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Brad & Butter's avatar

> And if you can't cite two papers that serve as paragons or exemplars of the vast literature, it means that the knowledge contained in that vast literature must be very diffuse and sparse. Which means it has a high likelihood of being a mud moat.

For the counterfactual idiocy in me, I can't help but think of the recent ATIS article on messing around with bad ideas or sparse literature (not as a good foundation but as greenfield research) https://atis.substack.com/p/embrace-interesting-ideas

If we were to try and "do our own (fun) research" are there similar rules that can be applied (other than avoiding comspiracies)?

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Mike Huben's avatar

"Voila - a peer-reviewed literature chock full of misinformation. In practice, I doubt anyone ever does this intentionally. It takes too much coordination and long-term planning."

And yet that is what the Kochs have funded over 50 years or so of libertarian economics propaganda. Pretty much all of Austrian economics, Public Choice economics and large amounts of Chicago economics have been funded that way. And there's a wealth of critiques of their basic reasoning that has been emerging recently, such as Donut Economics and Ha-Joon Chang's books. Most philosophy, libertarian and otherwise, works similarly.

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