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Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists?

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Re: Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists?

#61

Post by ekianjo »

trb wrote: post #48
ekianjo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Singapore is also a very wealthy state, and it has nothing to do with the population size and the costs of living there. You are comparing countries on a single factor, the population - how is that variable relevant? Then why don't you compare with Turkmenistan, also 5 million people, no scientists in charge and a ridden with poverty ? How about Sierra Leone, 5 million people. no scientists, ridden with civil war? On…

Just to clarify: I didn't want to say that Singapore is successful due to its small-ish population size, just that another country is almost as successful _without_ scientists at the top of the government. I chose Finland as an example since its population size is the same, the per-capita income is similiar and it enjoys a low rate-of-crime as well. Actually, the president of Turkmenistan has a PhD in medical science…

Allright, seems like I picked up the wrong examples :) I agree on your last sentence as least, that the educational background of politicians is irrelevant to the success of a nation.

Then again, there are many different ways to define what "success" truly means. It really depends what you consider: wages / welfare / freedom of expression / perceived happiness, etc... It's hard to compare two different countries unless you take a look at a bunch of criteria.

One thing I would add, though: you cannot judge a country's current success by the politicians currently in charge. For all you know, they may not be the ones responsible for the current situation and may just benefit from what was done years ago. Economics trends are very much happening on the long term, you would not see a net difference in a few years of policy (unless something very drastic is done). Europe is, for the most, now suffering from poor decisions made during the 80s and 90s regarding sovereign debt, and only recently the massive problems seem to surface while the policies have been going on for about 30years+.

Re: Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists?

#62

Post by Retric »

kolinko wrote: post #44
prewett wrote: post #22

Why don't Americans elect scientists? Because current American culture is anti-intellectual. I can't really back this up concretely, but as an American, it's hard to find anything intellectual around. A long time ago, people went to hear lectures on the weekends, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates were well attended. Now, TV "news" is a joke, and even NPR is becoming a bit entertainy. I get the feeling that few American…

Anti-intellectuality aside. Understanding science is important, but a good scientist ≠ good manager. A scientist is usually someone with narrow, but deep knowledge/experience, as a politician I want someone with a broader set of experiences & knowledge. I mean, MSc president - sure. PhD president - probably no, thank you :)

It's unusual for a 'scientist' to be working alone now days. In academia it's fairly common for a single 'scientist' to manage 2-12 graduate and post doc students. And groups of 10's or even 100's of people working together on the same project is increasingly common.

PS: By 'scientist' I mean someone with a PHD doing research. Plenty of people do research that don't fall under that umbrella, but that's a side issue.

Re: Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists?

#63

Post by Elrac »

As Isaac Asimov complained years ago, “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” There was a brief period, roughly coincident with the Apollo space program, when rockets were cool and so were rocket scientists. Since then, the public image of science and scientists in America has been in decline.

I believe that religion plays a strong role here. Religious dogma is threatened by scientific knowledge, and nowhere in the developed Western world has the backlash been as strong as in the US, which also happens to be the most religious of Western prosperous democracies. What's worse, the anti-science campaign of the religious is smashingly successful: only 40% of Americans give credence to biology's strongest and most useful theory, that of Evolution. Among the countries sampled in this study: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060810-evolu... that's almost at rock bottom, undercut only by Turkey.

Re: Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists?

#64

Post by vidarh »

adrianN wrote: post #59
smsm42 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People still go to lectures - or find them on YouTube, download them from the web or torrents, etc. And the debates are as much "attended" and more - people just don't have to be physically there anymore. It's all right with Americans and thinking - it's just most of them don't turn their thinking towards government. Which is a blessing - it is brilliant minds who brought us the current financial crisis, for example,…

Except Marxism was extremely anti-intellectual. You didn't have scientists in positions of power, instead peasants became majors. Children of intellectuals were forbidden to attend universities and forced instead to work in the industry.

There's nothing marxist in what you describe. Maoist or Leninist, maybe. Then again that's the case for the description you responded to as well.

Re: Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists?

#65

Post by suresk »

rndmize wrote: post #10
trb wrote: post #3

What is the article arguing? Is there even an argument made? Why should Americans elect more scientists? Will it lead to a higher quality of living or more wealth or what? It mentions China as a pro-scientists country, but why? It's riddled with human rights violations, corruption and environmental pollution. While American politicians decry climate change openly, China just seems to ignore it. Singapore is a city-st…

American politicians decry climate change openly? The way things have been going the last few years, you could have fooled me. Huntsman was notable as the only republican candidate to say he believed in climate change. I think the idea behind the article is that scientists are generally trained to work with/find factual information and grow their understanding, while engineers are generally going to take scientific k…

While I believe that humans are having a significant, negative effect on the climate, I can see how there might be some doubt and skepticism as to the magnitude of the damage and how much of that is caused by humans. I'm not saying I agree with full-on denial, but there is probably some room for discussion. The problem is that we aren't really having that discussion.

Our more fundamental science problem is that a significant portion of Americans and several of the Republican presidential candidates don't believe in evolution, despite the fact that civilization has benefited from the application of it for centuries.

Re: Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists?

#67

Post by yardie »

uuilly wrote: post #46
olalonde wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Intellectuals and society" by Thomas Sowell is an interesting book on the subject. His central thesis is that intellectuals -- "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas - writers, academics, and the like" - are having negative effects. http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Thomas-Sowell/dp...

Fantastic book. He also talks a lot about how being good at one thing doesn't make you good at another. Sowell's notion of effective intelligence is rooted more in experience than in aptitude. So a scientist with no political experience is less likely to be good at politics than someone of lesser intellect with that experience.

One example is president Jimmy Carter. Brilliant thinker, scientist and business man. Mediocre skills in leadership and absolutely dismal in working through beauracracy. He had the one-two punch of having an oil crisis and recession, unlike Obama he just couldn't get it turned around in time for the next election.

Re: Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists?

#68

Post by TeMPOraL »

While I'd definitely want to see more people with science/engineering background managing countries, I keep wondering, whether this wouldn't be solving a wrong problem. How much problems are there because western politicians supposedly are morons who can't handle the complexities of this world, and how much problems are caused by Upton Sinclair's "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"? The latter case would probably affect scientist-politicians as well.

Re: Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists?

#69

Post by moultano »

whatusername wrote: post #53
runningdogx wrote: post #29

One aspect I've never thought about before is the selection of representatives for parliament/legislature. In the U.S., they're pre-selected in primary elections per party, but the national elections are single-winner per seat, so the candidates are out pandering to the voters constantly. I don't know percentages, but many other countries use multi-winner to select their national multi-seat bodies, and my understandi…

What do you see as the problem with IRV?

The most extreme minority gets their second choice votes counted first. This leads to some absurd non-monotonicities. http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

Re: Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists?

#70

Post by bjnortier_hn »

ekianjo wrote: post #27
Radim wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody who has worked in academia would claim that scientists are somehow "more pragmatic". Capricious, scheming, vindictive... just like the rest of the population :) Plus the fact that scientists are typically paid by tax payers', in a stable governmental position (at least in Europe), and many never held any real job in their whole lives, only adds to my doubts.

Not all scientists are government-employed. It may be a majority in some countries, but I would not disregard the amount of scientists employed in the private industries as well. They may not be involved in fundamental research, rather "applied sciences", but they are scientists nonetheless. Anyone who produces data through experimentation, analyses it, uses critical judgment and appropriate tools to make evidence-ba…

'Anyone who [...] uses critical judgment and appropriate tools to make evidence-based decisions'

Except for the experimentation part, that could describe a lawyer. Which begs the question,

Where does it go wrong?

Why do people from an evidence-based career become embroiled in the kind of back[stabbing/scratching] politics that seems to be the norm today? And how can it be fixed?

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