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Dozens of U.S. academics lose grants from Minerva Research Initiative
- fithisux 2y ago"for unclassified research" with public funds?
- rsfern 2y agoYes - this isn’t some new or controversial phenomenon, DoD has funded all kinds of academic research for a long time through organizations like the Office of Naval Research, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, etc. The article says one of the programs that was cut studied how drug cartels operate, organize, and recruit, which seems quite in line with global security and US priorities on fighting narcotics trafficking
- typeofhuman 2y agoHow many other programs were studying the same subject? That's what we don't know. Insiders have reported for decades about redundant research, programs, etc.
- crummy 2y agoHopefully some!
- rscho 2y agoRedundancy in research is necessary. It's a good thing.
- ashoeafoot 2y agoBut then you dont cut with non insiders. You instead reward the reporting of bogus science and corruption bx handling a reward grant worth half the cut grand to the reporter. Make experts clean the house, instead of idiots tearing the house down , becsuse they can not tell apart a load bearing beam from drywall .
- ben_w 2y agoThat question is a general problem with anything secret. Or rather, potential problem, because "can this research be reproduced?" is also a useful question, which means random replication of such work is genuinely desirable. In any case, this specific program wasn't one of the secret ones.
- derbOac 2y agoThis is not the way to come to know. Regardless, much of this was known already if you would just look. The idea that Elon is discovering anything other than for himself, to say the least of being in a position to decide what to do about what is "found", is laughable. They can't even tell the difference between millions and billions of dollars, or who is vital to nuclear safety. It's like Chesterton's fence, but where the fence turns out to be vital, where you could find out what the fence is for by just asking the farmer, and where the person tearing down the fence knows nothing about fences or farming, and happens to run an animal and wildlife control company.
- VWWHFSfQ 2y agoWhat funds should government research (classified or otherwise), use?
- typeofhuman 2y ago[flagged]
- azinman2 2y agoSo, you’re advocating for taxes just shifted in source? Basically instead of income tax, sales tax?
- typeofhuman 2y agoI'm not advocating. I just answered the question.
- VWWHFSfQ 2y agoTariffs are just taxes on poor people. Everything becomes more expensive. You want to spend $3 on a plastic spatula at Target? Well now that costs $7.
- typeofhuman 2y agoMaybe things are artificially less expensive because of the exploitation of critically poor people (slaves in China)? Maybe the thing that costs $7 is really $7 because humane labor requires it; makes it economical.
- VWWHFSfQ 2y agoNobody in America cares about the slaves in China, or Vietnam. They only care whether their spatula costs $3 or $7.
- acdha 2y agoIf that was your goal, you’d need to use a mechanism which actually targets it such as a tariff based on reliable audits of factory conditions. A tariff applied to a country does nothing to improve working conditions until prices rise above the alternatives, and then businesses are going to pick the next cheapest option. None of this is speculative or something we need to study ancient history to understand, either. When Trump enacted tariffs during his first term prices for American consumers went up 10-30%, tens of thousands of American jobs were lost due to rising prices on intermediate goods and retaliatory tariffs, and manufacturing shifted to countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh where working conditions are not notably better. If you want to improve working conditions, you have to make that the best business choice.
- kube-system 2y agoGuess where the internet came from.
- dralley 2y agoWould you prefer all of the research was classified and nonpublic?
- fithisux 2y agoOr public and unclassified?
- guelo 2y agoThese people think they found a loophole in the constitution where the president can steal congress's power of the purse. I think that trying to find and exploit loopholes in the constitution breaks the spirit of the document and is traitorous to our form of government. But they don't care for our form of government, they want to undermine it because without government it increases billionaire's "freedom".
- azinman2 2y agoI agreed with you until the last bit. I don’t think there’s a uniform “they” with a stable set of goals. All of the heritage foundation, Vance, Trump, Elon, congress, the Christian nationalists, etc I’m certain have different and probably often conflicting goals… that also shift constantly depending on the context.
- TheBlight 2y agoIt's foolishness to think many millions of voters don't also agree with these cuts. They don't value these programs.
- giantg2 2y agoWith the vastness of the political spectrum and volume of voters, one can find "millions" of voters that support cuts to almost any program.
- thelock85 2y agoIn some respects, I agree. But they aren’t touching much that voters do care about and that’s where the overwhelming majority of spending comes from. Every valid path to actually reducing debt pisses off most of the electorate. It’s “chasing” a noble goal with political theater. What’s happening now is a path to privatization of large swaths of current govt.
- derbOac 2y agoThat's what representation in Congress is for, and why the Constitution specifies that Congress holds the power of the purse, not the president, and especially not an unelected billionaire with conflicts of interest.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- huijzer 2y ago> Dozens of researchers with grants under the Minerva Research Initiative—studying violent extremism, disinformation, and threats from climate change, for example—have had their grants terminated in recent days. Social scientists researching climate change. With the discussion here on HN often about how misaligned the incentives are and with the replication crisis in mind I get it that funding was cut (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis).
- AnimalMuppet 2y agoSocial scientists researching the likely social effects of climate change. They seem more qualified for that specific question than climate scientists, honestly.
- iuyhtgbd 2y agoMakes sense to me that violence could be related to climate phenomena like draught, and that you might want to pay people to study when and how that has happened and predict when and where it may happen again.
- huijzer 2y agoOr. You use technology. Even places like Saudi Arabia have water for everyone. We cannot after hundreds of years predict human behavior with much accuracy but we can fix water problems.
- jmspring 2y agoWhen you are a small country where much of it is bordered by water and the largest distance from tip to next border is ~300km, and you have immense oil wealth, desal and distribution makes sense. Not explain to me how that works for a state like Arizona, where the closest salt water body is ~80km to the state boundary, yet the closest metro area (Tucson or phoenix) is 250+km. How does processing and delivery get paid for? Note those are the two closest areas. I picked AZ because there are neighborhoods growing and some are having to rely on trucked in water.
- johnyzee 2y ago[flagged]
- Yoric 2y agoWhy?
- rayiner 2y ago[flagged]
- 9dev 2y agoYet another shallow dismissal of an entire branch of science, brought to you by random internet guy!
- rayiner 2y agoIf social science has explanatory and predictive power hedge funds would have figured out how to monetize that and would be hiring social scientists.
- tzs 2y agoBy that argument dentistry is fake.
- searealist 2y agoLarge parts of dentistry are fake. There is no evidence regular cleanings do anything.
- mcphage 2y agoThere’s plenty that is monetizable that hedge funds choose not to because they’re after a quick buck, and some things—rightfully—take time. In other words, what hedge funds do or do not monetize has little predictive power over anything meaningful.
- huijzer 2y ago> Other canceled projects investigated whether climate change could lead to armed conflicts over access to fish stocks and how it affects societies in the Sahel.
- moogly 2y agoI might agree that investigation is a bit unneeded. Overfishing is about to do that way before climate change: like the Chinese deep-water fishing fleet illegally fishing in other nations' waters.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y agoThey aren't independent ideas, effects of climate change would likely lead to higher pressures on fishing while at the same time reducing the number of fish if habitats change faster than species can adapt.
- walterbell 2y agoPhoto of a Chinese fishing fleet, taken from International Space Station, https://x.com/pettitfrontier/status/1894497444303396978 https://x.com/pettitfrontier/status/1894497444303396978
- lazyeye 2y ago36.5 trillion in total national debt Increasing by 1 trillion every 100 days Thats by 10 billion per day Thats 417 million per hour Thats 6.9 million per minute They need to cut more of this kind of stuff, not less. Way more.
- ahoka 2y agoMaybe stop giving tax cuts to rich people instead of downgrading the USA to a regional power?
- gjsman-1000 2y agoRaise taxes on rich people, rich people leave the country or invest offshore; or put it into advertising to make sure not one involved politician wins an election ever again. What is $1 billion to destroy a political career over $10 billion in taxes?
- sjsdaiuasgdia 2y agoThis is a great argument for why we should find ways, as a society, to prevent people from reaching such a level of ultra-wealth in the first place.
- gjsman-1000 2y agoOr accept, and recognize, that things kind of go both ways: The rich can be exploitative of the poor relative to themselves and heavily motivated by greed; But it can be equally true that the poor hate the rich with motivations based on greed and envy themselves. Poor people, ironically, can be extremely greedy, more greedy than many wealthy people - they aren’t incompatible. I’m not taking sides on this one.
- sjsdaiuasgdia 2y agoI agree that it goes both ways, in the sense that I support UBI. As I think there is a level of wealth that society has an interest in preventing anyone being above, I also think there is a level of poverty that society has an interest in preventing anyone being below.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago[flagged]
- sega_sai 2y agoIt is great you can quickly judge the value of a 5 year research project.
- throwawa14223 2y ago[flagged]
- ironman1478 2y agoA lot of the research seems really useful. I don't understand why we wouldn't prioritize understanding how to prevent drug cartel recruitment (one of the examples cited in the article).
- philwelch 2y agoThe research is useful in the sense that actually understanding the issues being investigated would be valuable. The question is, would the funded research actually deliver a better understanding of those issues? Given the state of the social sciences, I don't think that it would.
- some_random 2y agoYeah this is an under discussed aspect of the grant issues, it's important to decide whether or not to fund something, but just as if not more important is to make sure that the funding is used in a way that actually delivers the promised effect.
- philwelch 2y agoI also don't think the Pentagon has the expertise necessary to tell good social science from bad.
- relaxing 2y agoThe DoD employs experts from many different fields. Wars aren’t just won on the battlefront. PSYOPS is an obvious example of applied social science, but it extends far beyond that.
- ethbr1 2y ago> Given the state of the social sciences, I don't think that it would. Why not? That's a really broad brush.
- 2y ago
- loxodrome 2y agoSomething tells me wheel survive with a smaller budget for social science studies.
- bdangubic 2y agowe’ll spend it oil company subsidies and tax cuts so it’ll be even more money well spent :)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwaway89201 2y agoSome poignant projects that were canceled after already been awarded: "What Sustains and Ends Wars: Will to Fight to Secure Ontological Significance Versus Material Capacity to Pursue Power", with a slide-reading lecture video on "seemingly intractable conflicts" [1]. "Military Adaptation and War Termination" [2] ""Un"Resilience: Drawing Insights from Societal Collapse" [3] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2i_EEHK_u6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2i_EEHK_u6o [2] https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article/3965018/military-adaptation-and-war-termination/ https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article... [3] https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article/3965117/unresilience-drawing-insights-from-societal-collapse/ https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article...
- yusaythat 2y ago[flagged]
- mrBaizuo 2y ago[dead]
- gwerbret 2y agoIt's interesting to see that as of the time I'm writing this, half the top-level comments in this thread are being downvoted. I am NOT writing in support of the current slash-and-burn approach to government, but I suspect that the downvoted half are addressing a significant deficiency in this article -- it doesn't mention what has been meaningfully accomplished by the Minerva Initiative in 17 years, given that the program had a fairly discrete set of objectives. Did they prevent any terrorist attacks? Did they forestall any destabilizing uprisings in significant countries? Did they develop a real and actionable understanding of radicalization or similar movements? This is not to say that those accomplishments don't exist (I wouldn't know, I'd never heard of the program before), but it's extraordinarily lazy writing by a supposedly-premier science publication for these not to be identified and highlighted, if they exist. Edit: clarity.
- ethbr1 2y agoThat's not the program's goal. >> The Minerva Research Initiative supports social science research aimed at improving our basic understanding of security, broadly defined. [...] The goal is to improve DoD’s basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the U.S. [0] The emphasis here is on background, that should then better inform regional DoD strategy, that will then... well, 'not screw up things like Iraq' seems a fair summary. For the amounts, this seems like an excellent use of DoD money. Throwing military hardware and soldier time/lives away in pursuit of doomed to fail goals is expensive and often counterproductive. Fight smarter, not harder. [0] https://minerva.defense.gov/ https://minerva.defense.gov/
- yowmamasita 2y agohttps://archive.is/4luZu https://archive.is/4luZu
- holyknight 2y agoSoo.. any of these had any real applications by the Pentagon? Or then why is the Pentagon using their budget to fund general research? It could be perfectly valid research, but that's not their job.
- relaxing 2y agoYou might want to look up DARPA for reasons why the DoD funds general research.
- mgr86 2y agoWell, we aren't exactly in the need to know here, but the DOD has been studying Climate Change for decades. At least as far back as the Bush administration of the early 00's if not well before. It is not so much oh look the climate is changing, but more what will people do when they lose access to X. In other words, what can we expect when due to climate issues all of a sudden the fishing industry in your village collapses. Or water is scarce, or a particular crop no longer is sustainable in your region. In most cases, resource scarcity will lead to conflict. Sort of the DOD's bread and butter. It is not exactly all about who will big the biggest and baddest killing machine. And more about when will those killing machines be needed. Admittedly, that is a bit of a simplification.
- slater 2y agoWhy is every recent thread on DOGE and DOGE-similar stuff always riddled with people asking "this team were supposedly researching [insert apparently useless research topic], how does that help us?!?", as if every god damn research project funded by the US govt. better result in some kind of Manhattan-Project-style leap forward.