UN report finds — UN reports are not widely read
A United Nations report seeking ways to improve efficiency and cut costs has revealed: U.N. reports are not widely read.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres briefed countries on Friday on the report, produced by his UN80 reform that focused on how U.N. staff implement thousands of mandates given to them by bodies like the General Assembly or Security Council.
He said last year that the U.N. system supported 27,000 meetings involving 240 bodies, and the U.N. secretariat produced 1,100 reports, a 20% increase since 1990.
An outsider is bound to suspect that UN reports are not compiled to be widely read. The U.N. secretariat doesn't necessarily expect anyone at all to read those 1,100 reports once they have been issued. The function of a bureaucracy is to produce reports, not necessarily reports which are widely read, or even read at all.
Even if they haven't been read, those U.N. reports are available to be referred to in the future, to preload debates should the need arise.
7 comments:
Wonder how much job satisfaction there is for the report writers/compilers.
James - I bet at least some of them are already using AI then going out for a coffee.
Many years ago, I did read (in a report!), that in the dark days of the Soviet Union, many such publications were made, not to be widely read, but to provide evidence that 'dissidents' had breached the diktats in those reports, and they could now be punished in accordance with Soviet law. Perhaps someone thinks this is a good idea?
Penseivat
AI is good enough for reports nobody will read, which is most of them. My current research project is testing that. Give NotebookLM a pile of documents and it will produce a very passable summary report. Plausible, coherent, beguiling, but tends to dissolve into generalisation and platitudes if read with close attention. A lot of comfortable, mid-wit desk jobs are ripe for redundancy.
Penseivat - an interesting comparison because many of our UK laws, regulations and official procedures seem to have the same purpose as those Soviet Union publications, to provide evidence against 'dissidents'. As if the Soviet Union ethos didn't collapse with the USSR itself, it evolved.
djc - I haven't tried NotebookLM yet, but I use AI more and more as a summary tool, a way to gain an overview, where superficial will do for now before looking for anything deeper. I find it's very good at that.
I'm sure you are right, a lot of comfortable, mid-wit desk jobs are ripe for redundancy. Much mainstream media output seems to be done that way already.
The purpose of bureaucracies is to recruit and pay bureaucrats.
(Hat-tip: the late great Jerry Pournelle)
Peter - Jerry Pournelle was right, that's at least the primary purpose and in many cases the only purpose.
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