(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.
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.
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:
- 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.
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?).
These tables were reproduced by photo-offset from pages printed by the IBM model 856 Cardatype. Because of the very nature of the tables, it did not seem necessary to proofread every page of the final manuscript in order to catch random errors of the Cardatype.
> 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.
"tiqqun" contains the unfiltered ideas from the academics actually toiling on the ungrateful rand idea mines. hq was mostly for suits and wizsalespeople (nowadays confused with actual wiz)
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 :)
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...