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Comment by notavalleyman | Hacker News Reader

Your determination of who funds the agency has no relevance to the fake invented conspiracy theory which the post above is spreading.

It's a paper about a study which RAND did. You can click into read the paper and see if the headline fits.

Your fake conspiracy theory so far says - that the government is paying rand to only pretend to do a study. When in fact, the study is just a smokescreen to justify writing a headline to influence people's opinions? What? Why not just read the study and then come back and suggest alternative headlines. If the headline was different, would we still think is a psyop?

> the government seems to want you to think that the alphabet agencies need more money and/or power.

Yeah maybe I guess, but also maybe someone just did a sensible study and titled it appropriately. I think my theory has far more evidence than yours (which is simply: how you felt after reading the page title)

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> Your fake conspiracy theory so far says - that the government is paying rand to only pretend to do a study

You don't seem to understand either me or the parent poster.

What we're saying is that the government (or parts of it, or whatever hair-splitting you want to do) is currently interested in drumming up funding/influence/power for the intelligence community, so it asks RAND to publish something that will drum up support for it.

This isn't some spontaneous born-from-Zeus' head revelation that the authors have stumbled into. They are given a target, and asked to write something to justify them. You don't need to 'fake' doing a study, to make your 'study' end up supporting whatever pre-conceived thesis you were shooting for. [1]

This is everywhere in the media and the think-tank space. You write what your funders want you to write. Denying this blatant transactionality is the wild conspiratorial thinking.

RAND is an especially egregious example of this, because it marches lock-step with the empire-building geo-political consensus in Washington. It's doing what it's paid to do, if it started drawing conclusions and advocacy its funders didn't like, they wouldn't keep writing cheques.

[1] And if you can't find any way to torture the data into your pre-planned outcome, you can just not publish it. These aren't medical trials, they don't have to be pre-registered.

> so it asks RAND to publish something that will drum up support for it.

Please share your evidence for this conjecture, and also share your evidence for how it relates to the OP. Because you are just creating fake conspiracy theories with no evidence, just like the poster above

What kind of evidence would satisfy you?

And do you hold anyone criticizing Pravda.ru to that same standard? Or would suggesting that it's also a mouthpiece for government propaganda also be a baseless fake conspiracy theory with no evidence behind it?

> What kind of evidence would satisfy you?

Any evidence at all whatsoever, supporting your claim that

> so it asks RAND to publish something that will drum up support for it.

Or any of the other fake conspiracy theories invented and spread with no evidence, in this comment thread

I have referred to several RAND papers in varying topics over the years. They seemed highly professional, and I have the impression that RAND's work is highly non-partisan. Can you give an example of what you are talking about?

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