How and why and what is a think tank…
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Think tanks try to twist democracy to their own advantage. Most tanks are funded by wealthy corporate funds.
They try to acquire legitimacy by gathering members from academia and senior professions.
Tanks tend to over simplify complex issues and are even more out of touch with ordinary citizens than the government.
They think deeply in a Russian tank and if they don’t have any good ideas Ukrainians shoot javelin missiles at it
at a lot of companies, people become set in their ways of how to do business because that’s the way it’s always been done, or no one has updated the procedures to more modern methods. Also you may have never thought of branching out in a new direction because you are doing well as you are, and are focused on continuing to improve the services you already provide. A think tank has a bunch of different skills that they would apply to your business and the profits you gain make the cost of consulting them worthwhile.
If it’s a scientific (or at least sort-of-scientific) subject at a university, there are think tanks devoted to that subject. In general, they provide consulting on very custom and specific topics, to the point that someone is willing to pay for specialized research.
Sometimes, my role is as a research associate for a group which could be called a ‘think tank’. The firm is a group of college professors, mostly economics and business folks, some other specialties (statistics, computer science, or similar).
A good deal of our work is for litigation. So there is a lawsuit, and we are asked to present evidence on the economic impact of a particular topic. The first case I worked on was to value a specific piece of intellectual property which involved infrared readers on ‘palm pilots’.
Another was examining how long it would take for a charitable foundation to run out of money under various required payout systems. We were asked by some sort of finance company to examine the financials of a chain of gas stations – could the company have made more from their convenience stores, if they lowered the price of their fuel (Answer: Probably!)
A case I didn’t work on was something having to do with the impact of big-old power lines on nearby property values or something like that.
There are other think-tanks that might do civil engineering problems (how should building codes change to allow more affordable housing, but also avoid overcrowding), or maybe environmental issues (would power generators using ocean current help global warming, or just mess with fragile ecosystems).
I’m an engineer in the automotive industry.
We have an area called a Think Tank where we relocate engineers for a month at a time to work on specific projects. It’s a little different than an entire company being identified as a think tank so thought I’d share.
I work in product development so we will move the Design Engineer, Analysis Engineer, Project Engineer and whoever else is necessary to sit in a single room to have a more collaborative environment. We have projectors, white boards, etc available and is very effective.
Depending on the field/focus, it either deteriorates into new product development, or leadership by committee.
You can think of a “Think Tank” as being an organization whose sole purpose is to create official-sounding paperwork, “studies”, and articles that support a given narrative, goal, or bias. Think Tanks exist on the left, right, and everywhere in between. If there’s a lobby for a cause, there’s a think tank supporting it somewhere. There are think tanks for veganism, environmentalism, conservatism, Christianity, Islam, Atheism, etc etc. Even supposedly “non-partisan” think tanks are effectively partisan because they’re comprised of fallible humans with biases.
Many of them also function as bribery machines because they can employ, at great cost, former politicians and officials for beneficial policy-making. What often happens is, while in office, a think tank makes an employment offer to a politician contingent on policy-making beneficial to the think tank’s MO. That might be increased war-hawkishness to increase MIC profits or it could be campaigning on healthy meals for kids to increase profits to agro companies invested in “healthy but expensive crops”.
Information from think tanks should be taken with a grain of salt because invariably whatever information they’re peddling they’re doing so because of perverse incentives.
I want to start my own think tank. How do I do it? How much would I pay people for their thoughts?
He tanks intellectual damage (ad-hominem attacks, smear campaigns, cancelling attempts etc.). His role is taking and controlling discourse space to enable think-DPSes.
I pretty much sit around going through Reddit, play games, work and talk to my friends.
I do it by sheer will because I enjoy life.
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