Think Tank Town

[SWJED]

For the Council's 'Think Tank Junkies' from the Washington Post - Think Tank Town.

Washingtonpost.com edits and publishes columns submitted by 12 prominent think tanks on a rotating basis every other weekday. Each think tank is free to choose its authors and the topics it believes are most important and timely. Here are the participating organizations:

• American Enterprise Institute
• Brookings Institution
• Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
• Cato Institute
• Center for American Progress
• Center for Strategic and International Studies
• Council on Foreign Relations
• Heritage Foundation
• Hudson Institute
• Manhattan Institute
• New America Foundation
• RAND Corporation

[Tom Odom]

Obviously the Wash Post is sorely behind the times as they do not recognize SWJ as an interactive think tank unlike any of the conventional, line and block chart, organizations they list, each of which operates along political lines sometimes disguised but often not.

If you think I am being silly, maybe so to a certain degree. But overall I am not. There are far more informed opinions, thoughts, and better analysis on here than the paid guns at Brookings, AEI, the Heritage Foundation, or the Council on Foreign Relations--most of whom have never engaged in actual foreign relations other than as a pundit, academic, or a student.

Tom

[marct]

Obviously the Wash Post is sorely behind the times as they do not recognize SWJ as an interactive think tank unlike any of the conventional, line and block chart, organizations they list, each of which operates along political lines sometimes disguised but often not.

Maybe Bill and Dave should contact them and offer our "services" - for a suitable remuneration .

If you think I am being silly, maybe so to a certain degree. But overall I am not. There are far more informed opinions, thoughts, and better analysis on here than the paid guns at Brookings, AEI, the Heritage Foundation, or the Council on Foreign Relations--most of whom have never engaged in actual foreign relations other than as a pundit, academic, or a student.

A couple of other features:

• people here have much less "awe" of academic credentials and are more than happy to tell us ivory tower types that we are nuts ;
• people here tend to prefer experiential knowledge to academic knowledge - the pragmatic over the theoretical - so any theoretical plan or position gets vetted by pragmatists, not the other way around.

Marc

[Tom Odom]

people here have much less "awe" of academic credentials and are more than happy to tell us ivory tower types that we are nuts ;

Now, Marc, we all love you and admire your wisdom too much to use the word "nuts"

people here tend to prefer experiential knowledge to academic knowledge - the pragmatic over the theoretical - so any theoretical plan or position gets vetted by pragmatists, not the other way around.

That is a very good way of putting it!

Tom

[goesh]

I'm no expert on much of anything but I am smart enough to see exceedingly sharp pencils in a bin when I enter the bin - Tom's comment, "If you think I am being silly, maybe so to a certain degree. But overall I am not. There are far more informed opinions, thoughts, and better analysis on here than the paid guns at Brookings, AEI, the Heritage Foundation, or the Council on Foreign Relations--most of whom have never engaged in actual foreign relations other than as a pundit, academic, or a student." is spot on.

[Jimbo]

Quite often Think-Tank is more Tank than think. The joke about the CPA in Iraq was that it was the Heritage Foundation's summer camp program for college age youths.

[Bullmoose Bailey]

Obviously the Wash Post is sorely behind the times as they do not recognize SWJ as an interactive think tank unlike any of the conventional, line and block chart, organizations they list, each of which operates along political lines sometimes disguised but often not.

If you think I am being silly, maybe so to a certain degree. But overall I am not. There are far more informed opinions, thoughts, and better analysis on here than the paid guns at Brookings, AEI, the Heritage Foundation, or the Council on Foreign Relations--most of whom have never engaged in actual foreign relations other than as a pundit, academic, or a student.

Tom

Very well put. I appreciate the emphasis here on first person experience, intelligent innovation.

[SNW]

Obviously the Wash Post is sorely behind the times as they do not recognize SWJ as an interactive think tank unlike any of the conventional, line and block chart, organizations they list, each of which operates along political lines sometimes disguised but often not.

If you think I am being silly, maybe so to a certain degree. But overall I am not. There are far more informed opinions, thoughts, and better analysis on here than the paid guns at Brookings, AEI, the Heritage Foundation, or the Council on Foreign Relations--most of whom have never engaged in actual foreign relations other than as a pundit, academic, or a student.

Tom

I have to agree with you. I work at a Dutch think tank and, though perhaps by design, the product of the labors tends to be rooted in academia, with very little outputs derived from real-world experience.

When speaking to practitioners, many of them in the Hague say that while they respect what academics have to say, its often times quite difficult to put ivory-tower papers into practice.

[Piranha]

When speaking to practitioners, many of them in the Hague say that while they respect what academics have to say, its often times quite difficult to put ivory-tower papers into practice.

I just know what you are talking about.
How things are 'the other way around' is food for thought ...

[John T. Fishel]

Academics have no greater claim on "truth" than anybody else. Some academics have done good and relevant work on issues of war and peace; others - far too many - have produced garbage. For example, a well regarded US academic specialist on national security issues suggested that a good doctoral dissertation question would be whether al Qaeda's attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon was timed so as to "minimize civilian casualties!"

That is, unfortunately, typical of too much academic work. Fortunately, nobody here is engaged in such fuzzy thinking, are they Marc, Sam....?

Cheers

JohnT

[selil]

As an academic my field is technology. So, I've got two strikes against me. I'm an egg head, and geek head. My teaching area is operating systems, network systems, and security systems. Hmm seems like some fairly systemic thinking. I've always claimed that I am NOT a computer scientist and that I am a technologist. That means I don't sit around thinking up new algorithms that Knuth already documented in his books. The consistent criticism is that academics are not applied, or they do nothing. My entire field is only applied, and I only do things.

Unfortunately that means publication opportunities are few and far between as the academic landscape is littered with "basic research" only journals. It also means that by default my discipline is extremely inter-disciplinary. Everybody is always grabbing onto pieces of what I do (Information technology) because it is pervasive. Everybody is a programmer. Sort of like everybody owns a lawn-mower but that doesn't make them a landscaper.

There is also the constant threat to what we do in my department to turn us into vocational school. That is not what we do. I try very hard to teach concepts instead of applications. Students balk at that. Then a year or two later a bottle of wine, a really nice letter, shows up because they used some primary concept of technology to solve a big problem. Cool.

If you look at my research it gets much worse. My area of "expertise" is information assurance and security with a concentration in computer forensics. My dissertation research (I'm a life long student) is tentatively "Cyber warfare as form of low-intensity conflict". I am applying many of the tools and techniques of small wars to the cyber warfare landscape as an applied method of waging cyber warfare.

I read your email and I am watching you right now......

just kidding....

maybe....

What I do as research can be taken and immediately applied to the real world because that is a tenet of my discipline. In my discipline we don't get money for basic research as primary investigators (PIs). We get called in by PIs when their data repositories are broke, their applications suck, or they can't figure out how to ctrl-alt-del . So a large body of the research we do in my discipline is about social uses of technology or efficient uses of technology.

So, in many ways I look down on those "Think Tanks" that say academics information is hard to put into use, as what I do is usually ready to be commoditized, and because of that I can't get any traction to fund my research from think tanks.

I think they would call that irony.

Crystal caffeinated clarity clearly this morning.