This project has real Carrick Flynn vibes: well-meaning outsider without much domain expertise tries to fix things by throwing crypto money (I assume) at political problems where money has strongly diminishing returns.
Can you talk a bit more about what gave you this vibe? They aren’t starting a fund or a PAC, which is what comes to mind for me when people throw money at problems, and is literally what Carrick Flynn did.
My assumption about crypto money is because SBF/FTX has been the main EA funder giving extensively for political activity so far. Zvi’s comment that “existing organizations nominally dedicated to such purposes face poor incentive structures due to how they are funded and garner attention” also implies that Balsa has an unusual funding source.
Availability of money encourages organizations to spend that money on achieving their goals, and Zvi’s blogging about policy failures, here and in the past, has tended to be rather strongly worded and even derisive. This leads me to believe that in practice he will be more focused on using the organization’s resources to enact changes, e.g. through advocacy/publicizing failures, than on impartial policy analysis.
If I turn out to be wrong on these points, then I would be significantly more optimistic about the project. In principle I think more policy engagement could be a good thing, if handled carefully.
Ah, thank you—I didn’t twig on the incentives comment, but I can see how that would be a signal of different operation.
I noticed you mention you work in one of these areas: from your perspective, what would you want an org like this to do differently from the existing ones that would make it more successful at getting policy implemented?
I suspect (though it’s not something I have experience with) that a successful new policy think tank would be started by people with inside knowledge and connections to be able to suss out where the levers of government are. When the public starts hearing a lot about some dumb thing the government is doing badly (at the federal level), there are basically three possibilities: 1) it’s well on its way to being fixed, 2) it’s well on its way to becoming partisan and therefore subject to gridlock, or 3) it makes a good story but there isn’t much substance to it, e.g. another less tractable factor is the real bottleneck. So you’d want to be in the position of having a thorough gears-level understanding of a particularly policy area that lets you be among the first to identify mistakes/weaknesses and how they could be fixed. Needless to say, this is tough to do in a whole bunch of policy areas at once.
Can you talk a bit more about what gave you this vibe? They aren’t starting a fund or a PAC, which is what comes to mind for me when people throw money at problems, and is literally what Carrick Flynn did.
My assumption about crypto money is because SBF/FTX has been the main EA funder giving extensively for political activity so far. Zvi’s comment that “existing organizations nominally dedicated to such purposes face poor incentive structures due to how they are funded and garner attention” also implies that Balsa has an unusual funding source.
Availability of money encourages organizations to spend that money on achieving their goals, and Zvi’s blogging about policy failures, here and in the past, has tended to be rather strongly worded and even derisive. This leads me to believe that in practice he will be more focused on using the organization’s resources to enact changes, e.g. through advocacy/publicizing failures, than on impartial policy analysis.
If I turn out to be wrong on these points, then I would be significantly more optimistic about the project. In principle I think more policy engagement could be a good thing, if handled carefully.
Ah, thank you—I didn’t twig on the incentives comment, but I can see how that would be a signal of different operation.
I noticed you mention you work in one of these areas: from your perspective, what would you want an org like this to do differently from the existing ones that would make it more successful at getting policy implemented?
I suspect (though it’s not something I have experience with) that a successful new policy think tank would be started by people with inside knowledge and connections to be able to suss out where the levers of government are. When the public starts hearing a lot about some dumb thing the government is doing badly (at the federal level), there are basically three possibilities: 1) it’s well on its way to being fixed, 2) it’s well on its way to becoming partisan and therefore subject to gridlock, or 3) it makes a good story but there isn’t much substance to it, e.g. another less tractable factor is the real bottleneck. So you’d want to be in the position of having a thorough gears-level understanding of a particularly policy area that lets you be among the first to identify mistakes/weaknesses and how they could be fixed. Needless to say, this is tough to do in a whole bunch of policy areas at once.