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Robin Hanson's avatar

Jason, if you can select different statistical methods or sources, you can just keep trying them to get the result you want, no matter how complicated the theoretical model is. You just need some automated way to plug your stat results into the model.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I think I have some idea what David is referring to. Competing interest groups choose arguments that support their preferred policy; restricting the class of valid and accepted arguments (which is what this suggestion does) increases the importance of the acceptable arguments, and hence the willingness of those interest groups to influence those specific arguments toward their desired policy. (Making simpler arguments also makes it easier to see how to influence those arguments to get a desired result, though I doubt this is hard as is.)

A clarifying example: One way to "game the system" is to input misleading or inaccurate statistics into the model. This may not be a problem if the original source of the statistics is unbiased, but this isn't always true; e.g., crime statistics come from police departments. (And in any case, the model makers always have to select a statistic, another source of bias.) If the model is largely known in advance it is easier to predict the effect of changes in the statistics, hence easier to manipulate them (consciously or unconsciously) to get the "correct" policy result.

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