[HN Gopher] When RAND made magic in Santa Monica
___________________________________________________________________
When RAND made magic in Santa Monica
Author : mitchbob
Score : 130 points
Date : 2024-07-01 19:48 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (asteriskmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (asteriskmag.com)
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| 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
| BJones12 wrote:
| >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_Unit
| ed_...
| moandcompany wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| ferfumarma wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| moandcompany wrote:
| > 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
| moandcompany wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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
| jdougan wrote:
| 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
| sillywalk wrote:
| 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."
| vkou wrote:
| Utter madness, and correctly derided as such when the 'enemy'
| expresses such sentiments.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| 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(
| b20000 wrote:
| what was the reason?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| You're really asking "why choose Xerox, the Office of the
| Future, over a mainframe job?"
| b20000 wrote:
| i thought xerox parc had lost its glamour and was being
| mismanaged by the parent company... maybe that was just a
| rumour
| jhbadger wrote:
| He's talking about 50 years or so ago -- he was there
| during the glory days of PARC.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| "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.
| moandcompany wrote:
| (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...
| helf wrote:
| 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 :)
| ancorevard wrote:
| Any books recommendations for this part of history?
| moandcompany wrote:
| 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/P370
| 5...
|
| - https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA255904.pdf
|
| Books:
|
| - Soldiers of Reason (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/246
| 7227.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.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> 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.
| livrem wrote:
| 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?).
| eru wrote:
| Not directly about RAND, but related to Operations Research:
| Tom Korner has an excellent book called 'The Pleasures of
| Counting'. See eg https://www.ams.org/notices/199803/comm-
| bkrev-blank.pdf for a review.
| MrSkelter wrote:
| "Wizards of Armageddon" is one of the best books about
| anything ever. It makes articles like the one linked
| redundant.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Not a book, but Steve Blank's blog has a lot of interesting
| Silicon Valley history.
| jebarker wrote:
| 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.
| Onavo wrote:
| > _this field was simply called "Operations Research" _
|
| Don't forget "cybernetics"
| relaxing wrote:
| _> 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....
| dayofthedaleks wrote:
| Third paragraph marks this as a work of fabulism.
| relaxing wrote:
| It's very much real.
| glompers wrote:
| That 2008 archive of Kronemyer's says that he had recently
| completed work at RAND and all site contents are copyright
| 2006, 2007, or 2008.
|
| 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...
| eschneider wrote:
| Boogie-boarding... O_o
| prpl wrote:
| Is it too simple to just say the MBA happened?
| RandomCitizen12 wrote:
| Yes, that is too simple. That may not be accurate, and if
| accurate stifles investigation into the root cause.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| 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."
| maroonblazer wrote:
| 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.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| nataz wrote:
| 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.
| nimbius wrote:
| 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.
| robertclaus wrote:
| 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?
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| dboreham wrote:
| 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.
| surfingdino wrote:
| > 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.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| 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.
| pphysch wrote:
| 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
| MaxPock wrote:
| Their follow up report recommends pursuing a peace treaty as
| the war is no longer served Americas interests and is actually
| harmful.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| banish-m4 wrote:
| 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.
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