HonoreDB comments on Open thread, Oct. 13 - Oct. 19, 2014 - Less Wrong

5 Post author: MrMind 13 October 2014 08:17AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (355)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: HonoreDB 14 October 2014 10:36:04PM 0 points [-]

It seems to be implicit in your model that funding for political parties is a negative-sum arms race.

What army1987 said. The specific assumption is that on the margin, the effect of more funding to both sides is either very small or negative.

In my own view, the most damaging negative-sum arms race is academia.

This is definitely an extendable idea. It gets a lot more complicated when there are >2 sides, unfortunately. Even if they agreed it was negative-sum, someone donating $100 to Columbia University would generally not be equally happy to take $100 away from Harvard. I don't know how to fix that.