Previously: Announcing Balsa Research, Why Balsa Research is Worthwhile This is an FAQ for Balsa Research, based on the conversations we’ve had with lots of people over the project’s first few weeks. It was last updated on 10/17/22. Q: This seems like it will be very hard?
One thing that might help a bit is to clarify what the enemy is that you intend to cut. What, as opposed to who, I expect is the right interrogative there. Really focus on the fact that you don't care who makes the improvements, so long as they get made. That will help the non-partisan mission aspect I suspect, a bit like google's old "Don't be evil" line. Being able to seriously ask "Are we supporting a policy or a person/party?" and demand answers might be very valuable.
Regarding NEPA reform, one angle to consider is that really we should be able to have stronger environmental protections and expedited permitting if we had a less insane process. It's really rather incredible to use the legal system as the primary means of adjudication. Many other countries have that as a ministerial rather than legal process and are still able to build stuff. That political economy angle is important to consider because there's a lot of interests vested in the NEPA status quo and one way to address that is to not be gutting a critical environmental law but rather modernizing it.
Huh, good response on TDS. As much as the president has lots of power these days, I'd really like to see the congress take back much of it's power... We need some 'thing' that makes congress select for the good of the country and not the good of themselves. I like Heinlein's idea of veterans, but I'm open to anything.
I get the reference behind "cut the enemy", but I recommend against the phrase. My friend always has to remind me that not everybody treats metaphors abstractly, and that she can't hear a dead baby joke without actually thinking about dead babies. Plus, quite in contrast to normal politics these days, you're specifically NOT out to do violence to an outgroup of barely human opponents.
Do you know in advance what kind of actions you would shy away from? The problem you are trying to solve appears nearly intractable, and fixing a bad but set system is historically accomplished by breaking the system, with much suffering to follow, until a new, younger system is in place. In fact, almost any Inadequate Equilibrium got to be slightly more adequate only after a lot of blood and sacrifices, literally or metaphorically.
I wonder if you have some sort of a model as to what kind of inadequate equilibria can be escaped from and at what cost. Seems like one of the first things to work on, though there is too little time if you want to have results in two years.
> Our comparative advantage lies at the Federal rather than the state level, and the stakes are higher even relative to the level of difficulty.
I'd like to push back on this. In my ~8 years working at a think tank that had both a federal- and state-focused policy team, I saw a lot more progress at the state level. It is *massively* easier to get state-level reforms done. Sure, you can't abolish the Jones Act at the state level, but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of low hanging fruit there.
One of the best examples is cannabis legalization, which has forever dragged its feet in the federal arena but become a pretty common reform in many states. At the state level, you get more at-bats. There are unusual political alliances that can form, and you're always going to find _some_ state with the properly aligned legislature and executive branches. And your full stack approach will work *much* better at the state level, because state legislators have far fewer resources for drafting good policy and far fewer smart people approaching them with good ideas.
The federal level is highly competitive. Everybody wants the ears of Congress and the President. And if the exact political composition you need to get a certain reform done isn't there, then it doesn't happen. Example: previous to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act during the Trump admin, there hadn't been such a comprehensive tax reform since Reagan in 1986. So tax policy wonks were basically shouting into the void for three decades, hoping somebody would remember what they said when the time came.
I'd also suggest that the YIMBY victories in CA aren't because it's a big state, but because it's had some of the worst effects from NIMBYism like Prop 13. That makes it a target ripe for popular backlash against the status quo. My brief experience with politics in college taught me one useful thing: if you're not directly hurt by some political problem, you probably won't work hard to fix it.
Focusing on the federal level to the exclusion of states is a failure mode I've often seen in groups left-of-center. It makes sense: people with a more left-leaning disposition are more likely to think of themselves as cosmopolitan and worldly, and so they focus on federal policy rather than more local levels. But this has ceded a lot of ground to right-of-center activists across the states. This is how so many states had laws already on the books and ready to go the moment Roe v. Wade got overturned.
Lots of things, good or ill, can happen at the state level—and much faster than anything that happens federally. I'd encourage you not to write it off.
A: We don’t plan to make our tech publicly visible, since we don’t want it to be used by those we do not want to help. However, in short, our first target is to use recent research in ML and data science to quickly identify and give advance warning of out-of-touch or counter-productive messaging.
On this one, David Shor and https://blueroseresearch.org/ has gotten data driven messaging down to less than 2 days and 200 USD per phrase you wanna test. Don't know how you plan to do it, but I think their biggest issue is getting people to listen more than anything.
One thing that might help a bit is to clarify what the enemy is that you intend to cut. What, as opposed to who, I expect is the right interrogative there. Really focus on the fact that you don't care who makes the improvements, so long as they get made. That will help the non-partisan mission aspect I suspect, a bit like google's old "Don't be evil" line. Being able to seriously ask "Are we supporting a policy or a person/party?" and demand answers might be very valuable.
Anything more you can share about the tech arm?
Regarding NEPA reform, one angle to consider is that really we should be able to have stronger environmental protections and expedited permitting if we had a less insane process. It's really rather incredible to use the legal system as the primary means of adjudication. Many other countries have that as a ministerial rather than legal process and are still able to build stuff. That political economy angle is important to consider because there's a lot of interests vested in the NEPA status quo and one way to address that is to not be gutting a critical environmental law but rather modernizing it.
Huh, good response on TDS. As much as the president has lots of power these days, I'd really like to see the congress take back much of it's power... We need some 'thing' that makes congress select for the good of the country and not the good of themselves. I like Heinlein's idea of veterans, but I'm open to anything.
I get the reference behind "cut the enemy", but I recommend against the phrase. My friend always has to remind me that not everybody treats metaphors abstractly, and that she can't hear a dead baby joke without actually thinking about dead babies. Plus, quite in contrast to normal politics these days, you're specifically NOT out to do violence to an outgroup of barely human opponents.
Do you know in advance what kind of actions you would shy away from? The problem you are trying to solve appears nearly intractable, and fixing a bad but set system is historically accomplished by breaking the system, with much suffering to follow, until a new, younger system is in place. In fact, almost any Inadequate Equilibrium got to be slightly more adequate only after a lot of blood and sacrifices, literally or metaphorically.
I wonder if you have some sort of a model as to what kind of inadequate equilibria can be escaped from and at what cost. Seems like one of the first things to work on, though there is too little time if you want to have results in two years.
> once something gets into a 501c(3) you cannot get it out again
This is a minor point, but you can get tech out by making it be in the public domain. Would not apply to your use case, but I thought I'd mention it.
In case you didn’t see: https://www.cato.org/blog/charge-all-past-present-members-cato-mercatus-institutes-treason
> Our comparative advantage lies at the Federal rather than the state level, and the stakes are higher even relative to the level of difficulty.
I'd like to push back on this. In my ~8 years working at a think tank that had both a federal- and state-focused policy team, I saw a lot more progress at the state level. It is *massively* easier to get state-level reforms done. Sure, you can't abolish the Jones Act at the state level, but that doesn't mean there aren't a lot of low hanging fruit there.
One of the best examples is cannabis legalization, which has forever dragged its feet in the federal arena but become a pretty common reform in many states. At the state level, you get more at-bats. There are unusual political alliances that can form, and you're always going to find _some_ state with the properly aligned legislature and executive branches. And your full stack approach will work *much* better at the state level, because state legislators have far fewer resources for drafting good policy and far fewer smart people approaching them with good ideas.
The federal level is highly competitive. Everybody wants the ears of Congress and the President. And if the exact political composition you need to get a certain reform done isn't there, then it doesn't happen. Example: previous to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act during the Trump admin, there hadn't been such a comprehensive tax reform since Reagan in 1986. So tax policy wonks were basically shouting into the void for three decades, hoping somebody would remember what they said when the time came.
I'd also suggest that the YIMBY victories in CA aren't because it's a big state, but because it's had some of the worst effects from NIMBYism like Prop 13. That makes it a target ripe for popular backlash against the status quo. My brief experience with politics in college taught me one useful thing: if you're not directly hurt by some political problem, you probably won't work hard to fix it.
Focusing on the federal level to the exclusion of states is a failure mode I've often seen in groups left-of-center. It makes sense: people with a more left-leaning disposition are more likely to think of themselves as cosmopolitan and worldly, and so they focus on federal policy rather than more local levels. But this has ceded a lot of ground to right-of-center activists across the states. This is how so many states had laws already on the books and ready to go the moment Roe v. Wade got overturned.
Lots of things, good or ill, can happen at the state level—and much faster than anything that happens federally. I'd encourage you not to write it off.
A: We don’t plan to make our tech publicly visible, since we don’t want it to be used by those we do not want to help. However, in short, our first target is to use recent research in ML and data science to quickly identify and give advance warning of out-of-touch or counter-productive messaging.
On this one, David Shor and https://blueroseresearch.org/ has gotten data driven messaging down to less than 2 days and 200 USD per phrase you wanna test. Don't know how you plan to do it, but I think their biggest issue is getting people to listen more than anything.
Ezra Klein is absolute scum of the earth and any effort aligned at all with his views is destined to fail.