In Denmark we have two major economic think tanks, that are respectively self-declared right wing and left wing and they continually release results supporting expanded welfare and the other expanded free trade / lower tax.

It is ridiculous that either is taken serious.

People have confirmation bias. They love when there is a "credible" source putting out results that are in agreement with the position they already hold. They can then use this "evidence" to justify their position. Everyone is guilty of this to some extent. The only way to mitigate confirmation bias is to be willing to entertain the idea that it affects you too.

They aren't though. They are used by the political parties but no one takes them seriously.

Given how much space in newspapers that CEPOS' press releases gets, I'm considering it as being taken serious.

I couldn't put out press release on my amateur research and expect to get articles printed in several national papers, simply because they wouldn't take me seriously.

> I couldn't put out press release on my amateur research and expect to get articles printed in several national papers, simply because they wouldn't take me seriously.

"Expect?" No.

But:

- Write a press release with a sufficiently "useful" headline. Ideally add some research with a conclusion that supports the headline, too, but that's really optional. Write well, and offer lots of both clever "sound bytes" and entire copy-pasteable paragraphs. Journalists are busy and/or lazy.

- "Useful" means that it fits a narrative being advanced by the part of the press you're interested in. However important your story is, without that hook it goes nowhere. With the right hook, a story about goats in Siberia can end up on the front page. These days, a novel edge on the ways that tax cuts shockingly benefits people who pay a lot of tax ("the rich") more than people who pay less or no tax ("the poor") is a shoe-in.

- You'll need some sort of credential, but not much. By the time anyone figures out your PhD is in marine biology and not economics or tax policy or Siberian goats, or the think tank or NGO you're chief researcher of operates out of your kitchen, the world will have moved on.

- Finally, you need a bit of luck, ingenuity and cheekiness getting the release in front of a journalist. Most of them are on Twitter and Facebook, and that seems to be where they do most of their research anyway, so that's a good start. You're going to want to offer them an exclusive.

Incidentally, this is basically how all of these "think tanks" operate, except with a few established press contacts and a sort of short-circuited credentials loop.

CEPOs and AE get approximately the same airtime. I don't like any one them but claiming that somehow CEPOS gets more simply isn't supported by evidence.

Furthermore they get less and less time because they do more and more lobbying.

http://www.altinget.dk/civilsamfund/artikel/taenketanke-faar...

I'm claiming CEPOS get more airtime than me, because unlike me, they are taken seriously :)

Well Linse gets more airtime than you (and me) hardly a useful metric.

We might have to make sure the upvotes are stronger than the downvotes :)

Posts don't have downvotes anyway. Only comments do.

The real "fight" is upvotes and substantive comments vs. people blindly flagging articles they disagree with.

I did my bit.

>OT: I'm curious how many hours will this post survive on the front page

Not long. HN heavily censors any criticism of Google and yet any blog post from one of the official Google sites stays on the front page for a whole day.

I've come to recognize over time that HN itself is not really censorship-heavy. But it relies heavily on ranking based on community effects, and for certain types of articles, that leads it interesting places.

For sure, Googlers downvote a lot of critical comments and surely flag posts they feel are inaccurate. There are a LOT of Googlers and quite a few of them are very active here. Some are even vocally opposed to disclosing their employer.

The other thing is that many posts critical of companies are extremely controversial here. HN is a weird mixing pot of startup folks from the Valley and hackers and code enthusiasts, so there are some very pro-business and very anti-business voices.

Where this plays in is that HN tends to push threads with a lot of argument and debate off the front page much faster. Announcements of new products aren't nearly as controversial as a post about say... James Damore's memo.

I haven't noticed heavy censorship. Who do you think is doing the censoring and how are they accomplishing it? Are there a few specific examples you can point to where that's happening?

Check out this story for example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15136918

It was censored by HN admins as a dupe.Even thought it's different from the other Google story about firing of a critic.

The content of that story and especially the HN discussion of that story was 95% similar to an already much larger and very active discussion on HN about the New York Times version of that story. In case you missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131370

The WaPo article adds nothing materially new to a conversation about Open Markets and Barry Lynn's firing.

Dozens of stories daily are marked as dupes to keep related conversations under one roof. I completely support marking the WaPo story as dupe and directing folks to the NYT discussion.

Or if this site was written properly, the moderators could merge the two together and edit in a note as to why.

Isn't this more the effect of Google employed engineers downvoting criticism of their beloved Google, and upvoting the Plex approved propaganda?