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UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

reuters.com

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Re: UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

#11

Post by AndrewKemendo »

browningstreet wrote: post #9

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 gle…

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.

Re: UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

#13

Post by kingstnap »

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.

Re: UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

#14

Post by HSO »

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?

Re: UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

#15

Post by roughly »

t-3 wrote: post #10
clort wrote: post #3

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…

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=…

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.

Re: UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

#17

Post by zeroCalories »

clort wrote: post #3

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…

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.

Re: UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

#18

Post by bootsmann »

browningstreet wrote: post #9

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 gle…

NGO is an incredibly broad category of things. There are certainly many grifter organizations (same as there are grifter companies) but there are also orgs such as the AMF which do incredibly effective work.

Re: UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

#19

Post by zeroCalories »

browningstreet wrote: post #9

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 gle…

I don't think it's fair to compare the UN and NGOs. The UN is a platform for diplomacy between nations. Of course it's going to be process heavy and not make a lot of progress, as these nations have fundamentally misaligned incentives. An NGO that exists as the project of nepobabies is fundamentally different.

Re: UN report finds UN reports are not widely read

#20

Post by pstuart »

browningstreet wrote: post #9

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 gle…

Seems like a perfect task for AI to do first pass assessment and summaries (albeit with follow up reviews).

If those reports go unread and thus not acted upon they are worthless. We obviously need the details to exist but we are in a battle for hearts and minds, and the more dumbed down the message, the likelier it is to be received.

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