So out of this sample, the only two interventions that had positive effects were based on one-on-one relationships. Any wisdom we can draw from this, or is it just a coincidence?
I got all 8 correct. My take is that programs that make participants feel like they have low status are unlikely to succeed.
I would explicitly say "The answer is yes for some but not all of these" - ie it's not a trick question where the answer is that they all worked, or none did.
As it usually happens in the social "sciences," it's very naive to believe that in any of these cases we have anything like solid evidence about the total effect of the programs in question. Even ignoring the intractable problems with disentangling all the countless non-obvious confounding variables, there is still the problem of unintended consequences -- which may be unaccounted for even if the study seemingly asks all the relevant questions, and which may manifest themselves only in the longer run.
Take for example this nurse-family partnership program. Even if the study has correctly proven that these positive outcomes have occurred in the families covered by the intervention, and that they are in fact a consequence of the intervention -- a big if -- we still have no way of knowing its total long-run effect. For one, it may happen that it lowers the cost of having children for poor unmarried women, both by providing assistance and by lowering the stigma and fear of such an outcome, so that in the new long-term equilibrium, more children are born to such women, especially the least responsible, resourceful, and competent ones, eventually increasing the total measure of child poverty, neglect, abuse, etc. Of course, this may or may not be the case, but there's no way to know it based on these studies that purport to give a definitive evaluation of the program's success.
I find it exceedingly unlikely that increasing "stigma and fear" will reduce such behavior.
I found this article interesting overview of examples of unintended consequences of past changes, that makes a case for being very cynical of this particular kind of argument:
It's amusing to see a libertarian suggesting that it's probably good for the few to suffer for the sake of the many.
Eh. There are two camps in libertarianism: the moral libertarians, and the technical libertarians. The moral libertarians derive their policies from principles- force is wrong, taxation implies the threat of force, and thus we need to build a society without taxation if we want to live in a moral society.
The technical libertarians derive their policies from economic arguments and history. It doesn't matter whether you think it's moral or immoral to lend money for profit- let's look at societies which allow that and societies which don't, and see which ones prosper more, and apply theoretical principles to expect which should be the case.
And so the atheist moral libertarian looks at gay marriage, and says something along the lines of "the state shouldn't be involved in marriage at all!" or, if you're lucky, "the state should recognize a marriage contract between any two consenting adults!". (The Christian moral libertarian probably thinks that gay marriage is wrong for the standard Christian reasons.) The technical libertarian, though, will be wi...
I've been noticing a lot of my comments get rapidly downvoted once shortly after I post them lately, especially (but not exclusively) in threads where I post libertarian-progressive-ish rebuttals to social-conservative positions.
I'd like to think that it's just someone who doesn't approve of political discussion on LW — but the socially conservative interlocutors don't seem to be getting the same treatment. (With the exception of the ever-popular sam0345, whose low comment scores I expect have more to do with his hostile attitude than the fact that he posts about politics.)
So there does seem to be some Blue/Green unpleasantness going on here. Comments advocating "race realism", sexual shame, or other socially conservative positions tend to float around +3 or +4, while responses disagreeing with them — even with citations to academic work and evidence on the subject — tend to float around -1 to +1.
It doesn't bother me all that much. If my comments were actually getting buried, I'd be worried that we had a bury brigade going on — but they're not. My current hypotheses are either ⓪ I'm just not very good at commenting, ① I have a stalker, ② the idea that social conservatism ...
I think this is what being on one side of a tribal conflict looks like from the inside. My experiences have been similar, with many of my posts getting instantly down voted to -3 to -4, then slowly recovering karma later. As you probably recall from our recent conversations with me we have differing opinions on some politically charged subjects.
It doesn't bother me all that much. If my comments were actually getting buried, I'd be worried that we had a bury brigade going on — but they're not. My current hypotheses are either ⓪ I'm just not very good at commenting, ① I have a stalker, ② the idea that social conservatism is "contrarian" really gets some folks excited, or ③ social conservatives think it's worthwhile to downvote comments that disagree with them. If it's the latter, well,
I don't think you a bad poster and you seem to have a high karma score so we can mostly throw out ⓪. I recall often up voting posts by you, even the ones I disagree with and only recall downvoting a recent one where you seemed to be plain wrong in the context of the discussed article. In that case I also made a comment explaining why I thought it wrong. The contrarian explanation as I wil...
Failing all this I think we really should consider if the overly-strictly interpreted no mindkillers rule that was prevalent as little as a few months ago that much reduced political discourse wasn't a good thing that should be restored.
I used to be excited about the idea of harnessing the high intellectual ability and strong norms of politeness on LW to reach accurate insight about various issues that are otherwise hard to discuss rationally. However, more recently I've become deeply pessimistic about the possibility of having a discussion forum that wouldn't be either severely biased and mind-killed or strictly confined to technical topics in math and hard sciences.
It looks like even if a forum approaches this happy state of affairs, the way old Overcoming Bias and early LessWrong arguably did for some time, this can happen only as a brief and transient phenomenon. (In fact, it isn't hard to identify the forces that inevitably make this situation unstable.) So, while OB ceased to be much of a discussion forum long ago, LW is currently in the final stages of turning into a forum that still has unusual smarts and politeness, but where on any mention of controversial issues, bat...
Much of the uncertainty in estimating the "success" of these programs lies in not knowing to what degree each of the different social indicators measuring said "success" have already been corrupted, in line with Campbell's law.
If you got 7-8 right, there’s less than a 1% chance you were guessing.
I would like to see this article published in the (very hypothetical) World Where Nobody Just Guesses. They would surely be amused at that sky-high 1% figure, when the real number is obviously 0% since nobody was going to guess.
You can't just flip around statements about conditional probability, darn it.
Did the first 4, then skipped to the answers - and I got all of those right! Well, with the exception of DARE; I see no logical way it can't be harmful and counterproductive - for the simple reason that it's crying wolf to teenagers, who are both impressionable and suspicious of adult authority.
I think that, when programs like these are unleashed upon sheltered teenagers from middle-class backgrounds (which is now happening in Russia as well), it can be a big part of the problem; kids are told in strong terms that marijuana and meth are both deadly and aw...
What does it say about me that on reading #1 I thought “Well, I guess that it increased the rate of crime among males and decreased it among females, but given that more crimes are committed by males than by females to begin with, I guess the total crime rate went up”?
Here are my results. P(yes) is the probability I gave that a given intervention worked before I saw the answers.
Question | P(yes) | Answer
1 | 0.2 | NO
2 | 0.7 | YES
3 | 0.2 | NO
4 | 0.4 | NO
5 | 0.5 | NO
6 | 0.4 | NO
7 | 0.3 | YES
8 | 0.4 | NO
My average probability rating was 0.39. My average probability rating for correct answers was 0.5, and my average probability rating for incorrect answers was 0.35.
If I do better than chance at this, it's not by much.
6/8 - I thought 21st Century schools would improve behavior, and I thought Even Start would improve child literacy but not adult literacy. This is really more of a 5/7, though, since I already knew of DARE's ineffectiveness.
The Nurse-family partnership thing sounds like a big-government liberal dream program, so how could I not predict that it would greatly improve outcomes :P
According to the Wikipedia article on happiness economics, historically women's have reported greater happiness than men up till the 1960s. This coincides with the triumph of first wave feminism - suffrage an legal obstacles and the emergence of social justice feminism that's more retributory and provides retaliatory privellages for women. Since then, women have reported increasingly less happiness and are no more unhappy than men on aggregate, in the West. Evidence supporting social conservatism?
2/8 here...
Instead, we need to test, measure the results, and take it from there.
Did they miss "against a properly set up control" after the word "test"?
Dear OP,
I applaud your effort to promote clear thinking on effects of policy. One thing I wanted to mention is that even programs with weak effects may be eventually worthwhile if there is some cancellation of direct effects of the program by some indirect effects. Even if not worthwhile directly, interventions with "effect cancellation" may perhaps be informative for designing future interventions. People in "mediation analysis" worry about these things a lot.
Analyzing mediation is tricky because it needs strong assumptions.
A piece I saw that Benjamin Todd adapted from THINK's module on charity assessment. Some of you may recall the network's recent launch.
cipergoth said that it should be emphasised that this isn't a trick question where the answer is they all worked or none did.
I thought Round 2 would have no effect and expected Round #5 to have no effect not a negative one, I got 6 out of 8 correct. How well did you do?
I recommend checking out the links and references. Gwern's comment there was also interesting.