> The point of this ritual is not to signal our obeisance to the gods (although if any of them want to stop by and help us out, that would be cool), but to remind ourselves that we know nothing. This is procedurally-induced humility, which is desperately necessary, because an alarming number of our best-intentioned interventions do not work.

> For example:

> In 2009, Congress spent $3 billion on “School Improvement Grants” for the worst-performing schools in the country. As far as we can tell, those grants did nothing.

> Universities that hired a Chief Diversity Officer between 2001 and 2019 did not end up with more diverse students, faculties, or administrators.

> The American government spent $280 million to help Afghan women get jobs, and now they can’t really say whether any women got any jobs.1

> Remember 20 years ago, when giving laptops to kids in developing countries seemed like the most important thing to do? Well, a 10-year RCT of 531 rural schools in Peru found zero effects of “One Laptop Per Child” on academic performance.2

> Researchers developed four different messages that were supposed to convince parents to vaccinate their kids. None of the messages worked, and one of them accidentally made parents more likely to believe that vaccines cause autism.

Something that needs addressing on all but the laptop one: there are parties who had a vested interest in seeing these example programs fail. In order:

* people who think public schools exist only as instruments of mass indoctrination for secular values and who would rather not have their money go to that, and/or would like to be the investors in "market-based" solutions to America's supposed education problems

* people who think that anyone and everyone who isn't white, male, middle-class-or-above, and Judeo-Christian gets into college programs because the government forced them in there, and find other ways to get those people to leave, because they see them as a threat to their freedom to do and say whatever they want in the spaces of higher education, and a threat to their sense of intelligence and superiority

* the Taliban. I hope I don't need to explain that one further.

* medical grifters who can't push you things like bleach enemas and colloidal silver if you aren't sick because you got vaccinated, among others

I can't speak to what happened in Peru, but these are all examples where you can easily point to people in American or Afghan society participating in the efforts in bad faith, and thus sabotaging them.