I find the SSC "Too much dark money in almonds" post interesting because it starts from the premise that there obviously isn't too much dark money in almonds, an argument from incredulity, and uses this (and similar) to argue that there isn't too much dark money in politics, but
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BTW, the reason this is a few tweets and not a blog post is because I did maybe 10-ish hours of reading on this topic and from that reading I think I'd need somewhere between 100 to 1000 hours of reading to write a post that I'd be comfortable putting on my blog.
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In my social circles, people pass around a lot of articles by "smart generalists" who regularly write on a wide variety of topics. When the topic intersects with something I've studied, I usually find that the author has really fundamental misunderstandings about the topic.
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I don't mean to pick on SSC in particular, I think that's probably the least wrong "smart generalist" blog out there (I don't include gwern in this category since he seems to stick to topics he has a good understanding of, which limits the range of topics he writes about), but
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it seems very difficult and perhaps impossible to write about a wide variety of new topics all the time without saying a lot of things that are obviously naive or wrong to someone who's familiar with the field being discussed.
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It's become trendy to say that you should have credentials in the field to discuss it. To be clear, I'm not saying that. I think anyone can put in the time and learn about anything, I just don't think that someone can put in the time and learn about everything.
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Whoa literally on the same scale? The first estimate on google for CA housing policy costs is $140b/yr in lost output,* do you think water is comparable or that’s too high for housing? *https://imanetwork.org/blog/2019/07/15/the-economic-consequences-of-californias-housing-crisis/ …
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I don't think that estimate is implausible. They estimate that people reduce consumer spending by a bit less than $1k per person per year due to housing costs and then estimate other effects that are double that, that could be right.
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Scott has of course also written about thishttps://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/11/california-water-you-doing/ …
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I don't really agree with this, and in IMO the section that follows indicates that Scott didn't really dig into what implementation details would look like. Yes, water is severely underpriced and this causes serious problems. However, his example is a "spherical cow" example.pic.twitter.com/5Eq7ufVdMJ
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Good friend is a water consultant in CA, helping smaller towns figure out water rights etc etc. She confirms "absolute shit show".
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