14 ms·

UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

353 points by anjneymidha 1y ago

reader9274 1y ago
[flagged]
clort 1y ago
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.
- sunaookami 1y ago
  I don't think they mean that citizens don't read the reports (which is to be expected) but politicians?
  - HPsquared 1y ago
    Politicians don't even read the bills they sign.
    - pstuart 1y ago
      In many cases they don't even write the bills they vote on.
    - monkeyelite 1y ago
      This is kind of like saying you don’t read every line of code for the product you ship
      - lazide 1y ago
        Eh, more like don’t actually do your code reviews.
        monkeyelite 1y ago
        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.
      - t-3 1y ago
        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.
        monkeyelite 1y ago
        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.
    - abdullahkhalids 1y 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.
- t-3 1y 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=&rm=&sf=&so=d&rg=50&c=Reports&c=&of=hb&fti=0&fct__1=Reports&fti=0 https://digitallibrary.un.org/search?cc=Reports&ln=en&p=&f=&...), and most seem to be very meta internal UN stuff.
  - roughly 1y 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.
    - stdbrouw 1y ago
      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.
- zeroCalories 1y 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.
- esseph 1y ago
  You expect journalists to translate research papers for you? Damn.
  - fn-mote 1y 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 1y ago
    You expect the average person even to be able to read a research paper? Damn.
    - esseph 1y ago
      Not at all, which is why I wonder why the hell you'd ask a journalist!
      - nairboon 1y ago
        OP was possibly referring to science journalism/science editors. These "journalists" usually have a graduate degree in the field they're writing about.
- ars 1y 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.
- abdullahkhalids 1y 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.
Foobar8568 1y ago
After working in different NGO HQ, I would have more believed that most reporting are bullshit.
michaeldoron 1y ago
The title reads like an Onion article
- Pinus 1y 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."
  - prmph 1y ago
    Do you have a link to this report?
    - cperciva 1y ago
      https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-12-480r https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-12-480r
      - classichasclass 1y ago
        That is absolutely impenetrable prose. An LLM couldn't make it any more obfuscated.
      - marcosdumay 1y ago
        And, like most IgNobel winners, it's an important research about important problems.
      - prmph 1y ago
        I do not see anywhere in that report evidence of the deep semantic recursion you mentioned
- jakeydus 1y ago
  I'm shocked I had to scroll so far to find someone who had this same thought!
zahirbmirza 1y ago
Should I read this report?
- marcosdumay 1y ago
  I dunno, I imagine we already know the gist of the claims.
browningstreet 1y 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.
- AndrewKemendo 1y 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.
  - repeekad 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
        Or they want to feel/say they are helping the community while actually not risking getting their hands dirty.
deadbabe 1y ago
Reading reports is hard work. If AI could turn them into videos instead I think they’d be easier to digest.
kingstnap 1y ago
UN library has lot of stuff in it. https://digitallibrary.un.org/?ln=en 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.
- duskwuff 1y 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.
- nashashmi 1y ago
  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.
HSO 1y 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?
xyst 1y ago
Almost feels like an onion headline.
kachapopopow 1y 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.
SoftTalker 1y 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 1y 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. :)
elcritch 1y 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.
simpaticoder 1y ago
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.)
- BolsunBacset 1y ago
  [flagged]
- brightball 1y 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.
- EA-3167 1y 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.
mhb 1y ago
[flagged]
- olddustytrail 1y ago
  Well its most powerful and influencial member is the USA, so I suppose that follows.
  - mhb 1y ago
    It would if the US were writing the reports.
    - olddustytrail 1y ago
      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.
aspenmayer 1y ago
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 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.
resource_waste 1y 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 1y 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). [1]: https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/311664/9789241550536-eng.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/311664/978924155... [2]: https://www.un.org/en/essential-un/ https://www.un.org/en/essential-un/
excalibur 1y ago
The Onion is now Reuters; Reuters is now The Onion.
Analemma_ 1y 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 1y ago
  Has anyone thought the UN had anything to do with quality before?
willguest 1y 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
- nashashmi 1y ago
  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.
  - mhb 1y ago
    What is "this" in the why democracy fails? Are you suggesting that the UN is some kind of democracy?
    - nashashmi 1y ago
      Bureaucracy
  - willguest 1y ago
    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.
    - nashashmi 1y ago
      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.
saaaaaam 1y 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 1y ago
  Yellow Journalism: Reading a tweet. Journalism: Reading the press release. Investigative Journalism: Reading the report.
kenanblair 1y ago
beyond the title, what’s this UN report about?
atleastoptimal 1y ago
Perfect Onion headline
dotcoma 1y ago
Did they also find out WHY ?
footnote43 1y ago
https://www.un.org/un80-initiative/en/report-mandate-implementation-review https://www.un.org/un80-initiative/en/report-mandate-impleme...
neonate 1y ago
https://archive.md/JVG8r https://archive.md/JVG8r
XorNot 1y ago
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.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
anonu 1y ago
UN reports should probably pivot to video, they will get wider circulation.
dwheeler 1y ago
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.
crossbody 1y ago
I ain't reading this report
shikon7 1y ago
What irony that this report might be the most read UN report
golemiprague 1y ago
[dead]
thomasjudge 1y ago
I didn't read it
wnc3141 1y ago
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.
TheRealNGenius 1y ago
[dead]
anshumankmr 1y ago
Somewhat relevant Onion sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPfVkuPmpc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPfVkuPmpc8
specproc 1y ago
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/fa48b5ab-2912-5d7a-b11c-eb609931292d https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/fa4... [^2]: https://reliefweb.int/updates?view=reports&advanced-search=%28S1503%29_%28F10%29_%28DO20250101-20250630%29 https://reliefweb.int/updates?view=reports&advanced-search=%... [^3]: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789211065923 https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789211065923 [^4]: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789213589960 https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789213589960 [^5]: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/periodicals/26181061 https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/periodicals/26181061
j16sdiz 1y ago
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.
- robertlagrant 1y ago
  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.
ta20240528 1y ago
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 :)
blitzar 1y ago
Just wait till someone does a report on how widely read TPS reports are
unixhero 1y ago
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.
tardismechanic 1y ago
r/nottheonion
martin82 1y ago
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.
Frieren 1y ago
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.

353 points by anjneymidha 1y ago

[flagged]

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.

sunaookami 1y ago
I don't think they mean that citizens don't read the reports (which is to be expected) but politicians?
- HPsquared 1y ago
  Politicians don't even read the bills they sign.
  - pstuart 1y ago
    In many cases they don't even write the bills they vote on.
  - monkeyelite 1y ago
    This is kind of like saying you don’t read every line of code for the product you ship
    - lazide 1y ago
      Eh, more like don’t actually do your code reviews.
      - monkeyelite 1y ago
        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.
    - t-3 1y ago
      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.
      - monkeyelite 1y ago
        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.
  - abdullahkhalids 1y 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.
t-3 1y 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=&rm=&sf=&so=d&rg=50&c=Reports&c=&of=hb&fti=0&fct__1=Reports&fti=0 https://digitallibrary.un.org/search?cc=Reports&ln=en&p=&f=&...), and most seem to be very meta internal UN stuff.
- roughly 1y 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.
  - stdbrouw 1y ago
    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.
zeroCalories 1y 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.
esseph 1y ago
You expect journalists to translate research papers for you? Damn.
- fn-mote 1y 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 1y ago
  You expect the average person even to be able to read a research paper? Damn.
  - esseph 1y ago
    Not at all, which is why I wonder why the hell you'd ask a journalist!
    - nairboon 1y ago
      OP was possibly referring to science journalism/science editors. These "journalists" usually have a graduate degree in the field they're writing about.
ars 1y 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.
abdullahkhalids 1y 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.

Foobar8568 1y ago

After working in different NGO HQ, I would have more believed that most reporting are bullshit.

michaeldoron 1y ago

The title reads like an Onion article

Pinus 1y 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."
- prmph 1y ago
  Do you have a link to this report?
  - cperciva 1y ago
    https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-12-480r https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-12-480r
    - classichasclass 1y ago
      That is absolutely impenetrable prose. An LLM couldn't make it any more obfuscated.
    - marcosdumay 1y ago
      And, like most IgNobel winners, it's an important research about important problems.
    - prmph 1y ago
      I do not see anywhere in that report evidence of the deep semantic recursion you mentioned
jakeydus 1y ago
I'm shocked I had to scroll so far to find someone who had this same thought!

zahirbmirza 1y ago

Should I read this report?

marcosdumay 1y ago
I dunno, I imagine we already know the gist of the claims.

browningstreet 1y 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.

AndrewKemendo 1y 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.
- repeekad 1y 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 1y 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 1y ago
      Or they want to feel/say they are helping the community while actually not risking getting their hands dirty.

deadbabe 1y ago

Reading reports is hard work. If AI could turn them into videos instead I think they’d be easier to digest.

kingstnap 1y ago

UN library has lot of stuff in it. https://digitallibrary.un.org/?ln=en 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.

duskwuff 1y 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.
nashashmi 1y ago
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.

HSO 1y 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?

xyst 1y ago

Almost feels like an onion headline.

kachapopopow 1y 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.

SoftTalker 1y 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 1y 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. :)

elcritch 1y 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.

simpaticoder 1y ago

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.)

BolsunBacset 1y ago
[flagged]
brightball 1y 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.
EA-3167 1y 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.

mhb 1y ago

[flagged]

olddustytrail 1y ago
Well its most powerful and influencial member is the USA, so I suppose that follows.
- mhb 1y ago
  It would if the US were writing the reports.
  - olddustytrail 1y ago
    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.

aspenmayer 1y ago

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 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.

resource_waste 1y 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 1y 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). [1]: https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/311664/9789241550536-eng.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y https://iris.who.int/bitstream/handle/10665/311664/978924155... [2]: https://www.un.org/en/essential-un/ https://www.un.org/en/essential-un/

excalibur 1y ago

The Onion is now Reuters; Reuters is now The Onion.

Analemma_ 1y 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 1y ago
Has anyone thought the UN had anything to do with quality before?

willguest 1y 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

nashashmi 1y ago
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.
- mhb 1y ago
  What is "this" in the why democracy fails? Are you suggesting that the UN is some kind of democracy?
  - nashashmi 1y ago
    Bureaucracy
- willguest 1y ago
  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.
  - nashashmi 1y ago
    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.

saaaaaam 1y 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 1y ago
Yellow Journalism: Reading a tweet. Journalism: Reading the press release. Investigative Journalism: Reading the report.

kenanblair 1y ago

beyond the title, what’s this UN report about?

atleastoptimal 1y ago

Perfect Onion headline

dotcoma 1y ago

Did they also find out WHY ?

footnote43 1y ago

https://www.un.org/un80-initiative/en/report-mandate-implementation-review https://www.un.org/un80-initiative/en/report-mandate-impleme...

neonate 1y ago

https://archive.md/JVG8r https://archive.md/JVG8r

XorNot 1y ago

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.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

anonu 1y ago

UN reports should probably pivot to video, they will get wider circulation.

dwheeler 1y ago

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.

crossbody 1y ago

I ain't reading this report

shikon7 1y ago

What irony that this report might be the most read UN report

golemiprague 1y ago

[dead]

thomasjudge 1y ago

I didn't read it

wnc3141 1y ago

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.

TheRealNGenius 1y ago

[dead]

anshumankmr 1y ago

Somewhat relevant Onion sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPfVkuPmpc8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPfVkuPmpc8

specproc 1y ago

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/fa48b5ab-2912-5d7a-b11c-eb609931292d https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/entities/publication/fa4... [^2]: https://reliefweb.int/updates?view=reports&advanced-search=%28S1503%29_%28F10%29_%28DO20250101-20250630%29 https://reliefweb.int/updates?view=reports&advanced-search=%... [^3]: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789211065923 https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789211065923 [^4]: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789213589960 https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/books/9789213589960 [^5]: https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/periodicals/26181061 https://www.un-ilibrary.org/content/periodicals/26181061

j16sdiz 1y ago

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.

robertlagrant 1y ago
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.

ta20240528 1y ago

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 :)

blitzar 1y ago

Just wait till someone does a report on how widely read TPS reports are

unixhero 1y ago

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.

tardismechanic 1y ago

r/nottheonion

martin82 1y ago

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.

Frieren 1y ago

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.