We need more goat sacrifices
214 points
• 1 day ago
• Article
Link
在推出社会计划或政策之前，社会应先举行一场谦卑的"仪式"，承认我们深刻的无知。尽管这些举措旨在造福公众，但在教育、医疗和国际援助领域，令人意外的是，大量重大干预都未能达到预期效果。从未带来结果的学校改进补助金，到未能改变机构人口结构的多样性倡议，这些反复出现的失败说明，我们最精心的计划常常建立在并不牢靠的基础之上。
社会科学长期都在面对这一困境。 Peter Rossi 那著名的、尽管带着玩笑意味的评价"金属定律"（metallic laws of evaluation）就体现了这种担忧。他认为，大型社会项目的净影响往往为零，尤其是当项目试图从根本上改变人的行为时。尽管研究不断进步，稳定且可靠的实际成效依然难以获得。一些一次性的研究常被宣传为成功案例，但这些结论很少能在严格审查中站得住脚，于是出现一种局面：数十年的研究最终往往以令人失望的"无效结果"收场。
之所以会固执地继续推行无效干预，是因为人们存在一种心理上的控制错觉。就像人们会错误地相信自己能通过行动影响彩票这类随机结果一样，政策制定者和慈善机构也常常觉得，只要他们投入了干预，就一定会成功——仅仅因为他们抱着这样的意图。这种自信极其普遍，以至于许多项目在没有明确衡量"成功"的标准、也从未开展真正评估的情况下就照常推进，并默认良好的初衷本身就足以证明有效。
当这些项目不可避免地失灵时，人们通常会采取讨价还价、否认，或干脆彻底认命的反应。他们可能会转向自认为符合常识的做法，比如现金转移支付，却发现即便是这些手段也缺乏稳定的成功证据。还有人会使用"并非真正的苏格兰人"（no true Scotsman）式的辩护，把失败归咎于执行过程，而不是核心理念本身。不过，最具破坏性的反应是彻底认命：把解决社会问题的难度误当成不可能，从而让我们彻底放弃努力去改善世界。
最终，我们需要朝着科学成熟迈进：承认我们并不真正理解人类心智，也无法完全把握社会系统的复杂性。困在这种中间状态并不是停止前进的理由，而恰恰是拥抱更严谨的"猜测—核实"方法的理由。我们实际上还处在发现的早期阶段，类似古代学者：他们或许捕捉到了一些准确的线索，但对支撑世界的机制却存在深刻误解。与其把自己当作已经找到了终局答案，不如培养谦卑的态度，为未来的进步播下种子，并接受：真正有效的干预既需要耐心，也需要愿意从失败中吸取教训。
Before launching social programs or policies, society should adopt a ritual of humility to acknowledge our profound ignorance. While intended to serve the public good, a surprising number of major interventions in education, healthcare, and international aid fail to produce their desired effects. From school improvement grants that yielded no results to diversity initiatives that failed to shift institutional demographics, these persistent failures suggest that our best-laid plans are often built on shaky foundations.
The social sciences have long grappled with this, as evidenced by Peter Rossi's famous, albeit tongue-in-cheek, metallic laws of evaluation. Rossi argued that the net impact of large social programs is often zero, particularly when those programs seek to fundamentally change human behavior. Despite advancements in research, consistent and reliable impact remains elusive. One-off studies are frequently touted as successes, yet these findings rarely hold up under rigorous scrutiny, leading to a landscape where decades of research often culminate in disappointing null results.
This tendency to persevere with ineffective interventions is rooted in a psychological illusion of control. Just as people falsely believe they can influence random outcomes like lotteries through personal action, policymakers and philanthropists often feel their interventions will succeed simply because they intend them to. This confidence is so pervasive that many projects proceed without defining success or ever attempting a real evaluation, assuming that their good intentions are sufficient proof of efficacy.
When these programs inevitably falter, people typically react with bargaining, denial, or total resignation. They might pivot to what they view as common sense solutions, such as cash transfers, only to find that even these measures lack consistent evidence of success. Others retreat into a "no true Scotsman" defense, blaming the implementation rather than the core idea. However, the most damaging response is total resignation, where the difficulty of solving social problems is mistaken for impossibility, causing us to abandon the effort to improve our world altogether.
Ultimately, we must move toward scientific maturity by admitting that we do not fully understand the human mind or the complexities of societal systems. Being stuck in this middle state is not a reason to stop, but a reason to embrace a more rigorous "guess and check" approach. We are effectively living in the early stages of discovery, much like ancient scholars who held some accurate insights while being deeply mistaken about the underlying mechanisms of the world. Rather than assuming we have arrived at final answers, we should cultivate the humility to plant seeds for future progress, accepting that successful intervention requires both patience and the willingness to learn from failure.
133 comments • Comments Link
• 许多社会干预措施的失败，并非源于社会科学领域内在认知不足，而是因为国家层面的设计者更倾向于政治宣传，或依循缺陷重重、过度简化的框架，而非开展严谨的小规模实验。
• 对即时、可衡量成效的执念催生了"compassion theater"：花钱或宣称某种价值的行为被看作比取得真正的成果更重要，这往往忽视了长期反馈回路所必需的条件。
• 评估干预措施本身极为困难，因为社会系统复杂、动态，并且容易受到 cultural drift 的影响，使得既往计划的结果难以成为对未来世代的可靠预测指标。
• 衡量并非价值中立。它会带来沉重的后勤成本，并制造一种倾向于简化、偏好易于量化目标的偏差，进而让代理人为了达标而操纵系统，而不是去解决问题的根源。
• 自上而下的大规模干预之所以常常失败，是因为设计者缺乏本地背景与理解，往往凭借一张抽象的"地图"来判断问题，而这张地图与一线真实情况并不一致。
• 尽管科学方法是理想选择，却常常与政治时间表和伦理约束难以兼容，导致一种"guess and check"的循环：失败的干预措施被反复推行，因为它们能充当政治派系的象征性仪式，或可称为"goat sacrifices"。
• 断言社会干预措施普遍无效，往往是夸大其词。比如 anti-drinking-driving campaigns 等反例表明，只要政策持续推行且执行到位，随着时间推移就能带来有意义的社会变化。
• 公共讨论往往忽视了 bad-faith actors 的作用：他们会主动破坏政府项目，以推动自己的意识形态议程，或用基于市场的替代方案来替换公共方案。
• 与其彻底放弃干预，更有效的路径通常是迭代式的小规模测试、严谨的数据收集，并且愿意叫停那些无法达到客观、事先设定标准的项目。
• 治理本质上是一场与系统中积极"对抗操纵"的力量之间的冲突。这要求将僵化的瀑布式政策执行，转向更敏捷、更具响应性的管理，并把直接受影响者的反馈纳入决策过程。
这场讨论的核心在于：自上而下的社会干预一再失败，与此同时，人们又渴望推动 evidence-based policy，却又受到现实政治的强烈掣肘。参与者们试图回应这样一种看法：尽管不少项目无效，甚至只是表演性质，解决方案并不必然是放弃社会科学，而是要采取更谦逊、更具迭代性、并以数据为驱动的方法。最终的分歧主要体现在两派观点之间：一方认为机构的无能是系统性迭代失败的结果；另一方则认为"缺乏成功"本身可能是刻意的政治信号传递。 • Many social interventions fail not because of an inherent lack of understanding in the social sciences, but because state-level designers prioritize political messaging or flawed, oversimplified frameworks over rigorous, small-scale experimentation.
• The desire for immediate, measurable impact leads to "compassion theater," where the act of spending money or signaling a value is treated as more important than achieving actual outcomes, often ignoring the necessity of long-term feedback loops.
• Evaluating interventions is inherently difficult because social systems are complex, dynamic, and subject to cultural drift, making the results of past programs unreliable predictors for future generations.
• Measurement itself is not value-neutral, as it imposes heavy logistical overhead and creates a bias toward simplistic, easily quantifiable goals, which often causes agents to game the system to hit targets rather than solve underlying problems.
• Top-down, large-scale interventions often fail because their designers lack local context and understanding, viewing the problem through an abstracted map that does not correspond to the reality on the front lines.
• While the scientific method is the ideal approach, it is often incompatible with political timelines and ethical constraints, leading to a "guess and check" cycle where failed interventions are repeated because they serve as symbolic rituals or "goat sacrifices" for political factions.
• The claim that social interventions are universally ineffective is often an exaggeration; counter-examples like anti-drinking-driving campaigns demonstrate that persistent, well-executed policies can produce meaningful societal shifts over time.
• Public discourse often ignores the role of bad-faith actors who actively sabotage government programs to advance their own ideological agendas or market-based alternatives.
• Rather than total abandonment of intervention, a more effective path involves iterative, small-scale testing, rigorous data collection, and a willingness to terminate programs that fail to meet objective, pre-defined criteria.
• Governance is essentially a conflict against active adversaries who game systems, requiring a transition from rigid, waterfall-style policy implementation to more agile, responsive management that incorporates feedback from those directly affected.
The discussion centers on the recurring failure of top-down social interventions and the tension between the desire for evidence-based policy and the political realities that discourage it. Participants grapple with the idea that while many programs are ineffective or performative, the solution is not necessarily to abandon social science, but to embrace a more humble, iterative, and data-driven approach. The conversation ultimately reflects a divide between those who see institutional incompetence as a systemic failure to iterate and those who view the lack of success as a deliberate feature of political signaling.