Announcing Balsa Research

There was a long debate on this, I thought Zvi had changed his mind and recognized the rule change made no detectable difference in the port backlog.

I am confident that the container stacking rules caused major damage when compared to better stacking rules. If we had a sensible stacking rule across LB/LA from the start I am confident there would have been far less backlog. 

What is less clear is the extent to which the rules changes that were enacted mitigated the problem. While LB made some changes on the day of the post, LA didn't act and LB's action wasn't complete. Thus there was some increase in permitted stacking but it was far from what one would have hoped for. And Elizabeth is right that we did not see a difference in port backlog that we can definitively link to the partial change that was enacted.

I remember being unsure, at the time, if the effects of the rules that limited stack height were substantial or negligible, since some people were saying that they mostly just applied to places that didn’t have the equipment to stack higher.

A priori, it seems plausible that those places don't have the equipment because of the rules. In which case you wouldn't necessarily expect a rules change to make a quick difference, especially if not announced in advance. But perhaps on a timeline of weeks or months?

If the strategy is made explicit will it attract contrarianism/partisanship?

Naming things in politics is much more about not shooting yourself in the foot than anything else - you can't win that way but you can lose, and [plant] research is a standard option. Can always change later if we find something awesome. I learned from MetaMed that obsessing over finding the right name is not worth it, and this was (1) available (2) short (3) sounds nice and (4) is a good metaphorical plant.

For anyone who works in architecture, balsa wood is what you use to prototype ideas. 

It is also one of the weakest, most breakable woods.

To me, it suggests a contrast with Weber's "Politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards."

This is a full energy top priority effort.

I will continue the blog as part of that effort, it is the reason I am in position to be able to do this, and I will continue to attend to other commitments because life is complicated, but the effective barrier is 'I can only do so much in a week on this type of stuff no matter what anyway.'

I think this is an unnecessarily negative response to an announcement post. Zvi's been posting regularly for some time now about his thoughts on many of the areas he talks about in this post, including ideas for specific reforms. You've picked on a couple of the areas that are most high-profile, and I agree that we'd need extraordinary evidence to believe there's fruit in arm's reach in NEPA or NRC.

At the same time, I know Zvi's interested in repealing the Foreign Dredge Act, and that act didn't even have a Wikipedia article until one of his blog posts inspired me to make one. It seems to me he's doing a breadth-first search. I doubt he's going to land on an area where he doesn't bring anything to the table. I'm personally excited to see what Balsa comes up with.

I can speak a bit to what I have in mind to do. It's too early to speak too much about how I intend to get those particular things passed but am looking into it. 

I am studying the NEPA question, will hopefully have posts in a month or two after Manchin's reforms are done trying to pass. There are a lot of options both for marginal reforms and for radical reimagining. Right now, as far as I can tell, no one has designed a outcome-based replacement that someone could even consider (as opposed to process based) and I am excited to get that papered over time, as well as looking in detail to what marginal changes would have the most real impact.

NRC is more straightforward in terms of what to do, you order them to approve plants if they're safe, and do general permitting reforms, although details still matter. I am partial to 'hold nuclear plants to only require they be much safer than other power plants' although it's still early. I do think that there will be far more opportunity here going forward due to the course of events. 

Our funding sources are not public, but I will say at this time we are not funded in any way by FTX or OP.

I understand why you get the impression you do.   The issues mentioned are all over the map. Zoning is not even a Federal government issue.  Some of those issues are already the subject of significant reform efforts. In other cases, such as "fixing student loans"  it's unclear what Balsa's goal even is. 

But, many of the problems identified are real.

And, it doesn't seem that much progress is being made on many of them. 

So, Balsa's goal is worthy. 

And, it may well be that Balsa turns out to be unsuccessful, but doing nothing is guaranteed to be unsuccessful.  

So, I for one applaud this effort and am excited to see what comes of it.

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.

Pandemic policy lobbying is not an efficient market [LW · GW].

I expect high returns in this domain from the strategy of doing basically the same thing as everyone else but slightly differently

I think I'm personally interested in a more detailed self-review of how this project went. Like, Balsa Research seemed like your own operationalization of a particular hypothesis, which is "one partial solution to civilizational dysfunction is to accomplish clear wins that restore/improve faith that we can improve things on purpose." (or, something like that)

I didn't nominate the post but having thought about it now, I'd be interested in an in-depth update on how you think about that, and what nuts-and-bolts of your thinking have evolved over the past couple years. 

Examples like car seat mandates and the Jones act are not problems that are created through political polarization. 

Both Democrat and Republican voters support getting rid of civil forfeiture. Blaming political polarization for it not happening seems like a bad diagnosis. 

Oh, yeah, I forgot to edit this copy, it's fixed now.

This is an opinion that even some people who Trump appointed himself hold. Geoffrey S. Berman is the latest person who described it.

Trump right now makes the question of whether or not someone agrees that the 2020 election was fraudulent as the test of whether or not he supports the person. That's a filter that will allow him to appoint people in a way that reduces the pushback that he got in his last administration when he tried to do authoritarian things like pushing Berman. 

I'm curious what examples of highly authoritarian threats you see besides trump, and how trump ranks among them

No reason to think he's better or worse than other politicians, but he's certainly very different. 

In a world of almost omnimalevolent conformity, it's strange to see the possibility that things could be different.

strong downvote, strong agree: this is offtopic, but a perfectly reasonable topic to start a thread about. it doesn't seem like a bottleneck for the world to me, though, because nobody is trying to remove the CLI, and in fact even microsoft has been putting effort into ensuring that good CLIs are available on windows. if you'd like to discuss it, I suggest creating a post about it; I expect it to get little involvement, because as I said, I simply don't agree that it's catastrophic and don't find this to be important compared to AI and human inter-being friendliness/alignment. Since you commented that you feel ignored, I figured I'd comment on why.