71–80 of 151 posts
There'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.
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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.
You know what else scientists aren't? A group that can be generalized about that easily. Are you seriously willing to put forth scientists 'can tell no lies'? Do you have any evidence to support this generalization? As an earlier poster has said, being a scientist doesn't make you any less human and subject to everything that goes along with that - emotions, irrationality, ego, and so on.
Because 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 "p…
Better than anything else we've tried.
I could mention Pol Pot and I could mention the Soviet Union and so on, but I won't. All I'll say is, "When you fuck up a system of government, the results get bloody extremely fast."
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The last study on this I read said that only 20% of scientists believe that science and religion are in constant conflict with each other. So the pool is not as small as you might think, if that is your requirement.
Even if it's true that only 20% of scientists believe that science and religion are in constant conflict (citation?), it does not follow that the remaining 80% believe in a supernatural overlord or are members of any mainstream cult.
The second link indicates that the study found out that about half of those scientists surveyed express a religious identity, yet only 15% say they are always in conflict. My guess is most of those in the middle count themselves as 'deists'.
At least part of the problem is structural. One contributing factor could be that the US uses direct regional elections, instead of a parliamentary system. In a parliamentary system, the people vote on a party, rather than a person, and the party decides the individuals who get elected. There's less of an emphasis on individual charisma, and charismatic leaders only need appear at the top of the ticket. A party with…
Are you sure "parliamentary system" is appropriate here?
The UK has a parliamentary system[0] - and we vote for MPs, not parties, despite some people trying to change that.
Scientists are driven by truth - politicians are not.
That said, at the end of the day scientists win when they can make statistically viable predictions and politicians win when people like what they've done so it's not as if they're exactly the same. But the engineer-type tendency to reduce this to your simple one-liner hurts far more than it helps.
If you ask a scientist what you should do about your medical condition, they say unhappy, unreasoning things like "the best data we have at the moment says you should do X and it has a 63% chance of showing some improvement but you need to watch for side effects A, B, C, and D"
If you ask a homeopath or other snake oil salesman what you should do about your medical condition, they say happy, reassuring things like "You should do Y. I'm sure it will help and it has no side effects".
Scientists suck at selling things including themselves, and politics is all about selling yourself.
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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.
In science, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The bigger the claims a hypothesis makes, the more skepticism you should have about that hypothesis.
In political terms, the bigger the policy you're talking about, the more skepticism you should have about that policy.
This mindset leads toward literal conservatism -- always make small steps away from the status quo -- or libertarianism -- we need to be skeptical of government, so let's make it as weak as possible, and move powers as close to the bottom of the pyramid as possible (i.e. get the federal government's fingers out of housing, education and healthcare, and leave them up to state or local governments.)
Why so many scientists are pro-big-government lefties has always completely baffled me.