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Comment by leroy_masochist | Hacker News Reader

I read the article and didn't find any compelling examples of how the Jason team did anything that created actual value for the DoD specifically or US in general.

AFAICT, this is a team of distinguished scientists that is kept on the government payroll so that the US has the best scientific minds available for national security issues. Sounds great in theory, but when a clearly sympathetic article's chosen examples of the good work the group does include nuggets such as, "In the 1960s, the Jasons invented a type of sensor that could detect enemy guerrillas in Vietnam and communicate their location to U.S. bombers", I dunno, I'm kind of skeptical. I mean, maybe that sensor had a subsequent use case for the space program or something, who knows.

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Apparently Reuters did not view it as their job to persuade you with overwhelming evidence that the group is important. It is their job to convey to you who thinks the group is important and who doesn't.

JASON has a wikipedia page, google exists, etc. etc.

> It is their job to convey to you who thinks the group is important and who doesn't.

Preferably without sensationalized headlines like "Trump-era purge".

> sensationalized headlines like "Trump-era purge"

A headline is absolutely the least important part of an article, but in this case it's descriptive and appropriate so I'm not sure what the problem is. This is the Trump era of the US executive branch and he owns these decisions, whether you like them or not. This is not controversial.

Purge is a word with a dark history, most famously Stalin's purge in the USSR, in which people were sent to gulags. Is that what's happening here?

The dark meaning it conveys depends on who interprets it. It didn't even cross my mind.

> A headline is absolutely the least important part of an article

On the contrary, its a one sentence summary of an article. If combined with humor, it sticks better. If its too long, it will stick less. If its too sensationalist readers will feel deceived afterwards (and they'll express it). To be fair, it is difficult to make a good headline. Not everyone's cut for it. A good journalist can, but journalism is a race to the bottom and it is hard to compete with masses who lower the standards (seemingly for free thanks to advertisements).

They've probably done something useful in the past, but muh seekrits!

One thing is certain though; virtually every new president since George H.W. Bush, they've rolled out this very same article. "You're ruining my MITRE sinecure," basically. Obviously, it's not happened yet, and the actual substance of the events described is probably well short of the apocalypse which I must have read at least a dozen times in the last 25 years.

It's a tribute to the Jason dudes they have decent PR. They may even have done something useful once upon a time. The crap they do now is... doubtful. Mostly because almost all academics outside of something like chemistry seem to be engaged in doubtful work.

One of the things pointed out that they identified when certain plans (eg. missile defense system) was not useful, and also that the sound heard during the 'sonic attack' were crickets.

Right, but they're hardly a single point of failure with regard to internal oversight of missile defense systems; that alone is a multiple $Bn per year endeavor with several competing bureaucracies analyzing weak points and areas to improve.

The cricket thing is just a hypothesis; the article itself says that, "No definitive cause of the illnesses has been determined".

I don't have a dog in this fight, I'm just kind of skeptical.

They're not a single point of failure, they're one of a myriad of important analysis of weak points and areas to improve. Note that in the article the scientists are not defining the illness, merely were able to identify the source of the sound.

I'm mostly skeptical at the skepticism. Why wouldn't one want to retain world class researching talent to be queried at a moment's notice regarding anything that could possibly threaten the country?

Why would a retainer be something we should put tax dollars toward? Why not pay them when they are needed, instead of paying them for who they are?

Reminds me of Nixon trying to get rid of the Tea Tasting Board.

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/05/13/archives/nixon-drops-plan...

They are paid for when they're needed. They've been scheduled for 15 studies.

I'm sure top scientists working on stuff for the military are just filling public research journals with all the work they are doing.

And you don't think the people in charge of keeping nukes safe saying they are needed to keep the nukes safe justifies their position?

How are missile defense systems not useful? The most obvious example of a useful missile defense system that comes to mind is the Iron Dome Defense System.

In the article, the example was a "space-based missile defense system".

... oh ... yeah, that's fucked.

Strategic missile defence systems are destabilizing; game theory argues that if the other side builds such a defence your best bet is to attack before it's completed; failing that you need to build up your armory to a size where it can overwhelm the projected defense. This is why the US and UUSR signed a treaty in '72 specifically banning them (except for one city each; the US didn't even bother to deploy its).

Wasn’t this abrogated?

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