The centerpiece of the author's thesis, which is that "the media" exaggerates the impact of cash payments to the poor, is undercut by an egregiously sloppy reading of the results of the Denver Basic Income study: she criticizes the project's claim that there was significant improvement in housing for people receiving $1000/mo vs the control group receiving $50/mo, citing results that show 43% of the controls were in housing by the end of the study while 44% of the test group were. What she fails to mention is that 12% of the controls were already housed at the beginning of the study, vs only 6% of the test group.

She also fails to mention that the Baby's First Year study was unfortunately overlapped by the Covid epidemic, introducing an enormous confounding factor (made all the more significant since the study measured child welfare), not to mention the Covid payments that likely dwarfed the $333/mo study payments and would have been received by both control and test subjects.

https://www.denverbasicincomeproject.org/research

https://newrepublic.com/article/199070/government-cash-payme...

I am ashamed to complain she's the worst writer I've had the privilege of shaking my head at in my 37 years. There's this rushed, Eye of Sauron saccades, extremely-online, consistent undercurrent, stapled to a Stanford Rationalist™ who has never had to struggle to make a stronger argument - which opened my eyes to how much "Rationalism" is "performing thought in a particular style in a particular social group"

This is a brand new publication and I really wish they skipped her, made the whole endeavour seem unserious and extremely online to me (which it is! but I wouldn't have noticed. so I guess I'm grateful?)

It also made me appreciate how little editorial there is left, so many publications, especially online, are stripped down to the point its freelance bloggers that kinda stay the same no matter what, rather than people growing as writers.

My two most scarring facepalms in recent memory:

- [my home] Oakland is safe, the Feds coming in isn't needed, But..............the real problem of them being here would be Duh Dems complaining, people know crime is real and bad and hate being lied to.

- It'd be bad if we deported people for their views but then again we don't know what we don't know about the level of terrorist support provided by these people who complain about Gaza.