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Comment by huijzer | Hacker News Reader

> 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).

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"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."

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?

Makes 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.

I always thought the heat was the driver. There has historically been more crime in the summer than in the winter, for example. Heat makes you do crazy things, as some noir novel probably said.

I guess it'd be nice to have some research to try and find out the real reason and challenge our own hypothesis, rather than always fall back on "I thought X was the reason". This is why the defunding of these programs is so frustrating, because especially around the social sciences, Americans tend to value their own gut rather than empirical studies.

This assumes that the research was finding the real reason and not just finding evidence for the researcher's gut reasoning.

It's a short story and not a novel, but there's the short story August Heat[0]; it's available at [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Heat_(short_story)

[1] https://www.scaryforkids.com/august-heat/

Or. 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.

When 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.

This is a false dichotomy. There's no conflict between studying things from a social science angle and creating water infrastructure. They're not coming out of the same budget, they're not coming out of the same talent pool, they're not mutually exclusive, there's just no conflict there.

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.

> They're not coming out of the same budget

Federal budget is federal budget.

That's like saying HR's budget is the same as Accounting's budget because they're both part of Incorporated Widgets, and that we should fire Bob in HR because Sandra is a good accountant. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense or reflect how these decisions are actually made. Funding more social sciences doesn't actually mean funding less other science, just like hiring an HR rep doesn't entail firing an accountant.

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."

That is one of the purposes of USAID, but that’s been defunded too.

> ... 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.

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.

> Social scientists researching climate chanage

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

Social scientists researching the likely social effects of climate change.

They seem more qualified for that specific question than climate scientists, honestly.

Take a look sometime at where India and Pakistan get much of their fresh water, and what climate change is expected to do for that. Then contemplate the testy relationship between those two countries and consider the likelihood that they will peacefully work out a way to deal with the situation.

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...

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