Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance

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Summary. Daniel Davies's essay states a simple heuristic drawn from his earlier 'One Minute MBA' checklist for spotting disastrous projects: if a policy or plan requires a sustained campaign of lies, exaggerations, or bad-faith argument to win public acceptance, that need for deception is itself strong evidence the underlying idea is bad. He contrasts this with genuinely good ideas, which tend to be sellable on their honest merits without requiring their advocates to misrepresent costs, benefits, or evidence. The essay grew out of his critique of the run-up to the Iraq War, where he argued the scale of public dishonesty required to build support was a better predictor of disaster than any specific technical argument against the invasion.

Related

• the amount of lying a plan requires as a proxy for whether it's a good plan ↔ anti-misinformation platforms favoring existing orthodoxy over new knowledge (Taking money seriously — LessWrong) · Davies's heuristic assumes lies are mainly deployed to sell bad ideas, but if anti-misinformation regimes favor orthodoxy over discovery, the same 'this idea needs too much spin' judgment could be used to smear genuinely good but unorthodox ideas that lack establishment backing.
• the amount of lying a plan requires as a proxy for whether it's a good plan ↔ macroeconomic storytelling that outruns its evidence (the-uk-is-a-cautionary-tale-for-the) · Loose macroeconomic storytelling that outruns its evidence shows a milder, more common version of Davies's phenomenon: persuasion doesn't need outright lies to be untrustworthy, just narrative looseness that substitutes for rigor.