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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if you start looking at almonds, it seems like there's too much dark money in almonds? For example, here's a water policy expert who thinks a lot about CA water policy discussing the impact of almonds on CA https://onthepublicrecord.org/2015/05/05/turning-the-tables-on-almonds/ … https://onthepublicrecord.org/2015/04/17/more-almonds-make-them-prove-they-have-the-water-first/ …https://onthepublicrecord.org/2008/12/17/i-dont-even-like-wine/ …
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Those posts are targeted at an audience of water policy nerds, so they don't lay out the full case because it's expected that readers will generally know what's going on in CA water policy, but IMO, if you look into this in detail there's a decent case to be made that
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California water policy is a disaster on the same scale as California housing policy, caused in part by water policy that enriches some of the richest people in California, e.g., almond billionaires, at the expense of most others.
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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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Replying to @danluu
One way to cope with this is to spend a lot of time interviewing experts, have experts look over your writing, possibly include statements from them verbatim
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Replying to @hillelogram
Dan Luu Retweeted Dan Luu
I have a post on how discussions on the decline of bridge (the card game) and how to save it are missing the point where I did this. It's unpublished b/c I don't want to make errors like this and I'm not sure I can trust experts to catch basic errors.https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1255008926120079361 …
Dan Luu added,
Dan Luu @danluuReplying to @danluu @eshearIt'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.1 reply 0 retweets 0 likes
There are people who I'd trust to catch this kind of error if it were their area of expertise and there are experts on bridge, but I don't think an expert who's not previously known to me can credibly commit to being the right kind of careful for this.
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