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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Replying to @danluu
I can’t read that post in a way that it’s inconsistent with “California water policy unduly favors Almonds”.
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Replying to @hyperpape @danluu
Arguments from incredulity have a tendency to be hand-wavy, so I assume that you’re filling in the blanks differently. But how you’re doing that is not obvious to me.
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Replying to @hyperpape
Dan Luu Retweeted Dan Luu
I think my comment is arguably a "well, actually" if viewed as a criticism of the post, I just think it's funny that this example of innocuous money turns out to be very shady. A more direct criticism of the post ishttps://twitter.com/danluu/status/1255001418726928384 …
Dan Luu added,
Dan Luu @danluuReplying to @eshearOne 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 incorrect2 replies 0 retweets 0 likes -
Replying to @danluu
I think the quoted thread is full of good criticisms. The post has debatable assumptions at best, is misguided at worst.
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Replying to @hyperpape @danluu
I may be verging into "well actually" territory myself, but I don't think he (needs to) say almonds are innocuous, just that we collectively don't value them that much. If we spent more on them than we do on politics, that would suggest underspending.
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Replying to @hyperpape @danluu
The almond industry could be completely corrupt, and I don't think it would affect the argument.
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Replying to @hyperpape
I see what you mean, I think I didn't really explain this in the thread (this is the thing I'd be interested in writing a post about, but the amount of work to make a good case is more than I want to put in now), but that's one of the things I think is funny about picking almonds
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Replying to @danluu @hyperpape
Almond spend has increased drastically over the past few decades. Why? I doubt we value almonds much more. Maybe it's due to a curious set of under the table deals and not demand. So maybe we don't value almonds, but we still spend a lot on them because of a kind of lobbying.
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Replying to @danluu @hyperpape
This arguably doesn't matter, maybe it's still a small amount, but if the above is true, it's an awfully ironic example. Unfortunately, this isn't as straightforward as the story that diamond ads created demand for diamonds, the increase almond spend is basically all
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almonds that are bundled in as filler, replacing other fillers. But tracking these deals and making the case that, in a large fraction of cases, changing the filler didn't improve the product, and the increase was due to a kind of almond lobbying is non trivial.
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Replying to @danluu @hyperpape
Anyway, that's a longwinded way of saying that it seems plausible that the amount of money we spend on almonds is disproportionate to how much we care about almonds due to dark money, which is allegedly low value and yet arguably the cause of half of U.S. almond spend.
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