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Comment by bpchaps | Hacker News Reader

There's a middle ground.

Practically no systemic analysis is done within government. At least in Chicago. Government systems are compartmentalized in ways that makes interfacing with them impossible for any worthwhile analysis. Example: the only analysis that Chicago's finance department had done on its parking tickets is a single very high level spreadsheet.

Some analysis is better than no analysis.

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> Practically no systemic analysis is done within government

This is so far from being true, it undermines your point and your post.

The Federal Reserve does no systematic analysis? The U.S. Treasury does no systematic analysis? The Bureau of Labor Statistics does no systematic analysis? The Congressional Budget Office does no systematic analysis? The Centers for Disease Control do no systematic analysis?

Systemic, not systematic.

I don't even understand what you mean. I have read quite a few government papers (mainly federal) and they usually were well researched. I don't know how things are on a local level but the politicians in Congress have a lot of well researched data available if they want to listen (which they often don't).

Sorry - should have been more clear. I'm mostly talking about local policy, which is where most of my experience with government comes from, through many FOIA requests. Federal is much more calculated (read: slow) in comparison to local government. I've found local government to be very "we've checked the box, let's move on", which doesn't leave room for analysis, let alone the acknowledgement that analysis is even possible.

Makes sense. The way local governments deal with things like pensions is truly horrifying. Even the simplest analysis would quickly show that they are setting themselves up for disaster.

"We could add more money to the pension fund. Or we could assume a 10% market rate of return forever, and spend that money on new office chairs and computers instead. We can't get a tax increase just for those, but we could for the prospect of homeless old people eating cat food, and the next guy will get blamed for it."

They're actually setting other people up for disaster, hoping that they will already be gone when it hits.

If it is that easy to predict then it is probably career suicide to be the person who produces the analysis that proves a disaster is going to happen.

> Some analysis is better than no analysis.

I don't agree with that. Doing some analysis on a limited and possibly skewed data set can lull you into a false sense of understanding. It makes your ideas seems objective when they can in fact be completely baseless.

How is no analysis just as good?

It's hard to believe that the percentage of successes with no analysis is GTE the percentage of successes with some analysis.

I presume because faulty analysis or bad data can actually get you more off track than when its just a "back of the napkin" based guess or hunch.

And additionally, you now have the pride/confidence thing in your even worse results because you did "analysis"...

Often the pride is constant.

As always, you need to take the limitations of the available information into account. That ought to be part of the analysis, though of course it often, or perhaps usually, isn't.

Not at all. Analysis of limited data gives you wide credible intervals, the exact thing that guards against unwarranted confidence.

Are you saying that zero middle ground exists?

Obviously a middle ground exists, but it's possible that in part of the scale you get worse results as you head toward the middle.

I didn't downvote you :(

Sorry - edited. Still didn't answer the question, though :p

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