Intellectual honesty, operationalized.
The Money Game is defensible because it refuses lazy claims. The Think Tank runs on the same discipline — a fixed sequence every proposal must survive before it ships.
Steelman first
Every proposal opens with the strongest version of the opposing case. You cannot advance a position until you can pass the other side’s ideological Turing test.
Name the mechanism
Claims must attribute cause to a specific, falsifiable mechanism — never vibes. The same literacy-per-hour discipline that runs The Money Game runs here.
Red-team the incentives
Before anything ships, a rotating red team asks cui bono — who benefits, who is harmed, and how the proposal is gamed. Lesson 40, operationalized.
Produce an artifact
Deliberation that produces nothing is a book club. Every group ships a concrete artifact: a model bill, a dataset, a memo, a tool.
“If you can’t pass the other side’s ideological Turing test, you haven’t earned the right to argue against it.”