Maya Forstater

Why are GFI, the funder of this report @FordFoundation , the members of the transparency and accountability community @TAInitiative @FinTrCo all so willing to keep churning out these reports, and so uninterested in scrutinising and seriously considering their findings?

.... Unless the whole point of the methodology is to come up with big numbers. ..... because they can be used to argue for policies on transparency and accountability....

I like transparency and accountability. Its a good hypothesis and hope. The idea that if people have access to data about what their govt & other powerful organisations are doing they will hold them accountable. But it is a dynamic that has to be built by people & organisations

How can foundations contribute to that that if they are satisfied to keep funding the same organisations to produce the same reports, with the same lack of curiosity and scrutiny. ....."We need more transparency!" But don't look too closely at the analysis!

I can't speak to the GFI report either way, but this seems to be part of a larger issue with what in my day job gets called OSINT.

OSINT can be amazing, but I spend hours arguing that if you want to know how weapons move around illicitly you also need to speak to real people who illicitly move weapons around. Ditto essential oils. (Same could be said of much of the economics profession, of course!)

Yes. There's a meta-point (that's the same point that's been bugging me since I first shouted "why does know one notice if there's billions hiding in Zambia -Swiss copper", but clearly I'm slow on the uptake)