I think most of the damage done to evidence-gathering is done in fairly open ways: the organisation explains what it's doing even while it's selecting a dodgy method of analysis.
True, and this is generally hard to notice if your a non-expert, it is also hard to tell who is or isn't an expert if you're not one. As a result people tend to go with the "official position".
There are also cases of outright black-ops in terms of evidence-gathering, but I suspect they're much rarer, simply because that sort of work is usually done by a wide range of people with varied motivations,
True, unfortunately what tends to happen in practice is that enough people in the data pipeline manipulate the data for some reason or other that by the time the analysis is finished its correlation with reality is rather tenuous.
These are both risks. But the issue about manipulation at various points is presumably unlikely to add up to systematically misleading results: the involvement of many manipulators here would presumably create a lot of noise.
I was thinking about the hazards of bad government, and wondering if there was a way for the LW community to do something to oppose them, and it occurred to me that we might be picking up the problem by the wrong end.
The usual way of thinking about political action is to start with one's political identity (progressive, libertarian, whatever), and that's likely to put one at odds with people who have opposed identities.
Instead, I believe there are projects which could appeal to rationalists across a wide range of the political spectrum. A couple I can think of are opposing the war on drugs and improving judicial systems. Any other suggestions?