Word: socialism
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...this point, late in 1968 M.I.T.'s behavioral sciences mandarins under Professor Ithiel Pool began discussing the possibility that the Behavioral Science Program at ARPA could be interested in funding a vast new social science project to center around the then-idle IBM 7094 computer...
...years that followed have been increasingly lean ones for the scattering of bureaus within the Pentagon which concern themselves with social science research. The notion that the behavioral sciences could be of much use to the U.S. military has always been regarded with considerable skepticism by most ranking officials at the Pentagon, and after the Camelot disaster the job of selling the behavioral sciences was that much more difficult. This meant that such outfits as the Behavioral Science Program of the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) were increasingly hard put to justify their continued existence. What...
...information gathering project as Camelot had been, but would center instead on developing new ways of using and interpreting behavioral science data. Thus it entailed none of the diplomatic risks that had proved fatal to project Camelot (and almost fatal to the little social science bureaucracy within the Pentagon as well). At the same time the behavioral science officials at ARPA also believed that the M.I.T. project might convince the higher levels of the Pentagon research bureaucracy that the behavioral sciences could begin to approach the reliability and "hardness" of the natural sciences. Perhaps computers would work where foreign data...
...while Cambridge's behavioral scientists seem to like Foster personally (he is something of a Strangelovian cowboy, with a fondness for zooming around at the controls of his own jet plane), it is very clear that Foster puts his faith in hardware, and has little appreciation of the new social science technology...
There were three reasons why Harvard was felt to be important to the success of the project. The first was simply the prestige of the Harvard name. A second reason was that Harvard's participation would enable ARPA to simplify and centralize its support of social science research in the Cambridge community...