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.)
EA-3167 · 58s ago
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.
brightball · 35m ago
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.
BolsunBacset · 2h ago
But virtue signaling pays more
browningstreet · 3h ago
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.
cantor_S_drug · 2h ago
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?
OtherShrezzing · 1h ago
If you’re collecting data on human rights abuses, you get more high quality first hand reports if you protect your sources.
caseysoftware · 1h ago
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.
FirmwareBurner · 1h ago
> for some reason, they don't want to tell us
It should be pretty clear why they don't want to show and tell.
caseysoftware · 20m ago
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?
vr46 · 14m ago
Some of it is legitimately journalistic and protecting sources.
dgfitz · 1h ago
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.
bootsmann · 2h ago
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.
browningstreet · 2h ago
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.
lazide · 1h ago
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.
zeroCalories · 2h ago
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.
jowea · 1h ago
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.
AndrewKemendo · 3h ago
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.
buildmonkey · 4m ago
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.
repeekad · 2h ago
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…
monkeyelite · 2h ago
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
lazide · 1h ago
Or they want to feel/say they are helping the community while actually not risking getting their hands dirty.
pstuart · 2h ago
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.
abdullahkhalids · 25m ago
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.
t-3 · 3h ago
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.
roughly · 2h ago
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.
watwut · 2h ago
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.
esseph · 2h ago
You expect journalists to translate research papers for you?
Damn.
fn-mote · 1h ago
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.
xandrius · 1h ago
You expect the average person even to be able to read a research paper?
Damn.
sunaookami · 3h ago
I don't think they mean that citizens don't read the reports (which is to be expected) but politicians?
HPsquared · 3h ago
Politicians don't even read the bills they sign.
abdullahkhalids · 29m ago
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.
monkeyelite · 2h ago
This is kind of like saying you don’t read every line of code for the product you ship
lazide · 1h ago
Eh, more like don’t actually do your code reviews.
pstuart · 2h ago
In many cases they don't even write the bills they vote on.
ars · 2h ago
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.
zeroCalories · 2h ago
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.
atleastoptimal · 23m ago
Perfect Onion headline
willguest · 1h ago
> 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
michaeldoron · 3h ago
The title reads like an Onion article
Pinus · 3h ago
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."
And, like most IgNobel winners, it's an important research about important problems.
classichasclass · 2h ago
That is absolutely impenetrable prose. An LLM couldn't make it any more obfuscated.
SoftTalker · 2h ago
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?
1123581321 · 2h ago
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. :)
kachapopopow · 2h ago
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.
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.
duskwuff · 1h ago
> 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.
saaaaaam · 1h ago
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.
whatshisface · 25m ago
Yellow Journalism: Reading a tweet.
Journalism: Reading the press release.
Investigative Journalism: Reading the report.
elcritch · 2h ago
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.
mhb · 2h ago
The UN is a cesspool. Why would anyone read its reports?
olddustytrail · 2h ago
Well its most powerful and influencial member is the USA, so I suppose that follows.
mhb · 35m ago
It would if the US were writing the reports.
Analemma_ · 1h ago
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.
lazide · 1h ago
Has anyone thought the UN had anything to do with quality before?
kenanblair · 1h ago
beyond the title, what’s this UN report about?
excalibur · 1h ago
The Onion is now Reuters; Reuters is now The Onion.
xyst · 2h ago
Almost feels like an onion headline.
HSO · 3h ago
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?
zahirbmirza · 3h ago
Should I read this report?
marcosdumay · 1h ago
I dunno, I imagine we already know the gist of the claims.
resource_waste · 1h ago
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?
fn-mote · 1h ago
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’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.
reader9274 · 4h ago
TLDR
deadbabe · 3h ago
Reading reports is hard work. If AI could turn them into videos instead I think they’d be easier to digest.
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.
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 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?
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.
It should be pretty clear why they don't want to show and tell.
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?
It’s awful. Non-profits in the US are generally just awful. It’s embarrassing.
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.
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.
It’s one of the primary mechanics for how capital controls the execution (or not) of policy.
Very powerful tool.
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.
So perhaps my expectations are not being met? Unfortunately I don't have time to pay attention to everything.
I see no problem with this. When I write an email, typically I expect exactly one person to read it.
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.
Damn.
As an example, Quanta Magazine is regularly on the front page of HN doing just this.
Damn.
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.
The bureacracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy
Like almost everyone, I have zero involvement in UN activities, and zero influence over them. Why would I read their 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. :)
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.
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.
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.
Journalism: Reading the press release.
Investigative Journalism: Reading the report.
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.
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.
How many people actually read Marx, Einstein, Keynes etc vs how many read (or heard about!) their popularizers´popularizers?
>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?
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/
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.