“Parkinson’s Law and the Ideology of Statistics” by Benquo

LessWrong (Curated & Popular)

The anonymous review of The Anti-Politics Machine published on Astral Codex X focuses on a case study of a World Bank intervention in Lesotho, and tells a story about it:
The World Bank staff drew reasonable-seeming conclusions from sparse data, and made well-intentioned recommendations on that basis. However, the recommended programs failed, due to factors that would have been revealed by a careful historical and ethnographic investigation of the area in question. Therefore, we should spend more resources engaging in such investigations in order to make better-informed World Bank style resource allocation decisions. So goes the story.
It seems to me that the World Bank recommendations were not the natural ones an honest well-intentioned person would have made with the information at hand. Instead they are heavily biased towards top-down authoritarian schemes, due to a combination of perverse incentives, procedures that separate data-gathering from implementation, and an ideology that [...]
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Outline:
(01:06) Ideology
(02:58) Problem
(07:59) Diagnosis
(14:00) Recommendation
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First published:
January 4th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4CmYSPc4HfRfWxCLe/parkinson-s-law-and-the-ideology-of-statistics-1
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.