Many scientists are atheists or at the very least not strictly religious. It seems that you currently have to believe in God to be elected. Is this keeping many of them from even running?
Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?
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Re: Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?
#22Re: Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?
#23Americans don't elect scientists, because scientists don't run for office. Scientists don't run for office because they want to be scientists rather than politicians. Maybe the problem is that American politics requires elected officials to spend 100% of their time being politicians?
Re: Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?
#24Because elections are a poor way to elect competent people, overall?
The best democratic system in the world won't help anything if the population is not educated or interested enough to make an informed decision. Democracy itself is distorted because it doesn't thrive for optimal solutions, instead, it thrives to please the people.
The people who get elected are detached from the population to begin with. Being a "politician" is a full-time job. That's absurd. Policies are responsibility of each individual citizen.
Re: Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?
#25Many scientists are atheists or at the very least not strictly religious. It seems that you currently have to believe in God to be elected. Is this keeping many of them from even running?
And scientists aren't very good liars. If you could science your way through a campaign then there would be more scientists going for it, but unfortunately that doesn't work.
Re: Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?
#26I think a more interesting question is: why do Americans elect Lawyers? It's the most common profession in Congress (not including the self-referential "politics" answer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_111th_United_Sta...). Both presidential candidates are Harvard Law students as well.
I understand why Lawyers would want to become Lawmakers. I don't understand however such an unpopular field manages to get elected so often.
My new theory is that the House Representatives (not the Senate or Executive Branch) should be selected not by election but by random lottery, similar to jury duty. It would be much more representative of the populous than what we have today.
Re: Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?
#27There's a word for this: "technocracy".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy
I believe it comes down to whether or not scientists/engineers/etc would actually like to hold office. Truly passionate people want and need to be on the ground. Becoming a leader removes one from the processes that have a direct impact.
Re: Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have great sympathy for the position proposed in the article, with one major fear: those trained in science typically traffic in ideas that are either right (true) or wrong (false). I fear that this would dispose them toward authoritarianism, which is in fact the first word that comes to mind when I hear about Singapore. How does this compare to your personal experience?
I share this fear as well. I love the raw honesty most technical people have, but this characteristic seems to be correlated with narrowmindedness, stubbornness, and extremism. Think about how many tech folk you know with nuanced political views. Almost every one I know is either a far left socialist or far right libertarian. Given the array of fuzzy issues civilization faces, it would seem that extreme mindsets are…
Those individuals are using science to support their pre-existing narrowmindedness, stubbornness, and extremism. Science is not making them those things. On the contrary, the fundamentals of science lie in questioning pre-conceived notions in the face of findings that conflict them. This is how scientific progress is made.
Re: Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?
#29Re: Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?
#30From the opinion piece kindly submitted here, which is by mathematician and popular author on mathematics John Allen Paulos: "I’ve visited Singapore a few times in recent years and been impressed with its wealth and modernity. I was also quite aware of its world-leading programs in mathematics education and naturally noted that one of the candidates for president was Tony Tan, who has a Ph.D. in applied mathematics.…
I have great sympathy for the position proposed in the article, with one major fear: those trained in science typically traffic in ideas that are either right (true) or wrong (false). I fear that this would dispose them toward authoritarianism, which is in fact the first word that comes to mind when I hear about Singapore. How does this compare to your personal experience?
You're probably not a scientist. Mathematics mostly traffics in things which are right or wrong; science rarely does. That's one of the criticisms that the peanut gallery often lobs at it: that it's just based on theories.
When ideas are actually being trafficked -- that is when they're new and struggling for breathing room, they're rarely clearly right or wrong. Consensus forms over a fairly long amount of time. With luck, and a lot of verification, over the course of a decade or three theories elide to the canon of science's best understanding of a given problem space. There we might broadly refer to theories as "true", but that's just everyday conversational shorthand, not the language of science.
The problem in the intersection with pop culture is that it's generally only well after those couple of decades of a theory working its way into the canon of scientific understanding that it begins working its way through pop culture. This is the critical point where there's a lot of naysaying from the general public and a lot of rolled eyes from scientists. It's at this point that science transforms into politics: each side hardens their positions, begins stating them in absolutist terms and tries to win the other side over, usually based on an appeal to authority.
Science itself is, in fact, a slow and reasonably democratic process. It is at times dogmatic, but far less than, say, American politics.