the posting-to-policy pipeline is real. advice on how to achieve it.
I got my copy of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book! I’ll read it sometime this week, but I’ve been seeing lots of reviews — linked and noted below are ones from Noah Smith and Eric Levitz.
This is a story that many center-left commentators and researchers have been zeroing in on for about a decade now. I myself have written several posts in this vein. It’s also the theme of a recent book called Why Nothing Works, which is on my short list to read — in fact, some reviewers view Abundance and Why Nothing Works as companion volumes. (I strongly recommend this review of both books by Mike Konczal.)
Why is Abundance coming out now? Smith says it’s
What do they have in common? How hard it’s been to actually get shit done (or in COVID’s case, the experience of initial difficulty, then seeing barriers melt away and stuff getting fast-tracked, then seeing the barriers come back.)
Why doesn’t the stuff get built? Progressives, Klein and Thompson argue, get in their own way.
California’s high-speed rail, hyped so much over decades and given billions of dollars in funding, still doesn’t exist. “Affordable” (i.e. subsidized) housing often costs half again as much to build as privately built housing. Biden’s programs to build nationwide systems of electric vehicle chargers and rural broadband ended up producing almost zero chargers and almost zero broadband.
How are they getting in their own way?
American progressivism has the reputation of supporting big government, but in practice it often just tries to use government as a pass-through entity to write checks to various “stakeholders”, while preventing it from actually being able to do anything other than write checks. This is a problem that European and Asian countries, with their powerful bureaucracies, simply don’t have to nearly the same extent. America’s progressivism is uniquely libertarian in nature, and its conception of the proper role of the state is uniquely legalistic instead of bureaucratic.
These confusions, and people who continue to cling to framing policy debates as ideology instead of results.
But part of it has got to be class resentment. There are a number of elite progressives who simply don’t like the idea that in an America of growth and abundance, a few techbros would be very rich. Redistribution isn’t enough to make this bargain palatable — rich entrepreneurs must be cut off from the sources of their wealth, through antitrust, regulation, wealth taxes, or whatever tools are available.
Abundance liberalism just doesn’t care about that stuff; zero-sum status struggles like that are simply not a goal. What matters to the abundance agenda is that regular people — the middle class, the working class, and the poor — have a less onerous life. If that means rich people have to give up some of their wealth, then fine, but if it means that rich people get richer, that’s also fine.
Combating regulatory obstacles to housing construction, infrastructure, and energy production is not just compatible with prioritizing the interests of working-class Americans; it is synonymous with that task. An economic system biased toward scarcity and stagnation is one that serves the already comfortable better than the disadvantaged.
“Rents are expected to rise as supply is constrained.”
Portland’s rules that’re intended to make zoning inclusive end up decreasing the number of units: > The city put inclusionary zoning rules in place in 2017, requiring any new apartment building with 20 units or more to set aside 20% of them for people earning 80% of the area median income. Alternatively, developers could reserve 10% of units for renters who make less than 60% of the median. > > Whichever adventure they choose, the requirement diminishes the revenue from rent that a building can collect. Developers adapted in a few ways. First, they got approval for buildings before the inclusionary rules went into effect. That’s why we saw so many cranes on the city skyline for several years. Second, they started maxing out buildings at 19 units to avoid the hit to rent. > > “We’ve seen a bunch of buildings that are 19 units or fewer,” says Greg Frick, co-founder of HFO Investment Real Estate. > > That’s bad, Frick says, because developers are putting just 19 units on parcels of land that could support many more, thereby cutting the new supply that Kotek wants. > > “If you want the private sector to build housing, you can’t keep setting up these hurdles,” Frick says. “You’re not making a compelling case to invest here.”
Matthew Meselson, the biologist who convinced Nixon to ban biological weapons, took an accidental path to arms control policy. In 1963, he visited Fort Detrick and discovered the US was making anthrax in a 10,000-gallon reactor. When he asked why, the colonel said they’d be “cheaper than nuclear weapons as a strategic weapon.” Meselson immediately recognized the danger: “It’s our interest to keep strategic weapons so expensive that nobody could afford them but us… But the idea that you could introduce a strategic weapon that anybody could have? Oh my God!”
Years later, when Nixon was deciding whether toxins counted as biological weapons, Meselson’s paper included a section on “The Authority and Credibility of the President” that quoted a Washington Post editorial asking: “How can the president renounce nerve gas only to accept botulism?” Kissinger later told him: “The only thing that mattered to the president was that section… Besides, who gives a shit about them anyway?”
Another Meselson interview! (Also, yes, he is the Meselson of Meselson and Stahl fame). When anthrax killed up to 300 people in Sverdlovsk in 1979, the Soviets blamed contaminated meat. Meselson spent over a decade investigating what really happened. After the USSR fell, Meselson and his anthropologist wife interviewed victims’ families and plotted their locations on satellite maps. The deaths formed a straight line extending southwest from a military facility, perfectly matching wind patterns from a single day. The bureaucratic dysfunction was almost comical — when required to report the facility’s coordinates to the UN, Soviet diplomats couldn’t even get the location from their own military and had to ask Meselson for it instead.
I’m not even going to mention AI automation for classifying constituent outreach (though the potential there is enormous), but it’s crazy how few congressional offices are using modern project management software. There are huge incentives for companies like Atlassian and Salesforce to make software that helps teams get through month-long projects with as little friction as possible, keeping track of loose ends and dependencies.
I’d bet that at least half of all congresspeople don’t know what Asana is. That feels bad, and like a huge missed opportunity.
The incentives are clearly there, but the institutional capacity isn’t. Part of the problem is structural:
435 independent constitutional offices. Those offices operate within a larger system that provides some capacities, but they also each have the constitutional authority to operate their individual office in the manner that they choose, within certain ethical and legal guidelines. Moving an institution like that forward is particularly challenging.
Congressional offices spend an absurd amount of time on basic tasks that modern technology could streamline:
A disproportionately large number of those working hours are being spent on filtering incoming messages — this is perhaps one of the least exciting issues I could have chosen, but in some ways, it’s the most important one. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say an office has 10 working hours for the week across the entire staff, and four of those working hours are legislative correspondents (LCs) filtering inbound messages and categorizing them for different kinds of responses. That’s 40% of your capacity getting spent on a repetitive task.
Unfortunately, the career path in Congress actually normalizes these inefficiencies:
Look, if you’re on the Hill and you follow the typical career path from intern to staff assistant to LC to legislative assistant (LA) to legislative director (LD) or chief of staff, you’re like, “Oh, good, I don’t have to deal with that problem anymore. I paid my dues because I spent my year filtering the messages.” This is not true of everyone, but it becomes a lower priority problem to solve, and in some ways it’s almost glorified.
Experimentation tends to focus more on outward-facing technology rather than internal processes:
Candidly, a lot of that experimentation has focused on external communication. It’s almost like they need to hire one of those business transformation experts to just go in and work on these internal problems. There’s only so much time on the clock, so a lot of the innovations have been focused on things that would be more visible to the public, and for reasons that I completely understand.
Resources are a major constraint:
It’s not within the resource capacity of most individual offices to solve that problem alone, because they already have tight budgets. If you spend a dollar on process automation, that dollar is not going to bonuses, not going to salaries, not going to travel, not going to events.
The most concerning thing is that technology is advancing faster than Congress can adapt:
The technology is moving so rapidly that you’re still always one step behind. You move two steps forward but the technology moves four steps forward, so you’re still an institution that’s behind.
This has real implications for representation as populations grow:
The number of constituents per member is going up, but the number of staff is remaining flat. Just definitionally, the number of working hours in each district office per citizen has gotten fewer just because of population growth. These are real impacts on democracy.
Information silos are crazier than ever.
For example, I’ve been privy to two parallel, heated debates about foreign aid over the past half-decade. People who work in foreign development (especially effective altruists) have engaged in a battle about the efficacy of various forms of foreign aid: what works best, what works less well, what doesn’t work at all, and how we can know. Meanwhile, right-wingers have spent much of the last decade (since the summer of 2020 in particular) documenting how deeply embedded left-wing NGOs are in many federal (and local) funding programs, and developing a critique of that tight federal/NGO linkage.
[A reader points out that some of the criticism of American foreign aid on the right is older, and comes from a broader critique about the liberal world order — I think that’s also true.] But neither debate exhibits much awareness of the other at all, with very negative consequences. The DOGE team has axed the most effective and efficient programs at USAID, forced out the chief economist, who was brought in to oversee a more aggressive push toward efficiency. It does not appear to be interested in engaging with what we know about more or less effective humanitarian aid. And people in the NGO class were completely blindsided by the animosity the Trump administration had toward them and the speed at which many of their contracts would be torn up.
Also > In January, I wrote a piece with my colleague Matt Esche calling for better data collection in the federal government, and listing a set of places the Trump administration could start. There have been some encouraging signs on this front, like future NIH head Jay Bhattacharya’s commitment to focusing on “replicable, reproducible, and generalizable” science. But DOGE has made some missteps; for instance, as Stuart Buck has documented, it has canceled some of the most valuable long-run education studies we have. This is one of the best examples of a “penny-wise, pound-foolish” orientation at DOGE: the studies cost almost nothing, provide information no private actor can provide, and create the basis for smarter policymaking at the federal and state levels.
While we’re on the topic, it turns out that Santi Ruiz went to UChicago and did work for the Chicago Maroon. Hopefully I’ll have the opportunity to complement his taste in college newspapers.
Tom Kalil helped run Obama/s Office of Science and Technology policy — this is a great interview with him on getting stuff done
The OSTP has relatively little formal authority; its power is mainly advisory. But Tom’s team was remarkably effective under President Obama. The team developed a rich set of mottos and maxims, which were kept on the whiteboard (see below) of Tom’s deputy Kumar Garg. In our conversation, we discuss three of these mottos for working with people:
- “People never follow up.”
- “Talk to who owns the paper.”
- “If you want people to do something, make it easy.”
One of the best podcasts on getting stuff done. I won’t quote the whole thing here, but it’s a super quick read and a great listen.
Here’s one of the failure modes that I saw: the White House would have a meeting with someone and assume that progress was going to be made. That person would try to follow up, but run into some obstacle, and wouldn’t tell us — so we’d be left blissfully thinking that progress was being made. So if an agency just hears from the White House once about something, they might say, “Oh, this isn’t a priority.”
Save plenty of time in the meeting for, “Do we agree on what the very next step is?”
Does that person feel comfortable? Are you telegraphing to them, “Hey, if for whatever reason you’re having problems on your end, please contact me?”
And then, if you don’t hear from them, reach out and say, “Hey, I just wanted to check in on the thing that we discussed. Is that something that you were able to make progress on? If not, is there something that I can do to be helpful?”
People would ask me, “How did you get this or that line in the State of the Union address?” And I would say, “I talked to the White House speechwriter.”
Often, policy entrepreneurs benefit from asking themselves what document or documents would need to be created or edited in order to frame and make a decision or to implement it. It’s worth asking, “Who has that document on their screen?”
The key is to have cognitive empathy for that particular person in that organization. You need to know the answers to these questions: What is easy for them to do? What is hard for them to do? Is there anything that you can do or someone else can do to relax whatever constraints they’re operating under?
Most voting theory limits itself to studying “democratic” voting methods. That typically has both empirical and normative implications. Empirically, “democratic” means:
- There are many voters
- There can be more than two candidates
In order to be considered “democratic”, voting methods generally should meet various normative criteria as well. There are many possible such criteria, and on many of them theorists do not agree; but in general they do agree on this minimal set:
- Anonymity; permuting the ballots does not change the probability of any election outcome.
- Neutrality; permuting the candidates on all ballots does not change the probability of any election outcome.
- Unanimity: If voters universally vote a preference for a given outcome over all others, that outcome is selected. (This is a weak criterion, and is implied by many other stronger ones; but those stronger ones are often disputed, while this one rarely is.)
- Methods typically do not directly involve money changing hands or other enduring state-changes for individual voters. (There can be exceptions to this, but there are good reasons to want to understand “moneyless” elections.)
TLDR? First pass the post voting sucks, especially if we want to use voting to elicit latent preferences.
Election laws, in general—from voter identification and felon disenfranchisement to automatic registration and no-excuse mail voting—are presumed to have the intent or effect of influencing who votes, and, in turn, they are expected to impact partisan election outcomes. Such policies are highly polarizing. They are passed by legislatures along partisan lines and sometimes litigated in court. Many people express dismay about laws they disagree with, arguing the laws have dire consequences for American democracy, such as they generate fraud or they amount to “democratic backsliding”.
And yet, the reality of research on election administration does not support the dire rhetoric from either side. Policies beget studies and evidence. And the evidence shows the laws have small effects on turnout and essentially no effect on partisan advantage in a state. This is the puzzle we address: Why do election laws bear such a modest relationship to who wins and who loses?
Our answer is that modern election reforms target narrow shares of the population, have a small effect on turnout, and/or are imprecisely targeted at members of political parties.
The authors give a hypothetical up front that I find particularly illustrative:
Suppose a state recently held a close election in which 51 percent of voters supported the Democratic candidate and 49 percent of voters supported the Republican candidate. In response to the election, the Republican-controlled state legislature passes a bill that imposes additional requirements to vote and these requirements disproportionately target Democratic voters. Specifically, the additional requirements target 4 percent of the electorate and as a result of these requirements, there will be a 3 percentage point decline in turnout in this group. The targeted group is strongly Democratic: 60 percent of the targeted group supports the Democratic presidential candidate.
What would happen if the 51/49 election were held again and everything about the election was the same except for this law? The policy would cause a 0.12 percentage point decline in the overall turnout. And it would cause a 0.011 percentage point decline in the two-party vote share for the Democratic candidate. In other words, the Republican party would lose the election with nearly identical results: in the new election 50.989 percent of voters would support the Democratic candidate while 49.011 percent would support the Republican candidate. If the state had one million eligible voters, the policy would deter 720 Democratic voters and 480 Republican voters, netting the Republicans a 240-vote shift.
Say there are some alternatives to choose among. They could be policies, public projects, candidates in an election, distributions of income and labour requirements among the members of a society, or just about anything else. There are some people whose preferences will inform this choice, and the question is: which procedures are there for deriving, from what is known or can be found out about their preferences, a collective or “social” ordering of the alternatives from better to worse? The answer is startling. Arrow’s theorem says there are no such procedures whatsoever—none, anyway, that satisfy certain apparently quite reasonable assumptions concerning the autonomy of the people and the rationality of their preferences.
even if people do have stronger and weaker preferences, and even if the strengths of their preferences can somehow be measured and made available as a basis for social decisions, nevertheless ordinal information is all that matters because preferences are “interpersonally incomparable”. Intuitively, what this means is that there is no saying how much more strongly someone must prefer one thing to another in order to make up for the fact that someone else’s preference is just the other way around. Arrow saw no reason to provide aggregation procedures with information about the strength of preferences because he thought that they cannot put such information to meaningful use.
Taken separately, the conditions of Arrow’s theorem do not seem severe. Apparently, they ask of an aggregation procedure only that it will come up with a social preference ordering no matter what everybody prefers (U and SO), that it will resemble certain democratic arrangements in some ways (WP and I), and that it will not resemble certain undemocratic arrangements in another way (D). Taken together, though, these conditions exclude all possibility of deriving social preferences. It is time to consider them more closely.
Arrow’s theorem, it has been said, is about the impossibility of trying to do too much with too little information. This remark directs attention towards two main avenues leading from Arrow-inspired gloom toward a sunnier view of the possibilities for collective decision making: not trying to do so much, and using more information. One way of not trying to do so much is to relax the requirement, it is a part of SO, that all social preferences are transitive. Section 4.2 briefly considered this idea but found it unpromising. Another way is to soften the demand of U that there be a social ordering for each “logically possible” preference profile. That is, we can restrict the domains of social welfare functions. Section 5.1 discusses this important “escape route” from Arrow’s theorem in some detail. One way of using more information is to loosen the independence constraint I. This allows social welfare functions to make use of more of the information that is carried by individual preference orderings. See Section 5.2. Another way is to extend Arrow’s framework so as to allow individuals to contribute richer information than is carried by preference orderings. This information can come in the form of scores or grades, as discussed in Section 5.3, or in the form of cardinal measurements of individual utilities, in Section 5.4.
I love funky decision theory epistemology preference aggregation math. For what it’s worth, I think I’m a little more okay with interpersonal utility comparisons than Arrow is, though I agree that it’s very tough in real life. People can make trades / consider how they’d respond to hypothetical bets, and you can do something Frank Ramsey-ey to figure out the utilities people assign to possible states of the world.
Also, shoutout SEP for having good intros to stuff like this!
Great piece on Hyman Rickover, who personally built the US nuclear submarine program, and lessons we can take from him in the AI age. You can just build things, and he’s a better role model than Robert Moses.
Strong technical leaders are detail-oriented — if you don’t care about the details, your subordinates won’t either. Rickover was an electrical engineer before he got into leadership. He kept up to date on the state-of-the-art, and required his subordinates to do the same. He embedded project managers in his contractors. He was a super-detailed interviewer, and would assess his interviewees’ ability to execute on plans with short notice and little guidance.
Good ideas should win — Rickover had an incredibly-flat org chart, and cultivated an “anyone can challenge anyone else, including Rickover” culture. This is two-sided, and also meant that people were responsible when things went wrong.
Prototypes should look as similar as possible to the real thing.
Rickover was also able to realize his bureaucratic innovation to occupy a spot on the org chart both at AEC and in the Navy BuShips, something he first formulated while at Oak Ridge. This way, if the AEC refused something, he could respond that “this is a priority for the Navy” and vice versa. Similar to how the Manhattan Project reduced risk by pursuing parallel technological approaches, Rickover would reduce his bureaucratic risk by pursuing parallel chains of command.
I will almost certainly be reading a Rickover book soon.
If you think seeing the world for what it is, and not what you would like it to be, helps you make better decisions then seeking out negative feedback becomes really important.
The map is not the territory.
It is a good idea for ministers and regulators to actively seek out industry’s views of what they’re doing wrong (and not just what they’re getting right.) Some ministers are better than others at this. I know of one minister who effectively told a developer “I don’t want you to show me another crane, I want to know exactly how the Environment Agency and Natural England are making your life difficult.” More ministers (and regulators) should do this, but relying on having the right personnel in post is seldom a sustainable strategy.
The post’s proposed solution? Internal red teams. I like it, and I think this is the sort of thing DOGE would/could do if they were actually focused on improving outcomes.
The PLAAF is facing some key challenges, despite its impressive size and modernization efforts:
PLAAF remains constrained by limited strategic lift, airborne early warning and control (AWACS), and air-to-air refueling capabilities, the core enablers of sustained air operations. While these gaps may not hinder China in a short conflict, they would pose a serious challenge in prolonged air campaigns over Taiwan or the wider Western Pacific.
These limitations are central to their military planning:
gaps as part of its broader Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) strategy.
China has made significant progress in fighter development, partly through questionable means:
Hampered by the invasion of Ukraine, Russia is only producing small numbers of the Sukhoi Su-57 fifth-generation fighter, while other countries, such as the United Kingdom’s GCAP/Tempest jet, are still in the design process. Meanwhile, China is the only country besides the US producing sizeable numbers of fifth-generation fighters, producing roughly 120 J-20 multirole fighters annually, compared to 110 F-35s made by Lockheed Martin in 2024 after a disappointing 48 units in 2023.
Advanced technology acquisition hasn’t always been straightforward:
The J-20’s development has almost certainly been aided by Chinese industrial espionage, captured American technology (China acquired a downed F117 stealth jet from Serbia in 1999) and outright theft. Although the J-20 and F-35 look similar in appearance, the aesthetics of the jet are not the primary worry for the Americans but how the Chinese have stolen technology relating to engine treatments and engine heat reduction, the F-35’s fire-control array radar system and methods used by the turbine to cool gases, among other secrets that aid the F-35’s stealth capabilities.
In some areas, China may be pulling ahead:
Although the USAF has reportedly flown a demonstrator of its Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) jet and the US Navy is working on the F/A-XX Program, given the secrecy and cost of these programs, China may be ahead in getting these vehicles into frontline units.
The PLAAF has kept pace with drone development:
PLAAF has kept pace with US efforts to develop unmanned combat and reconnaissance drones.
Logistical and training issues remain significant constraints:
China’s private aviation sector is limited, so pilots have to be trained to fly with usually no prior experience.
Personnel challenges extend to international training as well:
China has hired former Western military pilots to help train the PLAAF in advanced techniques and to glean more information about how Western militaries operate, but this practice has been noticed, and individuals participating in these schemes face severe criminal sanctions for doing so. Having attempted to do this suggests the PLAAF’s confidence in its own training regimes and pilots is deficient. China is not allowed to participate in Western bilateral or multilateral international exercises, so exercises primarily take place with the Russian air force.
Internal issues plague the organization:
Corruption is pervasive within China, and the PLAAF is no different. Stories involving corruption leading to PLA Rocket Force missiles being filled with water instead of fuel were nonsensical, but siphoning aircraft fuel to cook hotpot is more plausible.
The strategic implications for any Taiwan conflict are profound:
If the US and China went to war over Taiwan, South Korea and Japan would likely allow the Seventh (South Korea) and Fifth (Japan) US air forces to operate from bases there, which China could not attack unless it was willing to risk war with those countries in addition to Taiwan and the US.
The US faces its own challenges in any prolonged conflict:
currently, the US will run out of munitions within weeks.
Advocates for domestic violence survivors back Hochul’s proposed discovery changes
There were some big discovery reforms in 2019, which required prosecutors to hand everything over. Now progressive groups want those changes rolled back for domestic violence cases. I forget who, but I came across this in the context of upper-middle-class progressive groups only supporting tough-on-crime policy when they can identify with the victims. Do with that what you will.
Jasper Craven infiltrates the world of private security, taking a job with Allied Universal (the largest security firm worldwide) to understand this largely invisible workforce that’s now North America’s third-largest private employer.
The security industry has a shocking track record of violence with minimal accountability:
It has been estimated that, over the past decade, hundreds of security guards have been arrested for manslaughter or murder. In 2019, California saw two incidents in which Allied-employed guards allegedly knelt on the necks of restrained citizens and killed them.
Despite this, the industry remains profitable while keeping costs low:
Allied’s business model relies on keeping labor costs low and deploying warm bodies as quickly as possible.
The training is alarmingly superficial. Craven’s instructor provided exam answers in advance and filled class time with conspiracy theories:
Rodriguez did the same thing before our test, though he kept us in his classroom for the requisite number of hours… He included interesting claims about the origins of COVID-19, which Rodriguez said was unleashed by Bill Gates to “cull the herd.”
Quality control is virtually nonexistent:
The guy next to me didn’t look like much of a meth head, but he came up positive for crank. The supervisor brushed it aside.
On the job, the emphasis is on appearances rather than actual security:
an approach that one manager inelegantly summed up to me as “look aware, not be aware.”
This industry emerged to fill gaps left by police budget cuts in the 1970s:
The NYPD had by then lost approximately 15 percent of its officers to budget cuts. This led business and civic groups to bankroll private-security forces to fill the gaps. It was the Association for a Better New York, not the city government, that funded the installation of New York’s first public surveillance cameras, in Times Square.
And had a history of questionable practices:
Many were still more familiar with the criminal code. In 1980, New York State found that there were twenty thousand guards with criminal records.
Some security companies even created the problems they claimed to solve:
Hoping to demonstrate the need for its business, the company also burglarized its own clients.
After 9/11, the response prioritized quantity over quality:
rather than increase the quality of guarding, companies in New York simply hired a greater quantity of guards, as though a qualitative problem were a quantitative one.
The industry continues to expand despite little evidence it actually increases safety. An expert who spent decades studying the field concluded that the actual value of private security remains unproven:
“In my fifty-four years studying the industry, I have failed to see the presence of a scientifically structured research project that identified the value of security in fighting crime.”
Henry Oliver explores Eisenhower’s remarkably patient career trajectory as part of his work on late bloomers: > Eisenhower’s career strategy was, on one level, to wait out the interwar years and keep himself prepared for the inevitable next conflict—and to hope it happened in his career. Because of this, he benefited from his slow progression.
When the moment finally came, Eisenhower was ready with both deep technical knowledge and leadership skills. His famous attention to detail (similar to Rickover in the nuclear program) combined with his work ethic made the difference: > Working with the infantry to prepare to fight Germany, Eisenhower often put in eighteen hours a day. He got to know his men, paid attention to their morale, and knew they would fight best if they knew what they were fighting for and why.
TLDR we didn’t learn much new about the actual assassination, but we learned a whole lot about intelligence agencies.
The release of the newly unredacted material had long been opposed by the C.I.A. because it would give up the names of its sources. But equally important to the agency was the desire to protect its mid-20th-century tradecraft: how well it had penetrated the Egyptian government’s communications, or the depth of its contacts in France.
Unredacted passages in the new documents revealed how the C.I.A. wiretapped phones in Mexico City in 1962. While that may be interesting in a Cold War spy movie kind of way, it has no bearing on whether American spy agencies can listen to a phone call made on an encrypted app on a modern cellphone.
But for historians, the agency’s closely guarded “sources and methods” are important to filling out the full historical picture. And some of the new material is startling, they said.
Throwaway lines about the Vatican, CIA involvement in certain coups, the identities of particular sources, and naming particular foreign officials who were involved. Who needs plausible deniability?
“There is enormous inertia — a tyranny of the status quo — in private and especially governmental arrangements. Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”[4] —Milton Friedman
That quote is the clearest framing of the problem I’ve found; every sentence is doing work. This is what people who want to make policy change are up against, especially when that policy change is outside the current Overton Window. Epistemically, I believe his framing at about 90% strength. I quibble with Friedman’s assertion that only crises can produce real change. But I agree this model explains most major policy change, and I still struggle to find good counter-examples.
Crises can be Schelling points — never let a good crisis go to waste.
The takeaway from this model is that people who want radical policy change need to be flexible and adaptable. They need to:
- wait for opportunities,
- understand how new crises are likely to be perceived,
- let the not-quite-good-enough pitches go, to avoid being seen as a crank,
- ruthlessly exploit the good-enough crisis to say, “Called it,”
- and then point to a binder of policy proposals.
At the “called it” step, when you argue that you predicted this and that your policy would have prevented/addressed/mitigated the crisis, it helps if it’s true.
What crises, real or perceived, might surprise policymakers in the next few years? Can we predict the smoke? https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5okDRahtDewnWfFmz/seeing-the-smoke Can we write good, implementable policy proposals to address those crises?
If so, we should call our shots; publish our predictions and proposals somewhere we can refer back to them later. They may come in handy when we least expect.
Affirmative Action (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Solid, if long, intro from SEP, especially with respect to AA on college campuses. They did a great job blending the philosophy with the history.
A few things I learned because I haven’t spent time on this topic:
I personally think that the best argument for affirmative action and diversity at top schools is that they’re training the next generation of American leaders — just look at Congress. I have a cool visualization on the people who make up congress at https://congress.henryjosephson.com/ 13% of the 118th Senate has at least one degree from Harvard! (Pew 2023) Hell, until Amy Coney Barrett (whose law degree is from Notre Dame), everyone on the Supreme Court had a law degree from either Harvard or Yale. The officer corps of the US military is pretty much entirely drawn from the service academies — don’t you want our officers to be similar to the enlisted men and women they command? You can argue (and people have) that the US government has a pretty compelling national security interest in ensuring our military is cohesive. Once you have that as an on-ramp that’s tough for anyone to deny, I don’t think it’s too big a step to “our elites should look like America, too.”
In retrospect the feat is viewed with pride and reverence in the United States, a symbol of American exceptionalism. However, before that giant leap for mankind - American’s weren’t so excited: in 1961 a Gallup poll showed only 33% of America in favor of a moon mission.
47% said it was worth it a decade later, in 1979 and it would take 20 years for amnesia to set it and this number to reach 77% in 1989. Meanwhile opposition to further moon missions remained higher than support for one until at least the mid-1990s. The US hasn’t been back to the moon since 1972.
It’s no moon landing, but the headline makes me think of the PR turnaround that congestion pricing is seeing. Don’t fall down at the altar of public opinion, because the people don’t always know what they’ll like.
TLDR if you get asked to do something illegal at work, don’t do it.
Case study starts off with Nishad Singh, eng director at FTX: > In September 2022, Singh had confirmation that something illegal was happening at the company, which he had no direct knowledge of, until then. At that point, if he wanted to avoid being an accomplice to potentially illegal activity, his options were: > > 1. Talk to a lawyer on how to avoid assisting a crime > 2. Turn whistleblower. See the tech whistleblower guide > 3. Quit the company, ensuring he did not further aid this activity > > The smart thing would have been to do #1. The profitable thing could have been to do #2 because in the US, a whistleblower may receive a whistleblower reward of between 10-30% of what the government recovers from fraudulent activities. The final choice #3 is hard, but could have meant Singh would not have had to plead guilty as he did. > > Here’s what Singh did instead: he asked for a personal meeting with Bankman-Fried and confronted him about the missing funds.
Lesson #1: when you discover fraud may be happening, do not “stay around to fix it.” Any other approach would have been better for Singh; seeking legal advice, turning whistleblower, or quitting on the spot.
Lesson #2: when your manager claims they don’t believe anyone would end up in an “orange jumpsuit,” assume that someone definitely could.
Lesson #3: if the CEO asks you to do something potentially illegal – document it, and consider not doing it.
I’ve really been appreciating Nathan Tankus’s Notes on the Crises. Turns out the federal government just… took $80 million from the main bank account of the City of New York? (Also, if you were wondering, NYC banks, aptly, with Citibank.) The government claims this is a clawback for grants not properly fulfilled because NYC wasn’t doing enough to prevent migrant gangs.
As Tankus notes, “this justification for denying congressionally appropriated funds is extremely legally dubious,” and it really weakens a lot of the trust our financial system is based on: that there’s a clear moment when financial transactions are done. Always scary when you realize how something that sounds as boring as “payment finality” can be so easily threatened.
Authors scraped the Patent and Trademark Office’s data, which has both patents applied for and patents granted, to find that, yes, we are. Luckily, it’s a tractable problem.
great overview. current prediction markets lack the three key participant groups that drive successful markets: savers (who see no long-term value in zero-sum betting), gamblers (who prefer faster-resolving wagers on more exciting topics), and professional traders (who need sufficient liquidity to justify their involvement). Without savers depositing funds or gamblers creating exploitable inefficiencies, there’s little incentive for experts to correct prices. This creates thin markets where sophisticated players hesitate to trade against other sophisticated players, resulting in low liquidity and questionable accuracy.