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Comment by clort | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

This is kind of like saying you don’t read every line of code for the product you ship

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.

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.

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.

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