When RAND made magic in Santa Monica | Hacker News Reader

When RAND made magic in Santa Monica

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145 pointsmitchbob58 comments

(Disclosure: I once worked at RAND, but at a much later time in its history)

RAND's heydays were during the period of WW-II and post-war period including the so-called Cold-war era.

From my point of view, RAND during its golden days was very much like Google or Bell Labs during their peaks, with many historically prominent computer scientists and mathematicians having worked at RAND in some capacity. Several people I had worked with were there during the golden days and would reflect on them with great nostalgia...

Back then, special names we use today like "computer science" or "data science" were not commonly used. In this era, this field was simply called "Operations Research" (i.e. the application of quantitative methods and data analysis to improve operational and strategic decision making). - Without going off course too much, I previously made the case that places like the RAND Corporation for all practical purposed invented the field of what we call data science today, but may so-called data science practitioners would not know what the RAND Corporation was, nor would many people at the RAND Corporation in modern times have connected the dots to recognize that they had pioneered this field.

For anyone interested in reading more on the theme of applying quantitative methods / operations research in the area of US public policy, it's reading about the "Whiz Kids": - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiz_Kids_(Department_of_Defen...

Thanks for the tidbits! I'm a huge fan of electronics and computer and related history. Id be interested in any stories you have about your time there :)

Any books recommendations for this part of history?

Will try to update this post if I come across a good book.

This RAND Blog Post covers activities that happened during RAND's first seventy-five years of history, which is still nice, as well as browsing through some of the publicly available papers and reports:

- https://www.rand.org/pubs/articles/2023/rand-turns-75-a-look...

- https://www.rand.org/about/history.html

- https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P7857.html

- https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2009/P3705...

- https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA255904.pdf

Books:

- Soldiers of Reason (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2467227.Soldiers_Of_Reas...) I haven't read this book myself, but it may scratch your itch

- History of Operations Research in the United States Army (https://books.google.com/books?id=KqtZ5XpcDHEC)

Some articles on RAND in general:

- https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1963/09/the-ran...

- https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/22120/rand-corporation-t...

Related back to the topic of "magic":

- There's a RAND paper that I recall reading while I was there on designing an office campus for intentional serendipity as part of cultivating a research organization. I hope I can find a copy online so I can link it to this article, as many of the ideas were incorporated into the design of RAND's future/replacement campus in Santa Monica, CA.

- The ideas on office/campus design were quite good and even included the subject of floor planning and desk assignments. Despite the inherent draw of organizations to divide office space by departments and functions, the RAND ideas were to deliberate interleave the locations of personnel such that people would have increased chances of collaborating with others that they would not naturally be drawn to directly in executing their work. This extended further to how walkways and passageways should be designed to connect floors, buildings etc... ensuring that people would pass by and see other people/functions/departments that they would not normally see or consider in their day-to-day work. I recall trying to cite some of these ideas when I worked in other research organizations (e.g. Google Research) where one of the principal complaints was siloing/lack of collaboration, yet teams were allowed to physically silo themselves in seating plans (by their own request/demands).

- I never got to see the original campus, as it was demolished and later turned into a public park. However, the drawings and photographs of the original campus reminded me of something that resembled an American high school or small university campus.

- There are many small details about working at RAND that were part of deliberate efforts to influence an individual's experiences and decisions to improve their creative/work potential. For example, the equivalent of Vacation/PTO time at RAND is called "sabbatical time." RAND employees were paid more, on an hourly equivalent rate, when taking their "sabbatical time" than for regular work time; this idea was not implemented to reduce financial liability of unspent PTO time for the company under modern standards, but because it was believed and understood --through research-- that employees were more likely to bring their best selves to work when having sufficient and periodic time away from their work -- often bringing back new ideas that wouldn't have emerged simply by grinding away at a problem... So they hoped to incentivize employees to take that time away from a problem by paying them more during their time off.

> the RAND ideas were to deliberate interleave the locations of personnel such that people would have increased chances of collaborating with others that they would not naturally be drawn to directly in executing their work. This extended further to how walkways and passageways should be designed to connect floors, buildings etc... ensuring that people would pass by and see other people/functions/departments that they would not normally see or consider in their day-to-day work.

This type of cross-specialty pollination is feature of Hacker News design and moderation.

If we are sharing favorite RAND books, this introduction to game theory from 1954 is lovely (I read it twice): https://www.rand.org/pubs/commercial_books/CB113-1.html I admit I skipped over much of the maths, since a lot of it is about clever tricks to manually do operations on matrices (might be fun to read about, but probably not very useful these days?).

And also this book from 1947 with ONE MILLION random digits: https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1418.html The foreword from 2001 goes into a lot of detail how and why the numbers were made (which is, I guess, more interesting than to download the book itself?).

> And also this book from 1947 with ONE MILLION random digits

Used to read this to my kids at night, a thousand digits at a time. I really loved the digits at positions 121,443 and 761,890.

From the introduction:

These tables were reproduced by photo-offset from pages printed by the IBM model 856 Cardatype. Because of the very nature of the tables, it did not seem necessary to proofread every page of the final manuscript in order to catch random errors of the Cardatype.

Not directly about RAND, but related to Operations Research: Tom Körner has an excellent book called 'The Pleasures of Counting'. See eg https://www.ams.org/notices/199803/comm-bkrev-blank.pdf for a review.

“Wizards of Armageddon” is one of the best books about anything ever. It makes articles like the one linked redundant.

Yes! More information about the book: http://www.fredkaplan.info/wizards.htm

Not a book, but Steve Blank's blog has a lot of interesting Silicon Valley history.

"tiqqun" contains the unfiltered ideas from the academics actually toiling on the ungrateful rand idea mines. hq was mostly for suits and wizsalespeople (nowadays confused with actual wiz)

My first job out of school was in defense operations research. Not at RAND, so maybe of limited relevance. But I found it less like modern data science and more like GOFAI. The work was mostly coming up with hand engineered models of military operations and then guesstimating the crucial variables since they were impossible to actually measure. I also observed that the analysis was rarely independent so it could inform policy in an unbiased way but instead was shaped to support particular policy choices.

> this field was simply called "Operations Research"

Don't forget "cybernetics"

RAND's role in the Vietnam War is widely derided on many grounds, from the highly unethical behavior exposed in the Pentagon Papers to technical incompetence in programs like Igloo White, the 'electronic fence' that was supposed to keep the NVA from infiltrating weapons, soldiers and supplies into South Vietnam. So maybe they were destroyed by largesse of the Vietnam War government contracting programs?

Eisenhower's famous comments about the military industrial complex are well known, but the later bits of that speech are worth reading (and contrasting to a certain recent spectacle of ignominious incompetence):

> "Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."

> "It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system — ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."

Great quotes.

Gen. LeMay was in charge of RAND? Didn't know that. He was the "bomb them back to the Stone Age" general.

The USAF was insanely well funded in the 1950's. The military got about 40% of the US government budget back then. The USAF bought most of the world's transistors. They ran several ICBM programs, a bomber program, SAGE, and accumulated huge fleets of aircraft. Even the mediocre airplanes where produced in large quantity. The B-47, the first good jet bomber, was built in quantity 2,042. In comparison, only 744 B-52 bombers were ever built, and many of those are still in use.

I recall that one of Rand's area of research was how a nation could survive a nuclear attack. They definitely nuclear hawks.

The USAF may get less of the budget as percentage of GDP but I'd wager the budget might equivalent in absolute terms since US economy is larger.

I think the real reason they have far fewer planes deployed is this: "The cost of acquiring and maintaining major posture components has tended to grow in real terms over time" [1] as a Rand Corporation report circa 1990 observed.

[1] https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2009/R380... p. 7

>The USAF may get less of the budget as percentage of GDP but I'd wager the budget might equivalent in absolute terms since US economy is larger.

In 1952 the military budget was 41.4 billion. A CPI calculator [1] puts that at 486.98 billion today. The current budget is 910 billion [2]. So the military budget has doubled since 1952.

[0] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-budget-mess...

[1] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=41.40&year1=19...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

While people may like to call the RAND Corporation as an entity of "nuclear hawks," it seems a bit dismissive of the mission and nature of what the RAND Corporation was chartered to do.

They were tasked, and encouraged, to apply their creativity, brain power, quantitative skills, to study decision spaces, future possibilities and analyze these to arrive at recommendations and methods for best achieving desired outcomes, as well as identifying and understanding blind spots in thinking. In the above context of nuclear war, I don't believe nuclear war was an organizationally desired outcome, however they had to contemplate it and its implications. This is the organization that concluded based on application of quantitative methods (e.g. game theory) that for example, pursuing a credible strategy of mutually assured destruction was objectively the best way to avoid a nuclear war.

I recommend looking for references to the phrase "Thinking the Unthinkable" to get additional insight to some of RAND's studies.

Think tanks are not about the talent, they are about who pays the bills. The USAF paid the bills.

The guy signing the checks was Curtis LeMay, who was a… reactionary who ended up as running mate to the George Wallace. He was an enthusiastic proponent of nuclear war and inspiration for Dr. Strangelove.

MAD came a bit later, many of the key folks assumed and accepted that nuclear conflict was inevitable. And they may have been right.

The article provides several concrete examples where RAND drew conclusions counter to the implied interests of the USAF.

In the absence of counterexamples your argument sounds plausible, but incorrect.

Fortunately, other resources exist. Try reading the book “Soldiers of Reason”.

RAND was literally founded to figure out how to wage nuclear war. It evolved after Vietnam. Particularly in the 50s and early 60s, the firm was the brain of the Air Force, period.

In that era, several of the principals fully expected that there would be a nuclear exchange in the 60s or 70s.

> RAND was literally founded to figure out how to wage nuclear war. It evolved after Vietnam. Particularly in the 50s and early 60s, the firm was the brain of the Air Force, period.

This is literally a stretch of reality.

Was the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) founded to figure out how to wage intergalactic space domination, and is CalTech the brain of NASA?

RAND, and the concept of FFRDCs (as well as UARCs), was created in the mid 1940s because of the recognition that the US government's partnership and direct ties to private sector industries for many national security matters was overexposed to the private sector's self-interest or potential conflict of interest.

It was founded to create a gap between the government and private sector of contractors that bid on contracts to (mass) produce "weapons" systems.

The thinking was, because the US Government and its armed services do not (sufficiently) have its own organic or dedicated personnel or a workforce for "R&D," it needed an expert workforce (i.e. "think-tanks") to help research requirements, core technologies, and guide the rest of the "R&D" process for "weapons" systems development -- and those experts should not be the companies that ultimately produce (i.e. prime contractors that bid on production contracts) those systems because of conflicts of interest. Similarly, by being directly involved in the "R&D" of a system's requirements/design, etc, conflicts of interest might preclude those contractors from being able to bid and be awarded contracts to produce those systems under US Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR)

The US Army Air Corps, which later became the Air Force, were reliant on R&D efforts from for-profit contractors such as Douglas Aircraft (it's worth mentioning that this is the same era of Howard Hughes and Hughes Aircraft) to develop requirements, "weapons" systems designs, and ultimately produce those systems. The starting pieces of the RAND Corporation were a split-off of Douglas Aircraft's R&D groups to create organizational distance and gaps for mitigating conflict of interest.

[Note: this doesn't mean that the idea of "self-licking ice cream cones" don't exist in the world of FFRDCs/UARCs, and the tendency of large organizations or bureaucracies to act in a manner to perpetuate their own existence certainly applies]

See US FAR 35.017-2:

https://www.acquisition.gov/far/35.017-2

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R44629

Indeed, everyone and every organization ends up having to consider how the bills get paid (i.e. "be careful about biting the hand that feeds). That's probably a universal understanding.

Yet we also have real life examples where people and organizations still act in a manner that differs from providing the most expedient or most self-interested outcome.

RAND itself is the place where Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers from.

I thought the reason for fewer bombers was the development of the icbm and related ship or sub based ordinance obviated the need for such a force

LeMay was a pussycat compared to General Thomas Power.

> Restraint? Why are you so concerned with saving their lives? The whole idea is to kill the bastards. At the end of the war if there are two Americans and one Russian left alive, we win!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_S._Power

Professor William Kaufmann from the RAND Corporation, losing his patience, noted: "Well, you'd better make sure that they're a man and a woman."

Utter madness, and correctly derided as such when the 'enemy' expresses such sentiments.

RAND is a pretty remarkable organization. I recently came across their proposal for an independent Palestinian state, dated 2005, referred to as "The Arc".

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9119.html

The above links to a more comprehensive PDF.

Curious why they didn’t think more simply in terms of their own back yard about about how the jews and arabs of southern california are able to live harmoniously.

Even in the late 60's and 70's, RAND did some seminal work in the modeling of estuarine and coastal flows using the computers of the day. It was incredibly practical work that was used through the 90's, and that's still cited today. They were wonderful papers for the time.

My seasonal neighbor now in his 80s worked at RAND, and also studied under Ed Lorenz. This reminds me that I need to go spend some time with him before fall arrives.

In 2019, RAND published Extending Russia [1], which explored various and prescient hostile means to deal with its current government. It recommended economic warfare against Russia, which, since 2022, will go down as one of the great geopolitical blunders of the 21st century.

My questions are to what extent that report affected the openness and credibility of RAND?

[1] - https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR3063.html

Their follow up report recommends pursuing a peace treaty as the war is no longer served Americas interests and is actually harmful.

In my experience with RAND they always reminded me of a resource extraction company. Think oil and gas, but their trade was government contracts.

Add in a couple of big names to justify the cost, staff it with jr people/post grads, shine it up with some fancy graphics and quant-ish formulas and poof, a million dollar study.

Of all the FFRDC beltway bandit think tanks, they felt the most like an MBA consultant shop. Lots of overhead, questionable return on investment. While they do have history and prestige, I'm not convinced anything they deliver is uniquely insightful.

I had an offer from them. Thankfully, I turned it down for Xerox.

(this was much later than most of the events described in here(

what was the reason?

You're really asking "why choose Xerox, the Office of the Future, over a mainframe job?"

i thought xerox parc had lost its glamour and was being mismanaged by the parent company… maybe that was just a rumour

He's talking about 50 years or so ago -- he was there during the glory days of PARC.

"Xerox PARC" is not one word.

This whole story has been discussed here ad nauseum. There are several books on it, including one by me.

> We no longer live in an era when branches of the U.S. military can cut massive blank checks to think tanks in the interests of beating the Soviets.

Well, that's about to change.

> One of my favorite past-times, particularly when conversation got too multi-voiced in the office, was to wander the corridors of the abandoned basement. The firm, it transpires, was in the process of constructing a brand spankin’ new office building, right next door. The old one was going to be torn down. So it was in a state of, shall we say, disrepair. In fact, it looked as though they’d stopped doing anything with it, several years earlier.
> But I found the basement irresistible. It drew me in like a tractor beam. Long, stale, sunless corridors, cracked linoleum at your feet, illumined by flickering fluorescent light-fixtures. Like something out of (or inspired by) Last Year at Marienbad. Nary a footstep now treads down those halls, which had overheard such secrets, hushed whispers, momentous occasions and portentous events.

> One day, to my surprise, I turned the corner, and there, sitting in his cell, was none other than Manuel Noriega, the ex-dictator of Panama. Seeing as how I did not know him personally, but recognized him from his many media appearances, I hastened to introduce myself. “How are they treating you?” I asked. “Si si, not so bad. Every now and then some junior CIA type comes in and we do some more – what is it, water-surfing? Boogie-boarding? No, no, water-boarding. But it is more for his pleasure, than mine.” I told him that the U.S. actually had given Panama the canal. “Yeah, I heard about that,” he replied. “But how about all of the new peoples who are there now, think of all of the opportunities for a little friendly mordida!” I said I was gonna mosey on, but I’d be back. “Please bring me some of the CDs by the band Pink Floyd,” he said. “They are like the thinking man’s AC/DC – I got so sick of all that puerile metal crap they were blasting at me when I was in the compound.” “Better than Sadam Hussein,” I replied. “They got him in a spider hole, and it didn’t look as though he was enjoying any music!” “They got Sadam, too?” he replied, querulously.

- David Kronemyer, My Days at RAND Corporation

https://web.archive.org/web/20080815050205/http://kronemyer....

Third paragraph marks this as a work of fabulism.

It’s very much real.

Meanwhile, "Noriega was incarcerated in the Federal Correctional Institution, Miami.

Under Article 85 of the Third Geneva Convention, Noriega was considered a prisoner of war, despite his conviction for acts committed prior to his capture by the "detaining power" (the U.S.). This status meant that he had his own prison cell, furnished with electronics and exercise equipment. His cell was nicknamed "the presidential suite".

...In August 2007, a U.S. federal judge approved the French government's request to extradite Noriega to France after his release. Noriega appealed his extradition because he claimed France would not honor his legal status as a prisoner of war. Though Noriega had been scheduled to be released in 2007, he remained incarcerated while his appeal was pending in court. The Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear his appeal in January 2010, and in March declined a petition for a rehearing. Two days after the refusal, the District Court for the Southern District of Florida in Miami lifted the stay that was blocking Noriega's extradition."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Noriega#Prosecution_a...

Noriega was a CIA asset. They would rendition him away when they wanted information. This would not make the news. RAND is obviously CIA linked as well.

Boogie-boarding... O_o

Is it too simple to just say the MBA happened?

Yes, that is too simple. That may not be accurate, and if accurate stifles investigation into the root cause.

This book

https://www.amazon.com/If-Then-Simulmatics-Corporation-Inven...

describes the rise and fall of a would-be competitor to RAND that I enjoyed.

RAND previously on HN: What is a think tank? (2022): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29829796

It feels like a place like this would easily attract top talent nowadays. Does anybody know of places actually operating this way other than a few skunk works teams reporting to bigger corporations?

Such organizations, while capable of bringing really large (and lucrative) breakthroughs, can't produce them reliably, let alone on a schedule. While at it, they require a constant and rather high upkeep.

So they can only exist on thick streams of resources, which can be emitted either by huge corporations (Xerox PARC, Lockheed's skunkworks, IBM and Google research centers, etc), or governments, the latter almost invariably from its military branch.

I'm disgusted by the triumphal celebration of an atrophied cog in the military-industrial complex that monetized more efficient killing. Also, Stanford evaded their charter by forming SRI to do defense work, and hired from the USAF revolving door as well.

The thing that killed RAND was government oversight and neoliberalism.

These days its not possible to innovate something like switched ethernet (which RAND had a hand in) unless you submit bids from forty GSA vendors and hold fifty meetings on which third party implementation consultants you need to hire for the work neoliberalism insists you not do anymore as a corporation because outsource culture is king. wrap it all up in a mountain of project managers and "best practices" because youre too chicken-shit to do anything that 200 other companies dont do, and viola. the punishment for failure FAR outweighs the reward for any breakthrough you think you can achieve.

youre not a thinktank anymore youre just a consulting firm with a particularly attractive media spend.

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