Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

You're misunderstanding what a think tank is. It's a place that gets money from places and is a parking lot for displaced political people. They aren't there to have original thoughts -- they are there to support the perspective of whomever is signing the checks. What they say isn't very important, but what they don't say is critical.

Ditto for political people like cabinet members and CEO types. In public, their outward messaging needs to be tightly controlled. Behind the scenes for smart ones, their personal thoughts or agendas are often very different.

View on HN

The RAND Corporation is a "think tank" but it's definitely not what you describe. They are quite valued for their objective and bi-partisan analysis domestically and even internationally. They actually shut down one of their international offices because the government in power basically asked them to spread propaganda on their behalf. RAND puts out great reports on all sorts of topics around policy and decision making. Education, marijuana reform, cybercrime, you name it. I bother saying this because I used to work there and think folks really misunderstand that there are some think tanks doing very valuable work. I'm a little salty even because when I moved to my current job at well known tech company, once there, I found my past experience gets massively discounted, even controlling for the differences between R&D/think tank vs tech company. It's annoying and it mostly seems to stem from ignorance and stereotypes based on a few of the bad apples that call themselves think tank but are actually partisan propaganda mills.

RAND is a pretty interesting place -- and as far as I know totally not connected to a certain author popular among libertarians. Research ANd Development, right?

A couple years ago I was considering a move to Santa Monica and while my obvious employment would have been some form of software development further from the beach, I thought it might be cool to find my way into RAND in some capacity.

Do they have part-time researchers there, or maybe researchers-in-residence for sabbatical-length periods?

They have part-timers who were once full timers but typically you can't start off part time. Closest thing is the summer associates program for visiting PhD students.

Ps. I had an office overlooking the Santa Monica mountains and got to spend time deeply immersing into interesting problems. Now at current tech co I'm packed into an open office plan elbows to elbows and don't immerse much past any problem that can't be solved in a week or too. I sometimes hear Gob saying in my head, "I've made a huge mistake..."

I believe it was "Research And No Development", intended as a pure think tank for concepts without worrying about implementation details.

I think places like RAND are exceptions that prove the rule, and there are others -- the political mills put up the trappings of intellectualism to pretend to look like a place like RAND!

As someone once said to me, "Think tanks don't think; they justify."

Well that's the article's point, a think tank serves one of the factions of the plutocracy and on the global and national stage public intellectuals have also been replaced by puppets of the plutocracy. They all serve money and people who hold it, just different factions. While at the same time the intellectuals in universities have become more and more divorced from reality, embracing ideologies that are excessively liberal and left leaning rather than centrist.

I think it is still summed up with the statement "Cash is King"

We used to decapitate the king anually and call that taxes.

The King realizing this created a fake person called a corporation that gives the people jobs. Good luck killing any of those.

> Good luck killing any of those.

I don't think we've really tried hard enough.

I work for a public policy think tank, and this absolutely DOES NOT describe us. No one here is just parking themselves while waiting for a gig with one administration or another.

That said, there certainly are such places. I believe a large number of people at the Center for American Progress had very different career plans for 2017 than what has actually played out for them.

There is a very wide variety to think tanks. Some do a lot of serious work. Some are zombies that do nothing but cash donor checks and write letters to the editor. I'm grateful to be at one of the better ones.

For some of them, what they say can be important (though this doesn't invalidate the rest of what you're saying). The Heritage Foundation is basically writing our executive policy in the US these days, for instance.

Very true. Even as someone who isn't a policy wonk, I could probably guess Heritage Foundation positions with 80% accuracy or better.

The "missing" info is where the conflict lay!

I was doing some research into the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (would ban underground nuclear tests, US has been voluntarily complying since the 90s but Republican Senators have refused to ratify) the other day. As I was researching, I stumbled upon an old Heritage Foundation position on the treaty. I knew of their reputation so I began reading with skepticism.

The author of the position piece made a number of very reasonable criticisms. He said that, for instance, while the treaty text bans "explosive" tests, and this is understood in some quarters to mean zero yield, it doesn't say that explicitly. He made two other sensible points that were at about the same order of magnitude maybe one more and one or two very hawkish points.

While I am not a diplomat or other professional in the field, I thought, hey some of these make a lot of sense, maybe they should workshop the treaty and fix these few points. I'm sure most countries would go along with a few amendments even if they've already signed it if they can get the US to say yes.

Instead he wholesale rejected the treaty and recommended that we signal total withdrawal and declare that we will no longer voluntarily comply with its terms. So essentially, he took a few reasonable points and then used them to support an extreme position.

I laughed and said aloud, "That's the Heritage Foundation that I know!"

http://www.heritage.org/arms-control/report/us-should-reject...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com