Given the time it takes to form relationships with nodes in decision making networks, and the difficulty of reducing uncertainty from the outside, at some point it makes sense to either aim people at such jobs or to make friends with people in them. That lobbying and working in government aren’t unique tactics or roles in society doesn’t matter if they are neglected by those who are capable of pursuing similar goals: different organizations compete for influence in different directions. Early investment to enable direct interaction with decision making networks can be how you get the “when” right, figure out “who” to target, and sometimes even figure out the “what to improve” by seeing what is going wrong in the first place.
If an outside organization only does outside research and competitors invest more in making internal connections, the competitors gain advantage and influence with time. Even if one gains a more objective perspective by looking in from the outside and avoiding political fights, a lot of the most valuable information for decision making is going to be internal. This failure mode leads to forms of naivety that are persistent: external actors can see things that clearly look like mistakes, by actors with biases that are obvious to outsiders, and then conclude more confidently than is justified that their own views are correct.
Given the time it takes to form relationships with nodes in decision making networks, and the difficulty of reducing uncertainty from the outside, at some point it makes sense to either aim people at such jobs or to make friends with people in them. That lobbying and working in government aren’t unique tactics or roles in society doesn’t matter if they are neglected by those who are capable of pursuing similar goals: different organizations compete for influence in different directions. Early investment to enable direct interaction with decision making networks can be how you get the “when” right, figure out “who” to target, and sometimes even figure out the “what to improve” by seeing what is going wrong in the first place.
If an outside organization only does outside research and competitors invest more in making internal connections, the competitors gain advantage and influence with time. Even if one gains a more objective perspective by looking in from the outside and avoiding political fights, a lot of the most valuable information for decision making is going to be internal. This failure mode leads to forms of naivety that are persistent: external actors can see things that clearly look like mistakes, by actors with biases that are obvious to outsiders, and then conclude more confidently than is justified that their own views are correct.