is really the only one that has the rare bit of trouble because noncompliance escalates to the Security Council where appeals die due to friendly vetoes.
Diplomacy is an art, not a science, and “doing something” isn’t necessarily the goal.
I’ve worked in government in varying capacities, and one thing that happens is that legislatures want reports. It’s part of the governing process. The fact that it’s being written and later has meaning and justifies inquiry which may not have happened otherwise.
It’s hard for people to understand because companies don’t work that way - they have their own mercurial processes. I went to a conference awhile ago, and the AWS sales dude gave me a bunch of swag. Palo gave me a fancy water bottle, Oracle gave me a dancing wind up dude for my desk. The hotel gave me a pen.
Does that make me buy AWS? No. It’s a token that essentially buys attention and goodwill for a moment in time.
Yes they seem very different. Firstly NGOs can do stuff. Groups like Doctors Without Borders come to mind. The UN doesn't do stuff because it's not meant to do stuff. It's where countries come to discuss things. Sometimes they do things, but only when all the important countries agree. I feel like people expect way too much from organizations like the UN, as if they're supposed to act like a world government.
I agree on the latter point, but I think it's unfair to say the UN doesn't "do stuff". A lot of the time they partner with govs to deliver the below, but they're frequently the provider of last resort too:
UNHCR (High Commissioner for Refugees): delivers shelter, food, and protection to millions of refugees and internally displaced persons.
• WFP (World Food Programme): feeds over 100 million people annually and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020.
• UNICEF: runs child vaccination and education programs across the Global South.
• WHO (World Health Organization): leads responses to global health threats (like COVID-19, Ebola, and now mpox and cholera outbreaks).
That's fair, but I would say it's not really the UN that does those things, it's the countries that sponsor those programs. Saying otherwise implies the UN is some kind of distinct body with its own interests, which it is not. It is just a medium through which countries interact.
I always wondered that whenever such reports or surveys come out why don't these organisations make the whole data and methodology public? Are they afraid that if they made it public, people will know how muddy these waters are?
When they don't release the data and/or methodolgy, you have to treat the result the same: garbage.
They could be completely making up data or demonstrating the gold standard example of pristine data collection and brilliant analysis but we'd never know.. and for some reason, they don't want to tell us.
I'm quite confident on why they don't want to share their data and/or methodology but there could be legitimate reasons and I want to be open to those.
Regardless, without that information, we can only evaluate them based on how rigorus they've been in the past:
Are the researchers and organizations involved known for effective data collection and solid analysis?
NGO is an incredibly broad category of things. There are certainly many grifter organizations (same as there are grifter companies) but there are also orgs such as the AMF which do incredibly effective work.
A lot of what I was probing called themselves that.
I’m not bagging on NGOs in particular. But it’s also how a lot of them refer to themselves.
This is more about the lack of clarity in messaging by orgs that ostensibly have a vested interest in making their progress known. At least as long as they’re engaged in public outreach.
IMO, most of the heart string tugging problems that get a lot of donations are not actually tractable if we do things people will tolerate. So orgs optimize towards looking busy while not actually doing anything, because there really is nothing to actually do. But no one can admit it.
In San Francisco a friend ran an event for an LGBT policy non-profit, tons of private security yet no actual members of LGBT, only rich white hetero couples and the discussion was about finances and donations, nothing to do with LGBT policy impact, it was like pulling back a curtain…
Donating to a charity is kind of like outsourcing thinking. There is a market for people who want to help the LGBT community. How do we do that? Idk this group says they know how
Try https://www.charitynavigator.org , which tells you what percentage of donated money is directly spent on the cause versus administration, staffing, etc. Charities vary widely, and it’s worth comparing charities in the same space, e.g., healthcare, hunger relief, veterans, because different spaces have different overheads.
The bigger issue is a ton of foundations are just bribery enabling organizations. There's a reason pretty much every politician and rich person has one.
Donate $10k and the foundation can pay for a lavish speaking engagement in the Bahamas. The foundation head can give a 10 minute $50000 talk about how poverty is bad and then they enjoy the open bar and conversations with rich and powerful people.
Let's be frank, the average citizen isn't giving a dime to the George Clooney foundation for justice [1]. So you have to ask, why does such a foundation exist?
This may be true of organisations that are funded by USAid, etc; so they essentially allow the Government of the day to execute policies while attempting to avoid responsibility when the "my tax money pays for what" questions arise.
A lot of NGOs/charities/foundations are simply vehicles for tax avoidance/reduction or nepotistic job creation. There are very few that are truly altruistic, or maybe once were but eventually become indistinguishable from a corporation in how they are run, and what they pay their executives.
Seems like a perfect task for AI to do first pass assessment and summaries (albeit with follow up reviews).
If those reports go unread and thus not acted upon they are worthless. We obviously need the details to exist but we are in a battle for hearts and minds, and the more dumbed down the message, the likelier it is to be received.
tbh this is to be expected? I don't read UN reports, I expect reporters to read them and distill the information. I don't read research papers, I expect journalists to read them and present something reasonable to a layman. I don't read the minutae of the laws being passed, I expect lawyers and politicians to debate the finer points.
So perhaps my expectations are not being met? Unfortunately I don't have time to pay attention to everything.
TFA suggests that the vast majority of UN reports are being downloaded less than 5000 times, and even assuming 1:1 download:read ratio, journalists and reporters are unlikely to be reading them and passing along the contents to you. Whether or not this is a problem is another matter; I took a quick skim through the first few pages of report listings in the UN digital library (https://digitallibrary.un.org/search?cc=Reports&ln=en&p=&f=&...), and most seem to be very meta internal UN stuff.
The point of a report is to provide a structured process and background for a set of technical or policy recommendations. It’d be perfectly normal for a report drafted by the efforts of 50 people to have an audience of 2-3 major decision makers - the point is the process for generating the recommendations. Further, it’d also be quite normal for a report on a specific topic to be used as an input to another process which generates its own outputs, meaning there’s little reason for people not involved in the latter process to read the original report unless they’re deeply interrogating the findings of the consolidated report.
Even so. I read a lot of reports about educational policy (and occasionally produce them) and even if there are only 2-3 major decision makers you'd expect the report to be read by various cabinet members of those decision makers, by committee members in parliament, by academics, by other teams or colleagues or institutions that would have liked to write the report in your stead or that produce "competing" reports, by folks at think tanks, and by journalists and politicians in general. Because the executive summary is almost always inlined in these kinds of reports, the intended audience is generally quite broad. I'm not saying that attaining only a couple hundred downloads of a report necessarily show that money was wasted on superfluous research, but it definitely can be an indicator of waste.
I think this is one of those things where you can really overthink it and convince yourself that "the report was read only once, by the one person who had to read it" is an ideal outcome, but really it isn't.
I would not expect journalists to regularly download them and read them without specific reason. I would expect them to be read when someone is actually dealing with the issue at hands and needs the details from an authority.
Like, if something like "Report of the Secretary-General on the staff of the United Nations Secretariat" has 5000 readers, it is 4995 more then I would expect. That is a real report I just pulled from their database. I did not bothered to read it.
Similarly, even research papers are not downloaded that many times. Most are produced to be potentially read by the few hundred, at most few thousand people in specific subfield. In the end, depending on the quality of the paper, probably only zero to few hundred people end up reading a particular paper.
I see no problem with this. When I write an email, typically I expect exactly one person to read it.
OP was possibly referring to science journalism/science editors. These "journalists" usually have a graduate degree in the field they're writing about.
UN reports aren't useful for journalists because they are basically popularity contests between countries. The information in the report mostly just reflects the interests of the country preparing it, or who has a majority seat on the particular group it's being prepared for.
They are not like research studies where truth is the objective.
Diplomats care about it, as a kind of quiet "game of thrones" as it were, no one else cares.
I also wonder if this is an issue. At my work we will usually have some kind of artifact of notes, decisions, and action items after a meeting. While people will rarely go back and read the artifact, they exist as a form of documentation that can be helpful in a pinch. "Why didn't we do x again?" "What are the issues we need to look into?" All important details worth keeping a record of. That said, I don't really know what a UN report is supposed to be.
Depends on the country. In many (vast majority of?) countries bills are individually passed, i.e. a few pages of text at a time. I imagine in those countries, a substantial fraction of the members in the assembly do read the bill before voting, even if they vote according to the party line.
The actual situation is that the politicians are paid by outsiders who write the bills which the politician then submits. It's like outsourcing to North Koreans but getting paid by them as well as your actual employer.
They read the parts they care about very closely, and get a high level overview of the parts they don’t - or rely on relationships that the parts they don’t care about will be filled in reasonably.
They can overlap with other interests and hobbies. I don’t browse UN reports directly, but I used to have access to a research service for work that would save and categorize relevant ones. Which actually makes me wonder if they are undercounting reads from other parties sharing the reports.
Who indeed matters; I’m sure for many of the reports, only several people in the world actually need to read them. I used to occasionally do research for one person to read and it was a good use of my time/salary. If it’d shared it somewhere and no one downloaded it, it would still have been worth writing for that person. However, it would’ve looked pathetic sitting out there with no downloads, compared to being printed and walked over. :)
Not quite the level of the 2012 IgNobel litterature price, which went to "The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports."
Well, I haven't read the report about this report either, but I have indirectly read about the information it provided.
I feel like this is a non-issue since it's like the 'new' section on HN. Something that's important or and interesting gets picked up and spread (although only accessed once or twice) and is now a world-wide headline.
Isn’t this why democracy fails? It is exhausting. It is work designed for a paid shill. It is a burden placed on the governed by the government to distance everyone from participating.
It is the shade preceding the darkness that democracy dies in.
I see it as a preoccupation with the act of voting, in place of actual decision making. Incompetence disguised by paperwork is common feature, especially when the problem feel intractable but there is pressure to "get results".
Rules, protocol and regs are obviously necessary to some extent, but it feels like (in Europe, at least) the map has been confused with the terrain. Overly burdensome protocols are fuel for inaction and hand-wringing and, not very surprisingly, private interests have learnt to take advantage of this (e.g. lawfare)
It is tempting to adopt a "drain the swamp" mentality, but we should remember that swamps are ecosystems too.
The illusion of power coming from voting that stops the reform. But more importantly, the transparency of the process yet opaqueness of the processors both dampens activism/revolt against the system while simultaneously reducing activism/revolution within the system.
I think (or at least I hope) this isn’t true for all of them, but some of the report-producing agencies at the UN are absolutely terrible at their job. Their demographic projections, for example, are a complete joke, and no actual expert in the field has taken them seriously for a while.
Opinions vary on whether this is because of ideological bias or just because a UN analyst job is a sinecure handed out for political favors rather than awarded on merit, but whatever the reason, you can’t at all assume that coming from the UN is a guarantor of quality.
Honestly not sure why this is any sort of surprise. I very occasionally read UN reports for work. I very frequently see journalists covering those reports using the press release, clearly not having read anything else. And then I see low quality media reporting on the topic clearly having read only the third party reports. When journalists - whose job it is - don’t read them, it’s expecting a lot for anyone outside of the political/lobbying establishment to read them.
Everyone coming in with a hot take on "lol reports" here should go look up what a military command actually does during a war. Because some advances in live streaming aside...they read reports, and write more reports.
In fact something your field commanders get to do is go and be shot at and then write reports about what happened. Radio operators keep notepads of things to send to back to base while in the field (usually meaning they're the last to sleep because they need to get the reports in).
Writing stuff down is how knowledge is communicated in all disciplines.
I’m sure that they mention it in the report, and it is one of the UN80 reports, but I can’t be sure that it’s the one Reuters means, or that it’s the only UN report on this issue.
As someone who was a social science academic within economic development, some of the work is crucial to research, but is buried behind payrolls and other measures. Example; un reports on economic geography. Others are widely available for free, unctad, undp and so on.
Like you really have to be a giga nerd to read these. Reading wikipedia is fun but this is just slog fest and you need a lot.
Like check out this report its result 12 sorted chronologically:
> Strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development Account : report of the Secretary-General
> The present report has been prepared pursuant to General Assembly resolution
79/257, in which the Assembly requested the Secretary-General to submit a report on
strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development Account at its
eightieth session. The report details how the 10 implementing entities of the United
Nations Secretariat have implemented Account-funded projects to support the
capacity-development efforts of Member States, in particular in relation to selecting
projects based on Member State needs; ensuring complementarity with the regular
programme of technical cooperation; using a common framework for evaluating
projects; conducting outreach to promote awareness of the Development Account and
its funded projects; and leveraging additional resources to enhance the support
delivered to Member States. It also presents further actions to promote the visibility
of the Account and its results achieved and to strengthen coordination with the regular
programme of technical cooperation to maximize synergies.
It's frankly it's main use would probably be LLM training data. It's a pretty fantastic Rosetta stone of sorts with lots of documents translated professionally into multiple languages. But humans will struggle to have the attention to read through 16 pages of the above.
> It's a pretty fantastic Rosetta stone of sorts with lots of documents translated professionally into multiple languages.
UN and EU documents have, unironically, been a significant resource in the development of translation software - they're a great source of parallel texts across broad sets of languages.
Given their subject matter, they're not great for colloquialisms - good luck finding a UN report that uses the phrase "fucking bullshit", for example - but they're a great starting point.
Given that the UN is an utterly dystopian horror organisation that should be dismantled before it drives humanity into a dead-end with no return, and given that our "journalistic" institutions no longer practice journalism, but merely amplify propaganda, it would actually be better if the general public would scrutinise those reports more closely.
Read vs. disseminated. We don't all need a first hand review of the report if it's reported on by reputable sources and share within actionable bodies.
>In international relations, no one really takes institutionalism seriously. Bilateral agreements and power are so monumentally more important that it overshadows posturing.
>I once read the WHO recommendation on children watching TV. It said 1 minute of TV watching before the age of 1 was detrimental. There was no science, it was just a panel of experts.
Anti-science + idealistic organization... what do I benefit from caring about the UN?
As far as I could determine, the issues in the second point do not exist.
See the actual WHO report [1] from 2019. Page 8 contains the recommendations about "sedentary time" for infants. The box is literally tagged "Strong recommendations, very low quality evidence." The paragraphs at the bottom of the page contain a summary of the evidence from the literature.
I don't see any basis for anti-science thinking in this article. It seems like you may have only seen/read the executive summary page viii.
The UN's page of accomplishments [2] lists plenty of work that you don't have to be an optimist to find value in (e.g., support for refugees, food aid, and vaccines).
I work in this industry, a few scattered thoughts/explanations of how things work for the uninitiated.
These figures are actually pretty decent compared to the World Bank, who did a similar exercise in 2014 and found just under a third of their reports were _never_ downloaded [1].
The article discusses _only_ UN Secretariat reports, which, to my understanding, excludes most agencies (e.g., UNICEF, UNHCR etc.). We're looking at a very small sliver of the UN system here, i.e., there are many, many, many reports produced by the UN that aren't discussed.
I'm struggling to find the source report for the 1,100 figure, but I think this is probably a massive under-estimate from _within_ the Secretariat, because AFAIU, the Secretariat includes the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), who did >300 situation reports (sitreps) in the first half of this year.[2] I think it very unlikely sitreps constitute over half of the reports produced by the Secretariat.
Looking at the role of reports in the sector generally, it's best to think about them as a sort of parallel academic system, indeed many are produced alongside universities. Without my cynic hat on, they've got three audiences/uses, all very similar to traditional academic publishing: 1) getting press coverage, 2) informing activities/policy, 3) informing other reports.
Like academia, you're looking at a very diverse body of work, in terms of quality, usefulness and (importantly for the discussion) breadth of relevance. You have reports with genuine, absolute humanitarian necessity, (e.g., sitreps) [2]; you have ongoing annual tracking on a range of issues [3], matters of record [4], so much navel-gazing crap on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)[5] which are the global goals for the UN.
A lot of it is turgid, obtuse, expensively-produced crap; some of it is the canonical take on a particular issue (e.g., climate change, migration from Northern Africa to Europe) and will be used by governments when developing their policy response. Some of it will only get used by a few niche NGOs when writing their proposals for their next years' work, or as a footnote in another report which will be read by a very limited audience. Some of it will be used by humanitarian agencies to ensure they're not all delivering aid to the same region.
It's hard to defend the UN sometimes, it's certainly very easy to criticise. All in all, I agree with the comments in the thread that note that these reports aren't for a general audience. I also agree that reader count isn't necessarily a good metric: a good report with good policy recommendations that's read and implemented by a small number of policy-makers beats the shit out of the thousandth report on SDG implementation that's read by a lot of actors because it's broad enough to be relevant to more people.
Not all are a particularly good use of funds and human effort, but the same could be said of a huge chunk of academic publishing. It's also (mostly) targeted at improving the world. I'd encourage anyone getting too pissy in the thread to consider the amount of resources tech industry invests in getting people to click ads, to con people into subscriptions, to squeeze customers, undermine labour, encourage addictive behaviours and sell us stuff we don't need.
It's a very different world to the tech scene: as flawed, as diverse, as occasionally brilliant, arguably more necessary, arguably less impactful. Frustrating and fascinating in equal measure.
Perhaps impact would be a better metric for assessing whether or not these 1000s of person-hours are well-spent. I suspect the conclusion would be same.
> it's best to think about them as a sort of parallel academic system
Doesn't this demonstrate the impotence of the current academic system (which is also very bureaucratic), as it shows that it isn't fit for purpose.
> some of it ... will be used by governments when developing their policy response
And therein lies the rub - gov'ts don't actually read them in order to learn, but to formulate responses that suit any and all biases that are currently in vogue. "Can you make the numbers say we need another coal plant" or "we found the recommendation to not reflect the wider social needs of the population" and so-on and so-forth
> Doesn't this demonstrate the impotence of the current academic system (which is also very bureaucratic), as it shows that it isn't fit for purpose.
I wouldn't necessarily say it _demonstrates issues_ with the academic system, but there are definitely big problems with academia it shares. Lots of overlap in terms of its function and dysfunction for sure.
> gov'ts don't actually read them in order to learn, but to formulate responses that suit any and all biases that are currently in vogue
This is where the devil is in the details. So yes, absolutely, governments will chase fads/funding and cherry pick to suit their agenda, but "good" policy transfer does happen via the UN more often than some might think.
I live in a non-OECD country that's the target of a lot of recommendations via "the system". Here are a bunch of things I've seen happen here that I agree with that have been supported by this huge volume of reporting:
- maternity pay,
- permanent housing for internally displaced persons,
- an indoor smoking ban,
- proper driving tests and improved road safety laws,
- minimum standards in education (think, schools should have windows and functioning toilets),
- a land-ownership registry that vastly exceeds what's available in my (European) home country.
That's off the top of my head. It's a mixed bag, over many years, but it don't do nothing.
Wide readerships are overrated though. The identity of the reader(s) and the credibility of the findings are much more important variables for influence than "big numbers", esp. today
How many people actually read Marx, Einstein, Keynes etc vs how many read (or heard about!) their popularizers´popularizers?
Next headline: Most Read UN Report Is About UN Reports Not Being Read
If only 1% of us on HN committed to this we could easily achieve this worthwhile goal! Though I personally think it sounds boring and won’t. ;)
In other news, I’ve begun increasingly viewing the UN as next to useless. It’s a great idea and we should have it, but the amount of corruption and bureaucracy seems insane.
South Africa's case to the ICJ (a UN body) was largely based on presenting to the the judges what other UN bodies had already reported and concluded on Palestinian genocide. As in report after report…
It left the ICJ in a pickle: dismissing the case on a lack of evidence meant concluding that a lot of the UN was either incompetent or dishonest.
A smart legal strategy, regardless of one's political opinion on the matter.
It doesn't seem like a bad metric, though. There will be some "fluff" reports that are widely read but don't say much, but I doubt the inverse is true: reports 2 people read but are extremely impactful. I'd say that's really bad if it happens.
https://archive.md/JVG8r
This is an institutional reflection of the individual tendency to talk about problems rather than solving them. Or, an important variant, where the urge to help those in need is expressed as directing them to "appropriate resources", which are also services that direct those seeking help to other appropriate resources, ad infinitum. The net result is a whole army of people who's expressed goal is to help people but who's effect is to send needy people into a loop of endless communication. We'd all be better off if they all quit and helped out at a soup kitchen, volunteered to visit with house-bound elderly, or something similarly physical and real. (This is in part driven by an individual need to "scale". We praise this desire to "change the world", but we pay no heed to the cost when ONLY world-changing action is praised.)
As someone who's done a lot of volunteering at soup kitchens and such as well as things like public policy research, my take is exactly opposite.
Typical soup kitchen volunteering is pretty low impact. It's the first thing a lot of people think about when it comes to volunteering, and people like that they get to interact with the less fortunate. So they show up with their church group a few times, ladle some soup and that's about it. Running a soup kitchen is different and higher impact.
The things the UN is doing matter to millions of people. If you work with the UN food program, you're dealing with food by the truck load instead of by the spoonful.
Completely agree. The important corollary to that is that policy, in many cases, matters a lot more than boots on the ground (obviously good policy and manpower together are usually required).
I've volunteered with a prominent animal rescue charity for over 2 decades. While the work does require a lot of people, after you do it long enough you quickly realize bad policy is a giant contributor. For example, Texas is the only state in the US where it's illegal for shelter vets to do care on animals unless the animal is fully surrendered: https://www.humananimalsupportservices.org/blog/why-cant-vet... . So there are a lot of poor people who can't afford vet care, and then their only option is to surrender the animal at a shelter, where in many cases the animal may be euthanized. If your goal is to reduce the unnecessary killing of pets in shelters, fixing this policy is worth like thousands of volunteers.
> So there are a lot of poor people who can't afford vet care, and then their only option is to surrender the animal at a shelter, where in many cases the animal may be euthanized. If your goal is to reduce the unnecessary killing of pets in shelters, fixing this policy is worth like thousands of volunteers.
The problem is, Texas is ran by Republicans. And if there is one cornerstone of modern Republican politics, it is: the suffering is the point. Be it poor people who are denied care for their pets, pregnant women who are denied abortions, immigrants - even those with legal status - being snatched up by ICE... doesn't matter.
Texas is ran by property owners.
> And if there is one cornerstone of modern Republican politics, it is: the suffering is the point
This sort of deliberate mischaracterisation has no value in discussion. Republicans have definitely ridden high on stopping the suffering - perceived or otherwise - caused by objective, Democrat-led encouraging of illegal immigration across the southern border of the US. And even they wouldn't be as bad faith as you and claim that Democrats wanted that suffering.
The top deportations per year is Obama [1].
The idea that Democrats want a freely open southern border is just as false as Republicans are the party of fiscal responsibility.
[1]: https://www.cato.org/blog/deportation-rates-historical-persp...
They changed. Most "Trump is a Nazi" policies are 2008 Obama policies, but that's indicative of how far to the left the Democrats have shot in the last 10 years. That's why people voted for Trump even though they didn't like him. He was still the lesser of two crazies.
I don't see how it's a mischaracterization. Everything I read about the party points in the same direction.
It's not a mischaractisation just a plainly self evident reading of fact and reality and the current situation. Just cause you don't like it doesnt make it untrue.
> And even they wouldn't be as bad faith as you and claim that Democrats wanted that suffering.
Tell me as what else than deliberate want for suffering I should perceive the actions of ICE? There are rules and processes to deport people that are deliberately being broken by masked thugs not identifying themselves.
A discussion about enforcement of rules or even if these rules make sense (with the conclusion, say, of handing everyone who has legally worked and stayed out of trouble for anything but traffic tickets and smoking pot a permanent residence) might be had, I don't deny that. But the way the current administration runs rampant? That doesn't answer any of the multitude of questions, it just makes life hell for everyone affected - children that are US citizens who come home only to find out their parents got snatched by an ICE raid on their workplace, people who get deported to CECOT or other hellholes with no due process at all on sometimes not even evidence but outright fabrications, employers who have half their work force either snatched up and deported over night or the work force just vanishing because they are afraid of ICE even though they have legal status...
Oh and even before that, 'member Covid? People trying to apply for unemployment benefits who got stuck in bureaucracy?
With the current Republicans I am far beyond giving them the usual excuse of "don't assume malice when stupidity is sufficient".
I recently had an experience at a soup kitchen. It was my first time in an entirely new group and new place. Naturally I found that everybody only interacted with each other - the volunteers, not the people lining up for food. I realised it was more like a social gathering but there was a clear divide between the volunteers and the people getting the end product. In that sense I'm not really sure that soup kitchens do much besides allow a surplus time of the more fortunate to gather socially together for a pro-social benefit (hard to see if it's actually pro-social for those consuming the food).
> I'm not really sure that soup kitchens do much besides allow a surplus time of the more fortunate to gather socially together for a pro-social benefit
You say this like it is a bad thing, which confuses me
They’re arguing along the lines of “it’s not the /better/ thing I envisioned”, rather than a “this is good” baseline.
It must be said that as far as that goes, the UN is designed to be a place to talk about problems, to air grievances, and the idea of it as a universal problem-solver and half-assed world government isn't particularly a part of how it started. Unfortunately as we're seeing what the UN has become is a plodding bureaucracy that occasionally has good intentions, and rarely sees them through. Mostly the UN is a clearing house for NGO organization and directing aid, which isn't a terrible thing, although their history of corruption, abuse of locals, ineptitude, and so on doesn't inspire confidence.
There's also the reality that the UN suffers from being an open forum, it means that the Qaddafi's of the world get to air their... unique perspectives as well. The rise of China and the decline of Russia has also created a pretty grim dynamic, but IMO the worst of the present state of affairs is the travesty of having countries like Iran chairing the Human Right's Council!
All in all I don't think I have a better idea for a substitute, and any ideas I did have would probably just reflect my own beliefs and desires rather than some universal principle. All in all I feel like the state of the UN does at least mirror the state of the world pretty well though. The US is all over the place depending on administration, Western Europe just plods along, Russia is a butcher, China is extremely complex in both its internal and external dealings (I don't want to generalize and I'm no expert, obviously there's some problems there however), and the Middle Eastern countries like the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia use the limitless power of vast wealth to warp and twist everything they touch.
I’d argue that the ridiculous aspects are a feature. By having a bureaucratic process select Iran, you’re removing the editorial element.
> countries like Iran chairing the Human Right's Council!
I don't think this is bad because you want to influence these countries in particular and inclusion here has a domestic effect. It isn't meant for grandstanding on certain values.
You could pick the most social countries for such a position, but that is more like preaching to the choir.
> countries like Iran chairing the Human Right's Council
Council chair is a more or less ceremonial position, so it doesn't really matter all that much who's holding it. The irony of the chain being Iran is immense though.
> UN is designed to be a place to talk about problems
Uhm, my understanding is that the main UN purpose is to prevent WW3. It was thansformed from the League of Nations that was created after The World War, but obviously failed on its mission with the WW2.
Nope, the UN charter predictably was pretty concerned with war, but all the equality and progressivism is in there too. As the very first paragraph of the original 1945 UN charter reads:
"WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom"
Preventing WW3 usually starts by airing grievances so the collective body can talk about said problems and come to a peaceful, diplomatic solution.
I don't think that works anymore, UN can only issue "deep concerns" (c).
The real prevention starts when the collective body deploys troops (or authorize the deployment). The last such real deployment, authorized by UN, was for Iraq (Saddam Hussein), who really could start the WW3. But you know how it's portrayed now by authoritarians, so I doubt we will see any real action from UN anymore until the WW3 happens.
The UN is operating at a different scale doing something quite unique, and the reports don’t need to be widely-read to be important or influential. I ran kitchens at a series of homeless shelters for ten years and the difference between cooking/serving food, and actually procuring supplies and dealing with the supply chain - was the difference between something that took one hour and something that took nine months. It is much like this with the UN and other international trans-governmental organizations, they work with ridiculously complex systems and get real shit done, even if it’s not as visual as handing out a plate of food.
> endless communication
Having worked with WHO and ILO in Geneva... so much this. People have no idea - literally no idea - how mind-boggling the bureaucracy is inside the UN.
This is a dysfunctional org.
There are a lot of other contributing factors too. If a potential reader pre-assumes bias from the report, they may just choose not to invest the time. It's the same way bad faith political discussions play out with people making assumptions about the stance of a person voting the opposite way.
That's a great way of phrasing it, thank you. People have confused talking about the thing with doing something about the thing. It's an endemic in the liberal mindset. It's nice to have good ideas, but it needs to be followed through with actions. Otherwise the words simply amount to empty gestures.
[flagged]
This sounds exactly like “work” today. Certainly matches my experience in big tech.
It reminds me, tangentially, of something I did a while ago. I scraped hundreds of environment non-profits and NGO websites from around the world. Many of them are UN affiliated to some degree.
I tried to find 3 things: 1) what the non-profit does, 2) what the non-profit produces, 3) what the non-profit accomplished.
My ability to glean these details, by scraping and double-checking manually, had a very very low hit rate.. at least via website content. Organizations are oblique and very little is clear/available. [The same problem exists for websites for places (restaurants, venues, athletic events, etc). By and large, they all hide their addresses.]
I’m guessing these efforts and reports would produce a similar translucency if audited from outside.
As a male breast cancer survivor, when I dug into the actuals of the Susan g komen foundation, I realized how much of a fraud the whole thing was.
It’s awful. Non-profits in the US are generally just awful. It’s embarrassing.
I don't think it's fair to compare the UN and NGOs. The UN is a platform for diplomacy between nations. Of course it's going to be process heavy and not make a lot of progress, as these nations have fundamentally misaligned incentives. An NGO that exists as the project of nepobabies is fundamentally different.
The UN is many things. I guess most reports are a product of the secretariat/bureaucracy and the independent agencies more than the UNGA and the UNSC which is where the diplomacy happens. Although as usual the journalists failed to cite the @#*&#@(! report so I could read it myself.
Honest question, is the UN bureaucracy that different from the big international NGOs? They're both large well-meaning bureaucratic organizations staffed by a wide variety of people, a lot of funding by governments, a decent amount of authority to do these reports but not a lot of authority to actually do things.
> Honest question, is the UN bureaucracy that different from the big international NGOs?
It very much depends on the bureaucracy but there are quite a few UN agencies with actual authority far beyond what any NGO would have (with the exception of the International Committee of the Red Cross which is explicitly given authority by the Geneva Convention).
For example the WHO is backed by other international treaties like the International Health Regulations (~196 signatories) that give it various powers like declaring a public health emergency. Its executive board is full of Ministers of Health, Directors-General of national health services, and other high ranking public health officials that directly exercise their powers within their respective governments.
There’s also the International Court of Justice, IMF, International Atomic Energy Agency, ICAO (aviation), IMO (maritime), and ITU (telecom) with various powers ranging from allocating spectrum to handing out billions in bailout loans.
The UN may not be able to enforce many of its rulings and decisions without a standing army but for the most part, many agencies do have a lot of authority backed by international law to actually do stuff beyond coordinating its member nations and few countries ever rock the boat. Out of the agencies I mentioned above the ICJ is really the only one that has the rare bit of trouble because noncompliance escalates to the Security Council where appeals die due to friendly vetoes.
Diplomacy is an art, not a science, and “doing something” isn’t necessarily the goal.
I’ve worked in government in varying capacities, and one thing that happens is that legislatures want reports. It’s part of the governing process. The fact that it’s being written and later has meaning and justifies inquiry which may not have happened otherwise.
It’s hard for people to understand because companies don’t work that way - they have their own mercurial processes. I went to a conference awhile ago, and the AWS sales dude gave me a bunch of swag. Palo gave me a fancy water bottle, Oracle gave me a dancing wind up dude for my desk. The hotel gave me a pen.
Does that make me buy AWS? No. It’s a token that essentially buys attention and goodwill for a moment in time.
Yes they seem very different. Firstly NGOs can do stuff. Groups like Doctors Without Borders come to mind. The UN doesn't do stuff because it's not meant to do stuff. It's where countries come to discuss things. Sometimes they do things, but only when all the important countries agree. I feel like people expect way too much from organizations like the UN, as if they're supposed to act like a world government.
I agree on the latter point, but I think it's unfair to say the UN doesn't "do stuff". A lot of the time they partner with govs to deliver the below, but they're frequently the provider of last resort too:
UNHCR (High Commissioner for Refugees): delivers shelter, food, and protection to millions of refugees and internally displaced persons.
• WFP (World Food Programme): feeds over 100 million people annually and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020.
• UNICEF: runs child vaccination and education programs across the Global South.
• WHO (World Health Organization): leads responses to global health threats (like COVID-19, Ebola, and now mpox and cholera outbreaks).
That's fair, but I would say it's not really the UN that does those things, it's the countries that sponsor those programs. Saying otherwise implies the UN is some kind of distinct body with its own interests, which it is not. It is just a medium through which countries interact.
Please ignore if my statements are ignorant.
I always wondered that whenever such reports or surveys come out why don't these organisations make the whole data and methodology public? Are they afraid that if they made it public, people will know how muddy these waters are?
If you’re collecting data on human rights abuses, you get more high quality first hand reports if you protect your sources.
When they don't release the data and/or methodolgy, you have to treat the result the same: garbage.
They could be completely making up data or demonstrating the gold standard example of pristine data collection and brilliant analysis but we'd never know.. and for some reason, they don't want to tell us.
> for some reason, they don't want to tell us
It should be pretty clear why they don't want to show and tell.
I'm quite confident on why they don't want to share their data and/or methodology but there could be legitimate reasons and I want to be open to those.
Regardless, without that information, we can only evaluate them based on how rigorus they've been in the past:
Are the researchers and organizations involved known for effective data collection and solid analysis?
>but there could be legitimate reasons and I want to be open to those
Then they the should just say what those reasons are. What's there to hide?
You can't expect to be opaque and then the public to blindly trust you simply on the basis that you call yourself experts.
Some of it is legitimately journalistic and protecting sources.
NGO is an incredibly broad category of things. There are certainly many grifter organizations (same as there are grifter companies) but there are also orgs such as the AMF which do incredibly effective work.
A lot of what I was probing called themselves that.
I’m not bagging on NGOs in particular. But it’s also how a lot of them refer to themselves.
This is more about the lack of clarity in messaging by orgs that ostensibly have a vested interest in making their progress known. At least as long as they’re engaged in public outreach.
IMO, most of the heart string tugging problems that get a lot of donations are not actually tractable if we do things people will tolerate. So orgs optimize towards looking busy while not actually doing anything, because there really is nothing to actually do. But no one can admit it.
> I scraped hundreds of environment non-profits and NGO websites
Or you could visit https://charitynavigator.org instead.
NGOs are primarily money laundering operations for political purposes.
It’s one of the primary mechanics for how capital controls the execution (or not) of policy.
Very powerful tool.
In San Francisco a friend ran an event for an LGBT policy non-profit, tons of private security yet no actual members of LGBT, only rich white hetero couples and the discussion was about finances and donations, nothing to do with LGBT policy impact, it was like pulling back a curtain…
Donating to a charity is kind of like outsourcing thinking. There is a market for people who want to help the LGBT community. How do we do that? Idk this group says they know how
Or they want to feel/say they are helping the community while actually not risking getting their hands dirty.
There's a derisive term 'limousine liberals' that fits the bill here.
Try https://www.charitynavigator.org , which tells you what percentage of donated money is directly spent on the cause versus administration, staffing, etc. Charities vary widely, and it’s worth comparing charities in the same space, e.g., healthcare, hunger relief, veterans, because different spaces have different overheads.
Not so much the problem.
The bigger issue is a ton of foundations are just bribery enabling organizations. There's a reason pretty much every politician and rich person has one.
Donate $10k and the foundation can pay for a lavish speaking engagement in the Bahamas. The foundation head can give a 10 minute $50000 talk about how poverty is bad and then they enjoy the open bar and conversations with rich and powerful people.
Let's be frank, the average citizen isn't giving a dime to the George Clooney foundation for justice [1]. So you have to ask, why does such a foundation exist?
[1] https://cfj.org/
I don't know anything about the CFJ, but their 990 from 2024 suggests that they really aren't spending much on overhead besides wages and salaries[1].
[1]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/813...
And Susan G Komen has a 93% rating on that site. What an absolute joke.
This may be true of organisations that are funded by USAid, etc; so they essentially allow the Government of the day to execute policies while attempting to avoid responsibility when the "my tax money pays for what" questions arise.
A lot of NGOs/charities/foundations are simply vehicles for tax avoidance/reduction or nepotistic job creation. There are very few that are truly altruistic, or maybe once were but eventually become indistinguishable from a corporation in how they are run, and what they pay their executives.
Seems like a perfect task for AI to do first pass assessment and summaries (albeit with follow up reviews).
If those reports go unread and thus not acted upon they are worthless. We obviously need the details to exist but we are in a battle for hearts and minds, and the more dumbed down the message, the likelier it is to be received.
tbh this is to be expected? I don't read UN reports, I expect reporters to read them and distill the information. I don't read research papers, I expect journalists to read them and present something reasonable to a layman. I don't read the minutae of the laws being passed, I expect lawyers and politicians to debate the finer points.
So perhaps my expectations are not being met? Unfortunately I don't have time to pay attention to everything.
TFA suggests that the vast majority of UN reports are being downloaded less than 5000 times, and even assuming 1:1 download:read ratio, journalists and reporters are unlikely to be reading them and passing along the contents to you. Whether or not this is a problem is another matter; I took a quick skim through the first few pages of report listings in the UN digital library (https://digitallibrary.un.org/search?cc=Reports&ln=en&p=&f=&...), and most seem to be very meta internal UN stuff.
The point of a report is to provide a structured process and background for a set of technical or policy recommendations. It’d be perfectly normal for a report drafted by the efforts of 50 people to have an audience of 2-3 major decision makers - the point is the process for generating the recommendations. Further, it’d also be quite normal for a report on a specific topic to be used as an input to another process which generates its own outputs, meaning there’s little reason for people not involved in the latter process to read the original report unless they’re deeply interrogating the findings of the consolidated report.
Even so. I read a lot of reports about educational policy (and occasionally produce them) and even if there are only 2-3 major decision makers you'd expect the report to be read by various cabinet members of those decision makers, by committee members in parliament, by academics, by other teams or colleagues or institutions that would have liked to write the report in your stead or that produce "competing" reports, by folks at think tanks, and by journalists and politicians in general. Because the executive summary is almost always inlined in these kinds of reports, the intended audience is generally quite broad. I'm not saying that attaining only a couple hundred downloads of a report necessarily show that money was wasted on superfluous research, but it definitely can be an indicator of waste.
I think this is one of those things where you can really overthink it and convince yourself that "the report was read only once, by the one person who had to read it" is an ideal outcome, but really it isn't.
I would not expect journalists to regularly download them and read them without specific reason. I would expect them to be read when someone is actually dealing with the issue at hands and needs the details from an authority.
Like, if something like "Report of the Secretary-General on the staff of the United Nations Secretariat" has 5000 readers, it is 4995 more then I would expect. That is a real report I just pulled from their database. I did not bothered to read it.
Similarly, even research papers are not downloaded that many times. Most are produced to be potentially read by the few hundred, at most few thousand people in specific subfield. In the end, depending on the quality of the paper, probably only zero to few hundred people end up reading a particular paper.
I see no problem with this. When I write an email, typically I expect exactly one person to read it.
You expect journalists to translate research papers for you?
Damn.
Clearly referring to research not in their field / not relevant for their work.
As an example, Quanta Magazine is regularly on the front page of HN doing just this.
You expect the average person even to be able to read a research paper?
Damn.
Not at all, which is why I wonder why the hell you'd ask a journalist!
OP was possibly referring to science journalism/science editors. These "journalists" usually have a graduate degree in the field they're writing about.
UN reports aren't useful for journalists because they are basically popularity contests between countries. The information in the report mostly just reflects the interests of the country preparing it, or who has a majority seat on the particular group it's being prepared for.
They are not like research studies where truth is the objective.
Diplomats care about it, as a kind of quiet "game of thrones" as it were, no one else cares.
I also wonder if this is an issue. At my work we will usually have some kind of artifact of notes, decisions, and action items after a meeting. While people will rarely go back and read the artifact, they exist as a form of documentation that can be helpful in a pinch. "Why didn't we do x again?" "What are the issues we need to look into?" All important details worth keeping a record of. That said, I don't really know what a UN report is supposed to be.
I don't think they mean that citizens don't read the reports (which is to be expected) but politicians?
Politicians don't even read the bills they sign.
In many cases they don't even write the bills they vote on.
Depends on the country. In many (vast majority of?) countries bills are individually passed, i.e. a few pages of text at a time. I imagine in those countries, a substantial fraction of the members in the assembly do read the bill before voting, even if they vote according to the party line.
This is kind of like saying you don’t read every line of code for the product you ship
The actual situation is that the politicians are paid by outsiders who write the bills which the politician then submits. It's like outsourcing to North Koreans but getting paid by them as well as your actual employer.
I think what you’re missing is that a politician is a face for an organization with staff who do things like write bills.
That’s literally the function of politicians - to personify a group.
Eh, more like don’t actually do your code reviews.
They read the parts they care about very closely, and get a high level overview of the parts they don’t - or rely on relationships that the parts they don’t care about will be filled in reasonably.
Why should they be widely read? I’d think for reports like these, who reads them is more important than how many read them.
Like almost everyone, I have zero involvement in UN activities, and zero influence over them. Why would I read their reports?
They can overlap with other interests and hobbies. I don’t browse UN reports directly, but I used to have access to a research service for work that would save and categorize relevant ones. Which actually makes me wonder if they are undercounting reads from other parties sharing the reports.
Who indeed matters; I’m sure for many of the reports, only several people in the world actually need to read them. I used to occasionally do research for one person to read and it was a good use of my time/salary. If it’d shared it somewhere and no one downloaded it, it would still have been worth writing for that person. However, it would’ve looked pathetic sitting out there with no downloads, compared to being printed and walked over. :)
The title reads like an Onion article
Not quite the level of the 2012 IgNobel litterature price, which went to "The US Government General Accountability Office, for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports."
Do you have a link to this report?
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-12-480r
And, like most IgNobel winners, it's an important research about important problems.
I do not see anywhere in that report evidence of the deep semantic recursion you mentioned
That is absolutely impenetrable prose. An LLM couldn't make it any more obfuscated.
I'm shocked I had to scroll so far to find someone who had this same thought!
I'm not sure how much this matters. They should measure impact, not reader count.
Many reports are written for a narrow audience. That's fine if it provides key information necessary to make a good decision with wide impact.
Well, I haven't read the report about this report either, but I have indirectly read about the information it provided.
I feel like this is a non-issue since it's like the 'new' section on HN. Something that's important or and interesting gets picked up and spread (although only accessed once or twice) and is now a world-wide headline.
> last year that the U.N. system supported 27,000 meetings involving 240 bodies, and the U.N. secretariat produced 1,100 reports
The bureacracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy
Isn’t this why democracy fails? It is exhausting. It is work designed for a paid shill. It is a burden placed on the governed by the government to distance everyone from participating.
It is the shade preceding the darkness that democracy dies in.
What is "this" in the why democracy fails? Are you suggesting that the UN is some kind of democracy?
Bureaucracy
I see it as a preoccupation with the act of voting, in place of actual decision making. Incompetence disguised by paperwork is common feature, especially when the problem feel intractable but there is pressure to "get results".
Rules, protocol and regs are obviously necessary to some extent, but it feels like (in Europe, at least) the map has been confused with the terrain. Overly burdensome protocols are fuel for inaction and hand-wringing and, not very surprisingly, private interests have learnt to take advantage of this (e.g. lawfare)
It is tempting to adopt a "drain the swamp" mentality, but we should remember that swamps are ecosystems too.
The illusion of power coming from voting that stops the reform. But more importantly, the transparency of the process yet opaqueness of the processors both dampens activism/revolt against the system while simultaneously reducing activism/revolution within the system.
The steady hand becomes the ruler.
I think (or at least I hope) this isn’t true for all of them, but some of the report-producing agencies at the UN are absolutely terrible at their job. Their demographic projections, for example, are a complete joke, and no actual expert in the field has taken them seriously for a while.
Opinions vary on whether this is because of ideological bias or just because a UN analyst job is a sinecure handed out for political favors rather than awarded on merit, but whatever the reason, you can’t at all assume that coming from the UN is a guarantor of quality.
Has anyone thought the UN had anything to do with quality before?
Perfect Onion headline
Honestly not sure why this is any sort of surprise. I very occasionally read UN reports for work. I very frequently see journalists covering those reports using the press release, clearly not having read anything else. And then I see low quality media reporting on the topic clearly having read only the third party reports. When journalists - whose job it is - don’t read them, it’s expecting a lot for anyone outside of the political/lobbying establishment to read them.
Yellow Journalism: Reading a tweet.
Journalism: Reading the press release.
Investigative Journalism: Reading the report.
UN reports:
- Environment should be protected.
- Corruption harms countries and economies.
- Extreme poverty could be eradicated with coordinated efforts.
Half of the parties in any goverment: let's just ignore all of that.
Everyone coming in with a hot take on "lol reports" here should go look up what a military command actually does during a war. Because some advances in live streaming aside...they read reports, and write more reports.
In fact something your field commanders get to do is go and be shot at and then write reports about what happened. Radio operators keep notepads of things to send to back to base while in the field (usually meaning they're the last to sleep because they need to get the reports in).
Writing stuff down is how knowledge is communicated in all disciplines.
I’m pretty sure this is the report where they mention download numbers of UN reports, since Reuters buried the lede by not linking to it themselves:
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4086174
I’m sure that they mention it in the report, and it is one of the UN80 reports, but I can’t be sure that it’s the one Reuters means, or that it’s the only UN report on this issue.
As someone who was a social science academic within economic development, some of the work is crucial to research, but is buried behind payrolls and other measures. Example; un reports on economic geography. Others are widely available for free, unctad, undp and so on.
Did they also find out WHY ?
UN library has lot of stuff in it.
https://digitallibrary.un.org/?ln=en
Like you really have to be a giga nerd to read these. Reading wikipedia is fun but this is just slog fest and you need a lot.
Like check out this report its result 12 sorted chronologically:
> Strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development Account : report of the Secretary-General
> The present report has been prepared pursuant to General Assembly resolution 79/257, in which the Assembly requested the Secretary-General to submit a report on strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development Account at its eightieth session. The report details how the 10 implementing entities of the United Nations Secretariat have implemented Account-funded projects to support the capacity-development efforts of Member States, in particular in relation to selecting projects based on Member State needs; ensuring complementarity with the regular programme of technical cooperation; using a common framework for evaluating projects; conducting outreach to promote awareness of the Development Account and its funded projects; and leveraging additional resources to enhance the support delivered to Member States. It also presents further actions to promote the visibility of the Account and its results achieved and to strengthen coordination with the regular programme of technical cooperation to maximize synergies.
It's frankly it's main use would probably be LLM training data. It's a pretty fantastic Rosetta stone of sorts with lots of documents translated professionally into multiple languages. But humans will struggle to have the attention to read through 16 pages of the above.
It is the kind of stuff made for historians fifty years in the future.
No one cared about the resolutions regarding Israel until now. But now that they do, it is there for Your benefit.
> It's a pretty fantastic Rosetta stone of sorts with lots of documents translated professionally into multiple languages.
UN and EU documents have, unironically, been a significant resource in the development of translation software - they're a great source of parallel texts across broad sets of languages.
Given their subject matter, they're not great for colloquialisms - good luck finding a UN report that uses the phrase "fucking bullshit", for example - but they're a great starting point.
Given that the UN is an utterly dystopian horror organisation that should be dismantled before it drives humanity into a dead-end with no return, and given that our "journalistic" institutions no longer practice journalism, but merely amplify propaganda, it would actually be better if the general public would scrutinise those reports more closely.
Somewhat relevant Onion sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPfVkuPmpc8
https://www.un.org/un80-initiative/en/report-mandate-impleme...
Read vs. disseminated. We don't all need a first hand review of the report if it's reported on by reputable sources and share within actionable bodies.
What irony that this report might be the most read UN report
The Onion is now Reuters; Reuters is now The Onion.
My two strikes against the UN:
>In international relations, no one really takes institutionalism seriously. Bilateral agreements and power are so monumentally more important that it overshadows posturing.
>I once read the WHO recommendation on children watching TV. It said 1 minute of TV watching before the age of 1 was detrimental. There was no science, it was just a panel of experts.
Anti-science + idealistic organization... what do I benefit from caring about the UN?
As far as I could determine, the issues in the second point do not exist.
See the actual WHO report [1] from 2019. Page 8 contains the recommendations about "sedentary time" for infants. The box is literally tagged "Strong recommendations, very low quality evidence." The paragraphs at the bottom of the page contain a summary of the evidence from the literature.
I don't see any basis for anti-science thinking in this article. It seems like you may have only seen/read the executive summary page viii.
The UN's page of accomplishments [2] lists plenty of work that you don't have to be an optimist to find value in (e.g., support for refugees, food aid, and vaccines).
[1]: https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/311664/978924155...
[2]: https://www.un.org/en/essential-un/
beyond the title, what’s this UN report about?
I work in this industry, a few scattered thoughts/explanations of how things work for the uninitiated.
These figures are actually pretty decent compared to the World Bank, who did a similar exercise in 2014 and found just under a third of their reports were _never_ downloaded [1].
The article discusses _only_ UN Secretariat reports, which, to my understanding, excludes most agencies (e.g., UNICEF, UNHCR etc.). We're looking at a very small sliver of the UN system here, i.e., there are many, many, many reports produced by the UN that aren't discussed.
I'm struggling to find the source report for the 1,100 figure, but I think this is probably a massive under-estimate from _within_ the Secretariat, because AFAIU, the Secretariat includes the Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), who did >300 situation reports (sitreps) in the first half of this year.[2] I think it very unlikely sitreps constitute over half of the reports produced by the Secretariat.
Looking at the role of reports in the sector generally, it's best to think about them as a sort of parallel academic system, indeed many are produced alongside universities. Without my cynic hat on, they've got three audiences/uses, all very similar to traditional academic publishing: 1) getting press coverage, 2) informing activities/policy, 3) informing other reports.
Like academia, you're looking at a very diverse body of work, in terms of quality, usefulness and (importantly for the discussion) breadth of relevance. You have reports with genuine, absolute humanitarian necessity, (e.g., sitreps) [2]; you have ongoing annual tracking on a range of issues [3], matters of record [4], so much navel-gazing crap on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)[5] which are the global goals for the UN.
A lot of it is turgid, obtuse, expensively-produced crap; some of it is the canonical take on a particular issue (e.g., climate change, migration from Northern Africa to Europe) and will be used by governments when developing their policy response. Some of it will only get used by a few niche NGOs when writing their proposals for their next years' work, or as a footnote in another report which will be read by a very limited audience. Some of it will be used by humanitarian agencies to ensure they're not all delivering aid to the same region.
It's hard to defend the UN sometimes, it's certainly very easy to criticise. All in all, I agree with the comments in the thread that note that these reports aren't for a general audience. I also agree that reader count isn't necessarily a good metric: a good report with good policy recommendations that's read and implemented by a small number of policy-makers beats the shit out of the thousandth report on SDG implementation that's read by a lot of actors because it's broad enough to be relevant to more people.
Not all are a particularly good use of funds and human effort, but the same could be said of a huge chunk of academic publishing. It's also (mostly) targeted at improving the world. I'd encourage anyone getting too pissy in the thread to consider the amount of resources tech industry invests in getting people to click ads, to con people into subscriptions, to squeeze customers, undermine labour, encourage addictive behaviours and sell us stuff we don't need.
It's a very different world to the tech scene: as flawed, as diverse, as occasionally brilliant, arguably more necessary, arguably less impactful. Frustrating and fascinating in equal measure.
[^1]: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/fa4...
[^2]: https://reliefweb.int/updates?view=reports&advanced-search=%...
[^3]: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789211065923
[^4]: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789213589960
[^5]: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/periodicals/26181061
Perhaps impact would be a better metric for assessing whether or not these 1000s of person-hours are well-spent. I suspect the conclusion would be same.
> it's best to think about them as a sort of parallel academic system
Doesn't this demonstrate the impotence of the current academic system (which is also very bureaucratic), as it shows that it isn't fit for purpose.
> some of it ... will be used by governments when developing their policy response
And therein lies the rub - gov'ts don't actually read them in order to learn, but to formulate responses that suit any and all biases that are currently in vogue. "Can you make the numbers say we need another coal plant" or "we found the recommendation to not reflect the wider social needs of the population" and so-on and so-forth
> Doesn't this demonstrate the impotence of the current academic system (which is also very bureaucratic), as it shows that it isn't fit for purpose.
I wouldn't necessarily say it _demonstrates issues_ with the academic system, but there are definitely big problems with academia it shares. Lots of overlap in terms of its function and dysfunction for sure.
> gov'ts don't actually read them in order to learn, but to formulate responses that suit any and all biases that are currently in vogue
This is where the devil is in the details. So yes, absolutely, governments will chase fads/funding and cherry pick to suit their agenda, but "good" policy transfer does happen via the UN more often than some might think.
I live in a non-OECD country that's the target of a lot of recommendations via "the system". Here are a bunch of things I've seen happen here that I agree with that have been supported by this huge volume of reporting:
- maternity pay,
- permanent housing for internally displaced persons,
- an indoor smoking ban,
- proper driving tests and improved road safety laws,
- minimum standards in education (think, schools should have windows and functioning toilets),
- a land-ownership registry that vastly exceeds what's available in my (European) home country.
That's off the top of my head. It's a mixed bag, over many years, but it don't do nothing.
Almost feels like an onion headline.
Should I read this report?
I dunno, I imagine we already know the gist of the claims.
Wide readerships are overrated though. The identity of the reader(s) and the credibility of the findings are much more important variables for influence than "big numbers", esp. today
How many people actually read Marx, Einstein, Keynes etc vs how many read (or heard about!) their popularizers´popularizers?
UN reports should probably pivot to video, they will get wider circulation.
Next headline: Most Read UN Report Is About UN Reports Not Being Read
If only 1% of us on HN committed to this we could easily achieve this worthwhile goal! Though I personally think it sounds boring and won’t. ;)
In other news, I’ve begun increasingly viewing the UN as next to useless. It’s a great idea and we should have it, but the amount of corruption and bureaucracy seems insane.
Yip,
South Africa's case to the ICJ (a UN body) was largely based on presenting to the the judges what other UN bodies had already reported and concluded on Palestinian genocide. As in report after report…
It left the ICJ in a pickle: dismissing the case on a lack of evidence meant concluding that a lot of the UN was either incompetent or dishonest.
A smart legal strategy, regardless of one's political opinion on the matter.
Careers depend on not reading some reports :)
Looks like they are trying to use this metric to justify cutting meeting / reports.
I think this is just wrong. The number of download does not reflect how important or impactful a report is.
It doesn't seem like a bad metric, though. There will be some "fluff" reports that are widely read but don't say much, but I doubt the inverse is true: reports 2 people read but are extremely impactful. I'd say that's really bad if it happens.
r/nottheonion
After working in different NGO HQ, I would have more believed that most reporting are bullshit.
Just wait till someone does a report on how widely read TPS reports are
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Well its most powerful and influencial member is the USA, so I suppose that follows.
It would if the US were writing the reports.
Why shouldn't the US be writing reports? I presume they have basic literacy skills.
Well, perhaps not the current government appointments but that's surely an exception.
I didn't read it
I ain't reading this report
Reading reports is hard work. If AI could turn them into videos instead I think they’d be easier to digest.