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Comment by iuyhtgbd | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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