Dozens of U.S. academics lose grants from Minerva Research Initiative
science.org
science.org
"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
[2] https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article...
[3] https://minerva.defense.gov/Research/Funded-Projects/Article...
Why not? That's a really broad brush.
The fact that we (somewhat) do it with biology is amazing.
That doesn't mean we should avoid spending money in hard to replicate fields, or that we should require impossible to satisfy bars for funding.
Some of the most interesting results in these fields come with further questions attached.
> Mexico has sent 29 drug cartel figures, including drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, who was behind the killing of a U.S. DEA agent in 1985, to the United States as the Trump administration turns up the pressure on drug trafficking organizations.. “This is historical, this has really never happened in the history of Mexico,” said Mike Vigil, former DEA chief of international operations.. The unprecedented show of security cooperation comes as top Mexican officials are in Washington trying to head off the Trump administration’s threat of imposing 25% tariffs on all Mexican imports starting Tuesday.
cartels in Colombia, not Mexico
> the Ombudsman’s Office, an agency of Colombia’s Public Ministry, highlights the presence and the areas of operations of three of the strongest Mexican drug cartels: the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, Los Zetas, and the Sinaloa Cartel.. there is a belief among foreign consumers that Colombian drugs are of high quality, so the narcos capitalize on that.
the goal of the research is to prevent people from joining crime organizations, not how to catch existing heads of criminal organizations
History suggests cutting off the head of a drug cartel is just a Tier 2 career advancement opportunity.
Did the aquisition of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán as a token trophy head put much of a dent in the ongoing activity of the Sinaloa Cartel Ship of Theseus?
There's much to be said for understanding an organism (an entire cartel dynamic in this case) in order to eliminate it.
If not, what actions were taken based on previous social science research?
> Was this research the first social science project to seek an understanding of cartels?
Very probably not. Not in the US and not globally.
> what actions were taken based on previous social science research?
That'd be a question best answered by digging through the Hansards, Parliamentary Archives, Congressional Records, etc. of respective governments.
Political history would suggest that many good suggestions of social change were likely ignored in favour of operations with a lot of smoke and noise.
Likely to increase with terrorist designation, https://apnews.com/article/gangs-cartels-sinaloa-aragua-trum...
Organizations sometimes optimize for the problem to which they are the solution, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39491863
Today that horse is dead and well beaten .. but maybe guns will solve things this time 'round.
I mean, until someone stops them, and as long as they get away with it, they did.
https://www.npr.org/2014/01/20/263766043/wielding-a-pen-and-...
I'm quibbling with implications of "there's nothing new, they're both the same".
In the article he can sign an executive order to make college more affordable, but this is using Congress's budget allocation, and powers provided for the department of education though is it not?
Trump is literally dismantling departments approved by Congress, and using the budget in completely different areas as far as I can tell. He's not simply redirecting what X department should be doing, as compared to Obama.
Can you expand on this?
On quick glance, the article you're citing doesn't support the equivalence of cutting already awarded funding as the current American executive is doing now. It talks about calling meetings.
> The Minerva Research Initiative was launched in 2008 by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, motivated by the recognition that DoD was underutilizing the intellectual capital of university-based social scientists
Congress doesn’t specifically appropriate money for it. It looks like Congress appropriates money for the DOD’s Basic Research Office, and money is siphoned to this initiative by the executive branch.
EDIT: Corrected which administration.
Obama wasn’t president in 2008, not sure why you are mentioning him.
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.
>> 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.
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).
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.
I agree that foreign aid is a good way to avoid conflict. I'd love to see the US help the entire world have access to clean water. Shame that they dismantled the apparatus for providing it.
Federal budget is federal budget.
Different funds are appropriated for different purposes, funding the kind of research you're talking about would likely be connected to an NSF grant or a national lab. Note as well that science, like everything else, experiences diminishing returns. Putting 1000x the money into water treatment research won't get you 1000x the return. Allocating funds at the scale of the federal government isn't zero sum; you can saturate the amount of funding it's possible to provide, and it does make sense to spread funding around many different areas.
Incidentally, that research you want to see is probably in jeopardy because the grant funding it contains forbidden words like "environment."
Unless of course you happen to be one of the people actively and directly causing the problem they're studying. Then it might seem like a smart idea to put those people out of work.
They seem more qualified for that specific question than climate scientists, honestly.
It's about understanding how a society can change due to climate change, not understanding the actual mechanics of climate change. Do you think that understanding whether or not conflicts stemming from climate change are not useful?
They both have nukes. If a war between them turned nuclear it would of course be pretty bad for the people of those countries, but you might think that the rest of the world would be OK. After all both of them only have fairly small warheads, mostly around the size of the nukes the US used in WWII.
Unfortunately that is not the case. Even if they only nuked each other, an exchange of around 100 of their nukes from each side (about 1/3 of their arsenals) directed at each other's major population centers would be felt around the world.
Here's a paper that analyzed this [1], and an article about it [2].
Here's the abstract from that paper:
> A limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could ignite fires large enough to emit more than 5 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. Climate model simulations have shown severe resulting climate perturbations with declines in global mean temperature by 1.8 °C and precipitation by 8%, for at least 5 y. Here we evaluate impacts for the global food system. Six harmonized state-of-the-art crop models show that global caloric production from maize, wheat, rice, and soybean falls by 13 (±1)%, 11 (±8)%, 3 (±5)%, and 17 (±2)% over 5 y. Total single-year losses of 12 (±4)% quadruple the largest observed historical anomaly and exceed impacts caused by historic droughts and volcanic eruptions. Colder temperatures drive losses more than changes in precipitation and solar radiation, leading to strongest impacts in temperate regions poleward of 30°N, including the United States, Europe, and China for 10 to 15 y. Integrated food trade network analyses show that domestic reserves and global trade can largely buffer the production anomaly in the first year. Persistent multiyear losses, however, would constrain domestic food availability and propagate to the Global South, especially to food-insecure countries. By year 5, maize and wheat availability would decrease by 13% globally and by more than 20% in 71 countries with a cumulative population of 1.3 billion people. In view of increasing instability in South Asia, this study shows that a regional conflict using <1% of the worldwide nuclear arsenal could have adverse consequences for global food security unmatched in modern history.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1919049117
[2] https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/03/16/even-limited-in...
This misunderstanding lead you astray: this is social scientists studying social impacts. Look at the list of the most recent awards - all of these sound like good social science and useful things for the DoD to fund since, for example, climate change-caused economic woes and migration were key to events they do directly care about like the Syrian civil war and rise of ISIS.
Conflict Resilience Across Scales: Theory and Data to Evaluate Societal Resilience to Water and Climate Shock
Anticipating Coastal Population Mobility: Path to Maladaptation or Sociopolitical Stability
Modeling Climate-Induced Societal Adaptation and Population Displacement
Admittedly, that is a bit of a simplification.
with public funds?
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
In any case, this specific program wasn't one of the secret ones.
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.
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.
What is $1 billion to destroy a political career over $10 billion in taxes?
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.
What an odd argument.
Is it because they subvert the will of the people, and subvert what is good? If so, I agree, they must be stopped.
Is it just the principle of the thing, how dare they be so rich, when so many people aren’t? If so, that’s envy, and cannot be accepted.
> put it into advertising to make sure not one involved politician wins an election ever again.
That’s what happened in 2024 and we are facing rising inflation and a severe recession in the middle of a constitutional crisis. It’s unclear to me why anyone would think that the people who orchestrated that should be catered to.
They can move at any time, anywhere.
There will always be a country that will receive them with open arms.
Income redistribution will never happen.
> Maybe stop giving tax cuts to rich people
Nor did I write anything about "significant tax hikes".
How do you get from these comments to significant tax hikes? Not giving tax cuts to the wealthiest of Americans and not increasing our deficit further is not the same thing as a significant tax hike. If you cannot distinguish these two things, I don't know how any productive conversation could ever be had here.
And if billionaires choose to leave the US to avoid these non tax-hikes, that's their choice. But most countries they'd presently opt for do tax higher than the US does.
1. Inequality has been constantly decreasing for most of the 20th century, worldwide.
2. Income redistribution has happened multiple times throughout history, and you can argue about the process and also about the results but it has happened repeatedly (French Revolution, Communist Revolution in Russia and all associated revolutions and coups, etc, etc).
The Communist revolution initiated a sequence of events that make communism the #1 cause of death ever. From purges, to famine, wars...
Deng Xiaoping's communism is a completely different thing.
Umm... I see that you were schooled in the Anglo-American tradition (classical Conservative, I guess Edmund Burke?).
Let me expand on that... the French Revolution was a mess, like any revolution, that's true.
A mess that:
- shattered MANY legal abuses (primarily stemming from divine right, feudalism, etc) in a lot of Europe, in about 3 major shocks (the initial one which led to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire, then 1848, then slowly to the abolition of any feudal remains around 1918)
- greatly expanded personal and collective freedoms in Europe, freedoms that weren't abolished even by the "tyranny"
- served as a model for a better society for many oppressed countries and regions in Europe (I come from one, Romania)
And it did not end in a tyranny. It went through mass executions, lead to an absolutist regime, back to a monarchy, then back to a democracy, then back to a monarchy, and then finally back to a democracy, for good. All of that was started and made possible by the French Revolution.
> The Communist revolution initiated a sequence of events that make communism the #1 cause of death ever. From purges, to famine, wars...
That's only if you look at global Communism like a single phenomenon and you consider say, monarchy, as a set of disjointed ideologies. Communism also brought great equality in countries that were some of the most unequal and abusive on the planet, it greatly accelerated women's rights to the point to this day, Eastern Europe (for example) has more equal political representation and more women in STEM than Western Europe.
You could argue that fear of Communism also led the West to adopt policies such as high taxes on high earners, that led to more equality during the post war era. Look at what's happening now when Communism is basically gone for good. The US is falling back into a Gilded Era.
Maybe the public will just not know the numbers anymore.
Either way, I am not from the US, so I read these threads for my own amusement. I am fine with what is happen over there, in a way I wouldn't be in my country of residence :)