Was about to comment the same thing, even if they smoked more, the program was meant to reduce the trend of new smokers, period. And it was successful about that

What agenda? Like a hidden motive?

The not-so-hidden message is, "Interventions don't do anything, so make the government smaller, and let corporations do whatever they want."

This really is not the message though. From the post:

“That’s why the worst possible reaction to a failed intervention is resignation. We may not know enough to improve our lot right now, but perhaps we could figure it out, if we tried.”

From reading the whole post, I gather that he’s truly not advocating some libertarian angle, he really is writing on the observation that policy is hard, and it’s nearly impossible to actually predict all the effects of societal intervention.

From my reading, I’m not sure even sure that he’s advocating caution or reluctance to social policy. Just goat sacrifices!

Well, my assumption was he doesn't really want more goat sacrifices but rather less interventions. Otherwise, what does he have against goats?

I think neither you nor the comment you are replying to are understanding what the article is trying to say.

It is saying, acts must be done to reaffirm the commitment to the goal, the goat is a litmus test as to whether the goal is worth it. Not to abandon the goal, some things are worth the sacrifice, but to be aware of it.

"Because there are sometimes unintended consequences to doing stuff, we should never do anything" is a great motto to live by. (/S)

Wow. So we must not ask if any govt interventions work for fear that the wrong answer will empower political groups disfavoured by the govt and govt staff?

We should not cherry pick interventions that don't work and misleadingly show that interventions meant for one purpose did not work for another purpose in order to advance a narrative that no interventions work.

If you read more of the author's stuff it'll be obvious to you why this is wrong.

His whole thing is "we don't understand the world remotely as well as we think we do, and we need to be trying more diverse things (and reliably measuring the outcomes) so that we can understand it better"

The entire post seems to be along the lines of ‘no laws ever work!’ and then you scratch the surface and they do work.

There was a post here about Mississippi miracle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississippi_miracle recently which was due to one of the programs mentioned in the original post claiming it produced no improvements.

As in the original post is flat put lying to push an agenda. You can google for like 2mins on many of the points and see counter evidence.

This seems like a super important corrective, but I don't see the agenda you're seeing. The article concludes by arguing we need to do lots more stuff, and suggests that people whose takeaway from the article is "stop doing social science interventions" should take the place of the goats in the sacrifices.

It does somewhat undermine another point of the article, which is that since almost all of our interventions are ineffective we need to invest more in understanding which ones actually work.

It's a bit discouraging that there's no clear answer to that question even on this relatively well-studied intervention.

But the paper cited by the blog post also covers the smoking prevalence data and finds it to not be statistically significant. Now you can look at their model and decide if you find that conclusion convincing, but I don't think just pulling a number from a different report (especially one from the Australian government, which has its own agenda in motivating its own policy) is really such a gotcha here.

To be clear, I don't want to play the game of paper vs. paper. I simply think there is more depth of detail here than can be nicely summarised in a comment.