Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Teaching National Security Policy with AI

steveblank.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 23 posts

Re: Teaching National Security Policy with AI

#11

Post by radioactivist »

radioactivist wrote: post #9

At one point this states: > Claude was also able to create a list of leaders with the Department of Energy Title17 credit programs, Exim DFC, and other federal credit programs that the team should interview. In addition, it created a list of leaders within Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget that would be able to provide insights. See the demo here: and then there is a video of them "d…

It happens again in the next video. It says:

> The team came up with a use case the teaching team hadn’t thought of – using AI to critique the team’s own hypotheses. The AI not only gave them criticism but supported it with links from published scholars. See the demo here:

But the video just shows Claude giving some criticism but then just says go look at some journals and talk to experts (doesn't give any references or specifics).

Re: Teaching National Security Policy with AI

#12

Post by alephnerd »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #3

>Policy students have to read reams of documents weekly. Our hypotheses was that our student teams could use AI to ingest and summarize content, identify key themes and concepts across the content, provide an in-depth analysis of critical content sections, and then synthesize and structure their key insights and apply their key insights to solve their specific policy problem. Yeah who cares about actually reading and…

Enhanced information retrieval is a good tool to have - at some point close reading does become difficult to scale out.

Building experience on how to use tools to automated expected drudgery like making PPT slides or wordsmithing an NSC memo is a good skill to build.

There is a lot of low hanging fruit in professional tooling that can and should be automated where possible, and some class similar to the "Missing Semester" at MIT except oriented towards productivity tools would be helpful.

Re: Teaching National Security Policy with AI

#13

Post by sureokbutyeah »

OWaz wrote: post #6

I find it perplexing how people are so open to just dumping personal effort onto these tools and believing the tools work accurately.

Work accurately? Relative to what? Old humans? Make up something about psychology? Physics? Economics? History? Academics have been doing that for years and we all blindly agreed their work was accurate, lauded them, then found out decades later it was garbage.

Seems typical for humans; centuries of false belief religion was accurate, now contemporary nation state politics, economics, and the engineered things they sell for profit.

So long as enough stuff is available on shelves to keep people sedate, they'll believe whatever. Our biology couples us to knowing when we need food, water; keep those normal and no one cares about anything else. Riots only occur when biology is threatened. Everything else about humanity is 100% made up false belief, appeals to empty trust in what we say.

Physics makes it pretty clear its all just skins suits pulling illusions out their ass all the way down. We can never change the immutable forces of physics, there's too much other stuff in universe rushing in to correct. This is it for humans; idle about on Earth hallucinating.

Re: Teaching National Security Policy with AI

#15

Post by sarchertech »

sureokbutyeah wrote: post #13
OWaz wrote: post #6

I find it perplexing how people are so open to just dumping personal effort onto these tools and believing the tools work accurately.

Work accurately? Relative to what? Old humans? Make up something about psychology? Physics? Economics? History? Academics have been doing that for years and we all blindly agreed their work was accurate, lauded them, then found out decades later it was garbage. Seems typical for humans; centuries of false belief religion was accurate, now contemporary nation state politics, economics, and the engineered things they s…

So if you’re reading a summary of a bullshit document written by an old human, created by a machine trained on billions of bullshit documents written by old humans, what do you get out of that?

Re: Teaching National Security Policy with AI

#16

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

alephnerd wrote: post #12
suddenlybananas wrote: post #3

>Policy students have to read reams of documents weekly. Our hypotheses was that our student teams could use AI to ingest and summarize content, identify key themes and concepts across the content, provide an in-depth analysis of critical content sections, and then synthesize and structure their key insights and apply their key insights to solve their specific policy problem. Yeah who cares about actually reading and…

Enhanced information retrieval is a good tool to have - at some point close reading does become difficult to scale out. Building experience on how to use tools to automated expected drudgery like making PPT slides or wordsmithing an NSC memo is a good skill to build. There is a lot of low hanging fruit in professional tooling that can and should be automated where possible, and some class similar to the "Missing Seme…

Synthesis and summarization is literally the main job of an analyst. Frequently the real information is hidden in the tone, tenor, and syntax, not necessarily in the broader content (aka reading between the lines).

Re: Teaching National Security Policy with AI

#17

Post by vouaobrasil »

alephnerd wrote: post #12
suddenlybananas wrote: post #3

>Policy students have to read reams of documents weekly. Our hypotheses was that our student teams could use AI to ingest and summarize content, identify key themes and concepts across the content, provide an in-depth analysis of critical content sections, and then synthesize and structure their key insights and apply their key insights to solve their specific policy problem. Yeah who cares about actually reading and…

Enhanced information retrieval is a good tool to have - at some point close reading does become difficult to scale out. Building experience on how to use tools to automated expected drudgery like making PPT slides or wordsmithing an NSC memo is a good skill to build. There is a lot of low hanging fruit in professional tooling that can and should be automated where possible, and some class similar to the "Missing Seme…

I don't think it is when the students are random variables, because enhanced information retrieval will increase the proportion of the lazy in the class.

Re: Teaching National Security Policy with AI

#18

Post by bgwalter »

Just read Mearsheimer and the think tank policy papers if you want to know what is actually going on. Go to the Stanford Hoover Institute if you want to sell what is actually going on to the American public.

Why would LLMs help, unless trained on classified information for which you could also use an internal search engine? In the end it comes down to how much military, economic and propaganda power you have and how much you are willing to deploy it.

The whole interaction with LLMs, which focuses on clicking, wrestling with a stupid and recalcitrant dialogue partner distracts from thinking. Better read original information yourself and take a long walk to organize it in your own mind.

Re: Teaching National Security Policy with AI

#19

Post by formerphotoj »

bgwalter wrote: post #18

Just read Mearsheimer and the think tank policy papers if you want to know what is actually going on. Go to the Stanford Hoover Institute if you want to sell what is actually going on to the American public. Why would LLMs help, unless trained on classified information for which you could also use an internal search engine? In the end it comes down to how much military, economic and propaganda power you have and how…

And after the walk, talk with an intelligent human dialog partner to exchange ideas and concepts that illuminate the schemas. Heck, walk and talk together! :)

Re: Teaching National Security Policy with AI

#20

Post by kenjackson »

radioactivist wrote: post #9

At one point this states: > Claude was also able to create a list of leaders with the Department of Energy Title17 credit programs, Exim DFC, and other federal credit programs that the team should interview. In addition, it created a list of leaders within Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget that would be able to provide insights. See the demo here: and then there is a video of them "d…

That was really weird. I did do this with ChatGPT 4o and it seems to do a good job of creating this list. But I don't know anything about this field, so I don't know how accurate it is.
Post reply on HN