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Show HN: Guess which government programs work

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Re: Show HN: Guess which government programs work

#41

Post by toyg »

davidgrenier wrote: post #19
asgard1024 wrote: post #12

This is great! One of the interesting things about social sciences (and engineering, although just like computer hacking, social engineering has unfortunately strong negative connotations) is that the real world is often counter-intuitive. In particular, people tend to believe in punishment a lot, while it commonly escalates the problem (I like the quip "emphasis on punishment is the sign of an obedience frame"). I a…

My cue was to vote against strategies that seemed built on a rewards and punishments foundation.

The problem with reward/punishment strategies is that rewards are inevitably deferred; and people who are in problematic situations likely have much lower ability to deal with deferred satisfaction. That's just how it is.

Unfortunately, because bureaucracy is mostly run by people with great skills in the area, this fact is really hard to get across, or is even rejected outright. After all, if I-Court-Judge or I-Politician could keep it together enough to get where I am, why can't anybody else manage just a little bit? And then the morality discourse kicks in and there is no way out.

Re: Show HN: Guess which government programs work

#42

Post by frabcus »

tomjen3 wrote: post #31
jhundal wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how many folks are aware of this, but the ACA included funding for an 'Innovation Center' to run experiments on potential approaches to improve medical outcomes and cut costs: http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/01/14/37719262... I think that the A/B tests you propose would be great, though there will be plenty of ideologues still finding excuses not to accept the results. Also, hi Nate! You probab…

We shouldn't experiment with sick people, at least with their informed and voluntary consent.

It is unethical NOT to A/B test, because you may be doing the worst thing for all patients. You're right that it should be generally known this is done.

Re: Show HN: Guess which government programs work

#43

Post by michaelt »

NateLawson wrote: post #3
robertwiblin wrote: post #2

I'm one of the creators of the quiz! Note that the projects were not chosen based on their results, and certainly not because the results are counterintuitive. Rather they are the ten best understood social programs we could find. You can read about the findings of our research into whether people can guess what works and what doesn't ahead of time: http://www.vox.com/2015/8/13/9148123/quiz-which-programs-wor...

Hey, this is really neat. It reminds me of the lesswrong.com community, where the goal is to figure out ways of offsetting cognitive biases. One thing I've always wanted to see is a mandatory A/B test built into any new legislation. That is, funding for a study after X years of the new law or program being in place would have to be part of the law. It could even including a threshold of the desired controlled effect…

For certain types of legislation the A/B test itself would create a perverse incentive for opponents of the legislation to make the negative effects occur to get the legislation revoked.

For example, if you said "we're going to put twice as many cops on patrol, but we'll revoke this if crime rates don't decrease" then a rational criminal would commit more crime, in order to get the law revoked.

Or if you said "we're going to tax carbon emissions, but we'll revoke the law if domestic oil production drops by more than 20%" you've just invited oil companies to shut down their wells and wait you out.

Re: Show HN: Guess which government programs work

#45

Post by pluma »

I find it a bit unintuitive that "no change" errors are valued the same as "opposite" errors (e.g. answering "positive" when the change was actually negative). I find it far less interesting when the discrepancy is whether there is any change or not than when the effect is actually opposite to what one would apparently expect.

Additionally as others have pointed out some of the questions and answers aren't very clear (though maybe it's just my reading comprehension that's failing). I too am unhappy about the way the elderly question is posed -- it's not clear whether all of the programs were actually focussing on reducing mortality. In fact the introduction mentions that it's merely one of several goals and from anecdotal evidence I would expect that the mortality metric is thrown off by patients stabilizing once their health has deteriorated enough to require them to be placed under permanent care -- that you're less (or equally likely) to die doesn't mean you're more (or equally) healthy.

Re: Show HN: Guess which government programs work

#46

Post by [deleted] »

robertwiblin wrote: post #2

I'm one of the creators of the quiz! Note that the projects were not chosen based on their results, and certainly not because the results are counterintuitive. Rather they are the ten best understood social programs we could find. You can read about the findings of our research into whether people can guess what works and what doesn't ahead of time: http://www.vox.com/2015/8/13/9148123/quiz-which-programs-wor...

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Guess which government programs work

#47

Post by mattmanser »

While the content is great, the tech seems bloody awful. Why is it so slow to load? It takes 5-10 seconds to load on both my laptop and my desktop (both It severely impacts the usability, it looks like nothing is happening and I can imagine a lot of people just close it before it loads.

And it's (virtually) static content! Why doesn't it load with the opening page at least?

Re: Show HN: Guess which government programs work

#48

Post by bko »

robertwiblin wrote: post #2

I'm one of the creators of the quiz! Note that the projects were not chosen based on their results, and certainly not because the results are counterintuitive. Rather they are the ten best understood social programs we could find. You can read about the findings of our research into whether people can guess what works and what doesn't ahead of time: http://www.vox.com/2015/8/13/9148123/quiz-which-programs-wor...

I scored a 2/10.

It's very interesting how this quiz plays so well into your political and personal biases.

What I take away is reinforcing my bias that intentions and consequences are separate and that we should not conflate the two. However, I imagine many others see this and think "X is bad but Y is good. Let's do more of X and less of Y"

Re: Show HN: Guess which government programs work

#49

Post by maho »

robertwiblin wrote: post #2

I'm one of the creators of the quiz! Note that the projects were not chosen based on their results, and certainly not because the results are counterintuitive. Rather they are the ten best understood social programs we could find. You can read about the findings of our research into whether people can guess what works and what doesn't ahead of time: http://www.vox.com/2015/8/13/9148123/quiz-which-programs-wor...

I enjoyed the quiz, but I am not a big fan of the positive_effect/no_effect/negative_effect classification, because it hides the error of the measurement.

Instead, I propose to use a slider, like:

> "In your estimate, how does the second response program influence the rate of repeat offenses?"

> Underneath, a slider on a one-dimensional axis, with appropriate labels. For example, on the leftmost side: "50% increase in repeat offenses", and on the rightmost side "50% decrease in repeat offenses".

> Clicking the "reveal" button superimposes the measured effect and its errorbar (this is important!) onto the slider.

That way everyone can see if the measured effect is relevant, or if the measurement error is so large that the study might have missed a relevant effect.

The downside of a slider is that the slider range will influence ("prime") the responses. But I doubt that it would influence the direction of the guess, so you could still extract useful information out of the reponses.

Re: Show HN: Guess which government programs work

#50

Post by [deleted] »

vacri wrote: post #21
dclowd9901 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scared straight is highly effective PR. Hood looking young people getting yelled at by scary men? Possibly crying? It's like schadenfreude for "civilized" society. I don't understand how policy leaders can look at hard numbers and say, "fuck it, let's keep funding it."

Tucker: My expert would totally disprove that. Abbott: Who is your expert? Tucker: I don’t know, but I can get one by this afternoon. The thing is, you’ve been listening to the wrong expert. You need to listen to the right expert. And you need to know what an expert is going to advise you before he advises you. - The Thick Of It

[deleted]
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