One of the core mistakes of the SSC post is that it's implied that all dark money can be summed up with the number Scott comes up with, which is of course wrong: a large fraction, perhaps the vast majority, is off the books. My read is that the post has two parts, both incorrect
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1. Hey, look at this innocuous industry, almonds, we spend *so much* on it compared to lobbying. 2. If we sum up all the forms of dark money I can count, it's small compared to this innocuous industry. But the "I can count" part is doing a lot of work there.
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Rich people suing publications they dislike out of existence apparently doesn't count as influencing politics, nor does creating or buying up major publications. Nor does industry spend on offering government officials lucrative jobs in return for favorable policies, etc.pic.twitter.com/LBokcr8YjH
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Perhaps someone could figure out a way to estimate an upper bound on the sum of all these things combined and argue that it's still small, but the fact that this kind of "indirect" money influencing politics isn't mentioned except in the cases where it seems small, e.g., tumblr,
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makes the reasoning seem either ill informed or disingenuous. I'd classify a rhetorical trick SSC often relies on that's on display here, twice in this essay, similarly. If everyone just donated $100 to every cause they thought was at least as important as homelessness,pic.twitter.com/o7BND6fItH
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then a lot of people would become insolvent. This "gosh, this isn't that much money, only
$x per person" works as rhetoric but the sleight of hand here is that there are, from a personal standpoint, effectively an unbounded number of reasonable causes you could donate $100 to.1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes -
It's also factually incorrect. Municipalities, at times, have increased their homeless budget by more than $100/person and this has not solved the problem. But I'm pointing out the pattern because it's always intellectually dishonest, it may not always be factually incorrect.
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But as with the almonds example, the magnitude of the error is striking. We've had efforts that increase annual spend by an order of magnitude more than SSC's suggested number that haven't moved the needle. How much more needs to be spent to solve the problem? Maybe 2 orders more
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What fraction of people care enough about homeless to donate money? I doubt it's even 10%, so at least 1 more order of magnitude there. And he's talking about a one-time donation. If you want to convert that to an annuity, that's another 1.5 orders of magnitude.
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Your reply kind of illustrates my point, SSC, like other generalist blogs, is full of reasonable sounding things that often fall apart if you're familiar with what's being discussed.
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You can feel like you've learned something when you don't know much about the topics being discussed, but at some point you have to start getting a little suspicious about the topics you're not familiar with based on seeing multiple order of magnitude errors everywhere else.
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Replying to @danluu
My summary of your take here is "Intellectual generalists who write broadly across multiple topics are dishonest and bad. Specifically SSC is dishonest and bad. If you read them you're being fooled." It reads like sneering dismissal to me, rather than engagement.
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That's a shame, because (a) I love your blog (https://danluu.com/hiring-lemons/ is a particular favorite), and (b) I thought you brought a really interesting counterpoint to the table for the particular article you chose. I learned something about the almond industry and about dark money.
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