maia comments on Rationality Quotes March 2014 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: malcolmocean 01 March 2014 03:34PM

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Comment author: CCC 03 March 2014 02:03:33PM 6 points [-]

Only about 10 percent of new social programs in fields like education, criminology and social welfare demonstrate statistically significant benefits in RCTs

This is a higher rate than I'd expected. It implies that current policies in these three fields are not really thoroughly thought out, or at least not to the extent that I had expected. It seems that there is substantial room for improvement.

I would have expected perhaps one or two percent.

Comment author: maia 13 March 2014 02:26:35PM 2 points [-]

Remember, you expect 5% to give a statistically significant result just by chance...

Comment author: CCC 14 March 2014 07:49:04AM 2 points [-]

That's only true of the programs which can be expected to produce no detriments, surely?