Thread by @Operation_Ryan

A 🧵 about #ThinkTank stuff:

Think tanks are sometimes described as universities without students. Specialists and subject-matter experts sit around, do research, write papers, and think big thoughts about the world without having any of those pesky students around.

Usually people are often way too busy doing their job (i.e., purely functional stuff) to get any real work done (i.e., figuring out how to be smarter about stuff). Think tanks attempt to address this by paying people to figure out how to be smarter about stuff. 2/16

The practical implementation of think tanks varies wildly from country to country. Where the room for debate is relatively regulated, think tanks can serve the secondary political purpose of being a quasi-unofficial mouthpiece for a government or business organization. 3/16

This allows them to say things (or leak information) but without going so far as to make a formal, official statement. In such situations, think tanks are also a place
where ancient and venerable greybeards are put out to pasture so they can wax philosophical. 4/16

In the west, think tanks can have that sort of role, but that’s generally not as common, and think tanks that act purely as messengers don’t get much airtime or respect. This is because the information environment is vastly more porous and open. 5/16

You can’t swing a dead cat at a cable news studio without running into retired generals and colonels holding forth on every topic imaginable. Government employees leak to the media constantly (both with and without official sanction). 6/16

There’s rarely a point to getting a front organization to quietly float an idea in a world where you have to scream at the top of your lungs to be heard above the background noise. That's just not how the modern information ecosystem works. 7/16

In the past, western think tanks have been a place where many people who would normally be in senior gov't roles spend their time when their party is out of power. This isn’t quite as prevalent. But think tanks play an important role (esp. in the US) as conveners. 8/16

They gather stakeholders together in a relatively public forum and can focus on some specific situation or event. They also sometimes serve as a clearinghouse for particular kinds of information. 9/16

A big example is the International Institute for Strategic Studies @IISS_org, which produces the widely regarded Military Balance, with information about national military holdings.
iiss.org/publications/t…
(Send me a copy pls?)
10/16

The insinuation that this or that think tank is “intertwined” with this or that governmental entity doesn’t usually make much sense in the western context. Either you’re saying that people in the think tank may have worked for or with that organization.
11/16

In that case I fail to be surprised that a subject matter expert in, let’s say, defense budget policy has worked on budget policy at the Department of Defense. Alternately, the implication is that it’s a mouthpiece for some shadowy influence network. 12/16

That doesn’t make sense either since it’s already hard enough to make a point in this media-saturated environment that an organization won’t want to attenuate their message by routing it through some arcane third-party cutout setup. 13/16

People sometimes assert that this or that think tank is merely a shill for other interests (i.e., whoring out their reputation for money). That’s generally very unlikely to be true. The only coin of the realm in the world of western think tanks is credibility. 14/16

What coverage a think tank generates comes from the institution’s credibility. Losing credibility reduces brand value, limiting fund raising. Assume that anytime someone at a think tank says something, it’s because they honestly, truly believe it to be true. 15/16

If any of the subject matter experts at a think tank wanted to bullshit for a living, there are better, more lucrative places to do it than a think tank. Someone at a think tank might be a complete, total idiot, but they’re probably sincere about it. (End 🧵)
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