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Comment by panarky | Hacker News Reader

The author answers that question with this:

  In 2010, Jim Rankin, a reporter for The Toronto Star, asked
  himself the same question. So he handed out five $50 prepaid
  Visa and MasterCard gift cards to panhandlers. What did they
  buy? Mostly food. Some phone minutes and clothes. A couple
  bought liquor as well.

By and large, people know what's best for themselves. Some will waste it, but most will put the cash to good use.

Waste can't be completely eliminated, and giving the cash to an organization also doesn't eliminate waste.

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Well...of course. Heroin dealers don't take Visa cards, so you wouldn't see a line item for drugs on a Visa bill. You also wouldn't see that the prepaid card had been exchanged for cash at a discount to someone that actually wanted food.

Heroin dealers don't take Visa cards, but liquor stores do.

Have you heard of this great app called Square Register?

There have actually been a few experiments of various kinds, and they've all (to my knowledge) showed somewhere between little positive effect and significant positive effect.

I have no opinion on the matter at hand, however I do have an opinion making ANY conclusions on a sample size of n=5...

Even a sample size of 5 allows us to reject some claims. Consider claim - "this die is fair". If it comes up a six 5 times out of 5, we're justified in being suspicious.

Thirteen bits suspicious.

... scratch that. Closer to ten bits, since the first throw isn't suspicious, assuming we had no reason to privilege 6 coming in.

Well sure, your example here is objective based on pure numbers. Statistically there is much less than a fraction of a percent of that occurring by chance alone, so being suspicious is absolutely justified.

But a dice is the antithesis of human behavior. The example I was talking about was almost completely subjective in nature and with 5 samples from an (assumingly) untrained observer (given he/she was a reporter, not a clinical researcher) leads to a whole lot of observation/experimenter bias.

So while my original if n=5, reject may not have been 100% accurate, in the case of human behavioral analyses, I stand by it.

i think the fact that the people are homeless and in need of help means they probably don't know whats best for themselves

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