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.)
This sounds exactly like “work” today. Certainly matches my experience in big tech.
It reminds me, tangentially, of something I did a while ago. I scraped hundreds of environment non-profits and NGO websites from around the world. Many of them are UN affiliated to some degree.
I tried to find 3 things: 1) what the non-profit does, 2) what the non-profit produces, 3) what the non-profit accomplished.
My ability to glean these details, by scraping and double-checking manually, had a very very low hit rate.. at least via website content. Organizations are oblique and very little is clear/available. [The same problem exists for websites for places (restaurants, venues, athletic events, etc). By and large, they all hide their addresses.]
I’m guessing these efforts and reports would produce a similar translucency if audited from outside.
I'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.
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.
What irony that this report might be the most read UN report
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?
> 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
The title reads like an Onion article
I ain't reading this report
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.
Perfect Onion headline
UN reports should probably pivot to video, they will get wider circulation.
UN library has lot of stuff in it.
https://digitallibrary.un.org/?ln=en
Like you really have to be a giga nerd to read these. Reading wikipedia is fun but this is just slog fest and you need a lot.
Like check out this report its result 12 sorted chronologically:
> Strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development Account : report of the Secretary-General
> The present report has been prepared pursuant to General Assembly resolution 79/257, in which the Assembly requested the Secretary-General to submit a report on strengthening the effectiveness and impact of the Development Account at its eightieth session. The report details how the 10 implementing entities of the United Nations Secretariat have implemented Account-funded projects to support the capacity-development efforts of Member States, in particular in relation to selecting projects based on Member State needs; ensuring complementarity with the regular programme of technical cooperation; using a common framework for evaluating projects; conducting outreach to promote awareness of the Development Account and its funded projects; and leveraging additional resources to enhance the support delivered to Member States. It also presents further actions to promote the visibility of the Account and its results achieved and to strengthen coordination with the regular programme of technical cooperation to maximize synergies.
It's frankly it's main use would probably be LLM training data. It's a pretty fantastic Rosetta stone of sorts with lots of documents translated professionally into multiple languages. But humans will struggle to have the attention to read through 16 pages of the above.
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.
The Onion is now Reuters; Reuters is now The Onion.
Did they also find out WHY ?
beyond the title, what’s this UN report about?
Should I read this report?
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.
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.
Everyone coming in with a hot take on "lol reports" here should go look up what a military command actually does during a war. Because some advances in live streaming aside...they read reports, and write more reports.
In fact something your field commanders get to do is go and be shot at and then write reports about what happened. Radio operators keep notepads of things to send to back to base while in the field (usually meaning they're the last to sleep because they need to get the reports in).
Writing stuff down is how knowledge is communicated in all disciplines.
I’m pretty sure this is the report where they mention download numbers of UN reports, since Reuters buried the lede by not linking to it themselves:
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/4086174
I’m sure that they mention it in the report, and it is one of the UN80 reports, but I can’t be sure that it’s the one Reuters means, or that it’s the only UN report on this issue.
Almost feels like an onion headline.
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?
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?
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Reading reports is hard work. If AI could turn them into videos instead I think they’d be easier to digest.
https://archive.md/JVG8r