Urge President Trump to give scientists a seat at the table | Hacker News Reader

Urge President Trump to give scientists a seat at the table

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161 pointsvqc115 comments

The thing is that I don't care if a politician has a background in STEM subjects - in fact, if they have a STEM background, I prefer they also have a political science background or something that has to do with public policy. It doesn't need to be a formal degree if the person has a long history of political experience. This is for state level or higher. Local elections I doubt it matters so much.

I do, however, fully expect elected officials to take those in the STEM fields seriously and listen to their advice like they would listen to any expert.

I do want the elected officals to appoint STEM folks to the appropriate departments. I want someone well-versed in science to head the EPA and the like. Similarly, I want someone with teaching experience (and confidence in bettering public education) to head education. And so on.

And you'd like a banker running the SEC, of course?

With that position, I'd prefer co-chairs. For one, I'd prefer an economist with an intimate knowledge of banking, actually, who is paid a decent wage in hopes to better deflect corruption. For the other, a consumer rights specialist.

Alternatively, a banker is acceptable, as is someone well versed in the ins and outs of banking - but of course, there is the little issue of bankers not exactly being trusted because of ... well, history.

Perhaps a triumverate, the economist, consumer rights advocate, and a banker?

That would work as well. Banking is an odd place, very ripe for corruption, self-gain, and one-sided vision. What is good for one side isn't necessarily good for the other.

The main point is to balance some of these things and not wreck the economy in the process. There are some folks that are capable of balancing this stuff on their own, but there is no promise that these same individuals will go into public service - in fact, they might be more useful in other sectors. Just seems easier to have some balance by design.

yes.

experience and deep familiarity with the industry a person is regulating is extremely important. finance or not.

> I want someone well-versed in science to head the EPA and the like. Similarly, I want someone with teaching experience (and confidence in bettering public education) to head education. And so on.

Canada's Cabinet [1] is diverse and the positions are individuals representative of those fields.

Quoting from the article:

> The defence minister, Harjit Sajjan, a decorated lieutenant-colonel in the Canadian armed forces, was the first Sikh Canadian to command an army regiment

> appointing two Aboriginal politicians to cabinet, along with indigenous affairs minister, Carolyn Bennett

> The veterans affairs minister, Kent Hehr, has also overcome adversity to get to his current role. A one-time hockey player, he was struck in the neck by a bullet in a drive-by shooting, and rendered paraplegic in his early 20s. He went on to become a lawyer and an advocate for the disabled before jumping into provincial, and now federal politics.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/05/canada-diverse...

I have respect for Trudeau, in part because of this.

> Canada's Cabinet [1] is diverse and the positions are individuals representative of those fields.

I don't know if that's necessarily a good thing.

Secretaries of State are supposed to be advisers to the {elected|appointed|self-selected} leader of the Government. If they already have some personal 'skin in the game' then that may influence the advice they give, rather than listening to their experts and selecting the options that are best for the country.

For example a Lt Col certainly knows how a regiment of 5000 men works, but why should that qualify him to advise a Prime Minister on, say, the strategic implications of nuclear deterrence? He's going to have to go and ask the experts first.

In that example it might actually be better to appoint him to a totally different department, so one still benefits from his management skills but he in turn has to start from a blank slate without preconceptions.

The majority of Einsatzgruppen (SS) officers had PhDs.

Anecdotes aside, I used to think this way until I realized that being a leader is about a lot more than raw intelligence.

The best leaders (business, political or otherwise) have a unique mental resolve that is a lot stronger than the rest of us. They need to be able to thrive in chaos and stay motivated when everything is falling apart.

I arrived at this conclusion after years of looking at various CEOs and scoffing at how easily I could do the job--just make arbitrary decisions, take credit when they work and deflect when they don't, right?

It wasn't until I worked for a company that was teetering on failure that I realized there was more to it. While I would have felt completely overwhelmed, frustrated and defeated, this CEO somehow managed to stay positive and kept fighting for years until the business was in the clear.

I'd say it's more about having generic transferable skills; a PhD might know a lot about their subject area (e.g. a biologist skilled in evolution), but won't necessarily apply that knowledge to other areas of life (e.g., same biologist is a practicing Creationist). Perhaps the SS officers were chosen for exactly this kind of blind spot.

IMO the major qualification for any CEO is people skills, since most of the job consists of meetings and negotiations as opposed to any technical pursuit. And if this thread is secretly about Trump, it's hard to argue that he doesn't have people skills: http://archive.vcstar.com/opinion/columnists/ruben-navarrett...

This is really true. After working my way up in a mid-sized organization, I've learned being a CEO is hard and really easy to screw up.

As you mentioned it's about motivating people when they all want to go in a different direction. And it's not about saying "do this". That doesn't work. It's about convincing them it's the right path forward.

This will help, but isnt the real issue .. which is that the main qualifier for high office is having immense wealth.

The measure of wealth in and of itself selects for people without the depth of experience in fields other than personal-wealth-generation. Due to effects explained in Piketty's Capital, it also has a secondary selection bias, preferring inherited wealth over entrepreneurial wealth.

Given the prior, that we do have money-in-politics, it makes sense to erode that bias in a minor way by having more STEM [ and poor but innovative entrepreneur ] people get involved in politics.

It also helps as a partial measure to reduce the power of the daily alternative facts, post truth media barrage we now face [ itself partly due to big-money owning the media ] - STEM practitioners are familiar with sifting facts from noise.

We should also solve the real problem - big-[old]-money in politics - perhaps by flushing the big-money out with little-money : a torrent of 27 dollar contributions from citizens.

The massive womens rally and the Bernie movement give me hope we might achieve this - but clearly the DNC itself is afflicted by the same cancer, and must be taken over by real/progressive Democrats for there to be any hope of sane policy in America.

[edit : clarity, intent ]

Overturn Citizens United and publicly fund elections.

I think blame on Citizen's United is misplaced. Even without it, rich interests can (and do) simply buy media companies and promote politicians without any regulation at all.

In theory at least, the pooling of money into PACs allows ordinary people with small donations to make a dofference.

Maybe we should encourage ordinary citizens to put some money into PACs, which will have a greater impact than trying to prevent rich people from having influence (which doesn't usually work).

From your perspective, what were the legal issues of the case that make you disagree with it?

> the main qualifier for high office is having immense wealth.

I would modify this to say that the main qualifier for high office is having the capability to generate a lot of wealth (in the form of advertising revenue) for the media companies.

I prefer my politicians having immense wealth. I want them to have enough - whatever "enough" is for them - before assuming office.

Because it works so well in China ?

Also Ahmadinejad has a master in civil engineering, a PhD in transportation engineering, and has taught as a professor (apparently he has returned to that job).

Is it not working well in China, or even Iran?

If you ask some Chinese, they're unlikely to be happy with the results. Just look at just how horrible smog is in Beijing. How they're destroying the savings of the Chinese people. The total and completely endemic corruption ...

> Just look at just how horrible smog is in Beijing.

Huh? Have you looked at it recently? Beijing has made incredible strides in solving air pollution problems. They turned around the situation quickly to pretty decent results -- give them some more time and I'm sure they'll do even better.

China is not doing that bad. And I think one of the reasons why is in fact that high amount of STEM-educated folks in the politburo.

They did let it get pretty bad though, I was only there once in 2008 after the games and it was already pretty crazy back then.

It was pretty bad around 2008. Now, 2017, it's not perfect but it's much, much better. They're on the right track.

Separately, I want to say: judging per capita they're not doing bad.

As was most any country going through their industrialization phase. And China has gone from a third world country to second biggest economy in 20 or so years.

Iran is a Theocracy and Authoritarian and China is Authoritarian. So I'd say, not so good.

>>Iran is a Theocracy and Authoritarian

Thanks to the CIA

>>China is Authoritarian.

Yes but I would argue they are making large strides in freedom, clearly they have a LONG way to go but you have to see the changes in both the government and the culture.

Is this improvement a result of STEM leaders? Is America's decline in this area also a result of a regression in our Leaders? America used to have Inventors, Businessmen, even scientists as leaders.

Just this comment light grey because of downvotes? Why would that be?

I think the parent comment was sarcastic.

If by authoritarian you mean that the government has all authority, the same holds for any stable government, including the US's.

There are democratic procedures in China, even if it doesn't extend to every person. As an American you've most likely been indoctrinated to the American flavor of democracy, but even here our votes aren't all equal, as evidenced by the election of Trump despite having fewer popular votes (effectively disenfranchising some American voters).

American democracy is only as perfect or democratic as can be given the constraints in its ability to amend itself (American government was designed specifically to move slowly and prevent concentration of power). It would be fallacious to think that America has the perfect representative governing system. The end goal is to serve the people, and while the government of China may be different, given that the American model isn't perfect, it means there's room for alternative systems to potentially serve the interest of its people in a better way.

If you look at the efficacy of China's government, it's done pretty well objectively in lifting its population out of poverty. As much as US criticizes other governments, you have to realize the US openly admits its own citizens come first, which means you can't really take its criticisms seriously as in the best interest of its target.

The Soviet Union had a bunch of engineers in their government too and they made all kinds of stupid decisions anyway. I don't think the composition of the government matters as much as its structure and as governments go I think the US has a decent one.

I think the problem is more who our politicians are listening to then what they actually believe themselves. Banning lobbying would probably do a lot more than just trying to elect a bunch of scientists and engineers.

The engineers may have even exacerbated some things, especially in the 1950s-70s, as they were more optimistic about rapid advances in (what was then called) cybernetic control than turned out to be warranted. It seemed within short term reach to have rational, data-driven optimization of large sections of the economy, but neither the technology, nor theory, nor data was there at the time to make that actually work. It's an interesting question what would've turned out differently if expectations of rapid advances turned out to be accurate, and they had 1960s USSR-level political resources paired with something closer to today's level of data-collection and ML technology. Central economic planning, but run by an engineering-bureaucracy with the resources of 2017 Google.

You mean today's computers can assign prices to existing products and decide which new products to develop better than the market? The iPhone coming out of a neural network which isn't close to passing even a pale shadow of the Turing test (which a lot of humans pass who certainly cannot develop new products or set prices better than the market)? I wouldn't put my money on it.

(BTW Botvinnik, the first Soviet chess champion, was trying to push his (weaker than competition) chess-playing program as a basis for running the entire Soviet economy (he explained the weakness of his program for chess by it being more general than the competition; it apparently did not occur to him however that the fact that it lost to other machines and of course to people - this was 1990 - could perhaps mean it might run the economy somewhat worse than say a person. He was an engineer.))

As to electing engineers - let's put it this way: all else being equal, I'd rather be ruled by an EXPERIENCED ex-engineer (not just a guy with a degree) with a track record of achieving something, for which people who worked with them can vouch, than an ex-lawyer or an ex-journalist. But "engineer" by itself is not even a certificate of basic sanity, let alone the ability to lead someone somewhere other than the abyss, and for this HN's comment section provides ample evidence on a daily basis.

I'm not betting my labor vouchers either for or against it, just an interesting thought experiment. Some of the technical problems with 1960s cybernetics are solved now, especially for more defined tasks. The USSR had huge problems getting to work things that would now be called "supply-chain optimization" and similar and are now routinely done, in a pretty centrally planned style, at large vertically integrated companies with complex logistics. This kind of stuff just didn't work at the time at the scale Soviet planners hoped to use it (scales like "optimize agricultural production in the whole USSR"), and when people tried to use it it produced bad results. I do agree that how to switch production into new sectors and products and how not to have a terrible bureaucracy capture all these decisions is a different, probably more difficult question though, certainly having some logistics optimization tools that work isn't solving the full picture (it's just better than having those problems and also having logistics optimization tools that don't work).

There's a huge difference between a vertically integrated company competing for customers and vendors and the entire economy of a country, IMO. One evidence is that large companies keep ossifying and failing to adapt all the time which means the economy needs more than one giant company to move forward. A new Google needs a way to tell the state/the giant computer/whatever, "you're wrong, search works badly and we can do better." It's very hard to do that if the giant computer is running everything and effectively decides what you do (and it cannot run the economy if it cannot decide who does what, or at least what projects are funded and which aren't.)

Also the USSR didn't just have problems optimizing supply chains. It had a problem deciding what to make. You couldn't buy woolen sweaters so you bought woolen socks and made sweaters from the woolen threads making up the sock (yes, I fucking participated in this fuckery). How is a giant neural network going to figure out how many socks and sweaters people want better than demand affecting prices affecting production, even if I grant you the assumption that the problem of managing the socks supply chain is nailed today?

What, A/B testing not good enough for you? Please rate how you liked these two socks, this will be taken into account in order to serve you better.

I hear you, I just think you're a lot like that Soviet cybernetician [1], meaning that you think you're very close to the technology of that ever-elusive tomorrow, but you aren't :-) Of course it's not really fair to say that since you qualified your statements, it just sounded good and I can't miss an opportunity to fire a cheap shot at the AI/big data bubble :-)

[1] Nobody was called that as cybernetics was declared "a servant of Imperialism", I guess nominally because automating away jobs hurts workers or something, which is one reason the USSR never produced particularly good computing machinery. But I get whom you refer to.

You are missing the plot completely if you think the USSR failed because of a lack of computing power. The incentives at every level of the communist system were misaligned. It was all about loyalty, not embarrassing the higher-ups, and not rocking the boat. Working too hard, or pointing out a flaw in the system that embarrassed your boss, were horrible things to do in the USSR. That's why there were shortages of even basic items like bread, where the supply was easy to predict. It's why a lot of things that got built, got built extremely poorly, like cars. And eventually, it's why Chernobyl happened, as well as many other nuclear disasters you never heard about in the Urals.

How would you ban lobbying consistent with the First Amendment?

Yes. Adding a certain monoculture of persons is tantamount to "more people with green eyes would help." There are many types of intelligences, experiences, wisdom and values besides analytical, especially social.

I do think we need some fairer, structured, open reevaluation of certain laws like US commercial code, income tax and fixed monetary fines which harm the poor and benefit the rich, whereas income-/balance-sheet-based fines (ie Finland)

In my view, the entire education process in China is ideological from the git go. Techies in China just happen to be more likely to be groomed for government positions.

I suspect that non-Western countries have different preferences for what disciplines to study. For instance, they probably don't have much use for degrees in US law or European art history. STEM subjects happen to be more portable across borders, and can be turned into a job that can pay off more quickly -- a practical issue when you can't fall back on family money.

About a third of the PMs here in Portugal were also engineers, yet we're not exactly topping the charts of the EU (at least, not the good ones).

As trivia, the current UN secretary-general - one of our former PMs - is a Physics and Electrical Engineering graduate.

I think electing people from a wider range of backgrounds (instead of mostly lawyers) would be advantageous. Having some scientists, teachers, and many other educated professions, who can share their diverse perspectives with their other elected peers would be beneficial.

In most parts of Asia there is strong societal and family pressure for males to major in STEM. Colleges oblige by renaming some subjects like economics and business and trades engineering. Then articles come out how the West is losing the STEM defree race to Asia. They are, but not as bad as it looks to these naming conventions.

You're being ironic, but of course it does work well in China. It is an authoritarian country (not the STEM minister's fault) but it's doing remarkably well in almost every other respect.

The problem isn't that politicians are stupid, the problem is that they have adverse incentives. Education is no vaccine against corruption, and if you're not a team player you won't get advanced by your party.

Anecdotally I don't think choosing leaders with STEM backgrounds would produce improvements in acceptance of climate science. Here's some members of congress who are climate deniers despite their STEM backgrounds.

Joe Barton, Texas 6th, industrial engineer and climate denier.

Tom Coburn (senator from Oklahoma from 2005-2015) is an obstetrician and leading climate denier.

Thom Tillis, climate denier and senator from North Carolina, has a degree in "technology management".

Timothy F. Murphy, Pennsylvania 18th, climate denier with a Ph.D in psychology.

Steve Scalise, Louisiana 1st, climate denier with a B.S. in computer science.

And that's just what I found off the top of my head plus 5 minutes of clicking through the bios of some of the Republican members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, then googling to check if they were climate deniers. I'm sure people will take this opportunity to bash medical doctors, but I think it definitely counts as STEM, and they generally have abhorrent views on health policy as well.

I wonder how many of these people truly disbelieve climate change, and how many are "towing the party line"?

Toeing the party line would be voting no on climate change bills and keeping your mouth shut. I came across a couple of people apparently doing that, and they of course didn't make the list. I think all but one or two of the people listed gave some wacky statement invoking the Bible to say that humans can't change the climate.

Don't forget that 2012 presidential candidate Herman Cain has a B.S in Math and a MSc in Computer Science. By that criteria he should have been HN's candidate of choice.

I didn't like her politics, but Margaret Thatcher had a BSc in Chemistry, and went on to work as a research chemist.

Credit where credit's due: she understood the problem of climate change: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnAzoDtwCBg

And the ozone layer.

Angela Merkel has a similar background, doesn't she?

She had a doctorate.

I'm not hopeful. I am young but my experince has been that moving up the leadership or management ladder requires a vastly different set of skills than stem and if you are serious about doing it you will have to leave your stem behind, or you simply won't be able to compete.

True. But your background lasts. Management gives you people skills, organizational ones, teaches you to listen, and a sense of duty towards your team members. Couple that to a solid technical/scientific background, and you got a prepared leader.

Exactly, you better at least be aware of some of the "dark arts" to defend against them. For one, being a provocateur can actually be a good thing, strange right?

Generally, we want people of good character, integrity and intelligence to rise to the top. STEM is fine, but other backgrounds are fine too. They should inspire people so as to draw the attention away from the power mongers they will be running against.

Dear god the last thing I'd ever want is a country ruled by engineers. Most have one track minds, can't multitask, and can't see the forest beyond the trees. Maybe if they also have some sort of background in philosophy/economics/humanities or anything that can add perspective on the human condition, managing people, etc...

Here's a list of PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) graduates from Oxford: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_University_of_Oxford_p....

They're very much a mixed bag.

Right I'm the only STEM major I know that I'd even sort of vaguely trust to not fuck over large swatch of humans due to a belief in elegant solutions. And even then thats only because I'm a tad biased.

More Studio Art Majors and Interpretive Dancers please.

The call is for more engineers and scientists to be part of the decision process in the hope that they would be able to balance the anti-science streak that seesm representative of the current political make-up.

No-one is saying that political office should be held only by scientists and engineers.

President Carter had training in nuclear engineering. President Hoover had a geology degree, later practicing mining engineering. Neither were particularly exceptional Presidents.

Saying that Carter wasn't "exceptional" is quite an understatement. He kinda sucked at his job in general, and at getting the Congress to support his agenda in particular.

From my experience, guys with the highest IQs are the worst leaders and they inexplicably, usually lack vision and courage.

Hey, just a clarification. Could you ballpark, roughly, the ballpark that you're talking about for "highest IQs" and the IQs of the better leaders you've worked with? Because I think in software development, we fail to appreciate that 100 - by definition - is the median IQ and that half of people are below 100. I'd say the bulk of highly effective leaders in software I've worked with were substantially over 100. Before software, I have worked with different populations with greater variance. Unintelligent people usually make poor leaders.

Anyway, people have written and research a lot about this (MBTI, EQ, etc) and IQ is just a component and IQ itself is a very coarse grained metric that has many subcomponents. High IQ certainly doesn't hurt in general.

I meant real high IQ like most engineers & scientists, maybe IQ > 125 or 130. I guess there may be some relation between higher IQs and poor communication skills, less courage and other traits. But that's just a personal view with no scientific evidence.

That's what I guessed. I have seen some very smart individuals lack empathy for people that weren't as smart or otherwise capable, or undercommunicate because they thought more things were tacitly understood than really were. I have no idea if there's a negative correlation there.

Elect more leaders who come from a Philosophy background.

Wanting more STEM seems like an indirect way of wanting more critical, evidence-based, thinking. Atheism is probably a better proxy.

Do I want more critical, evidence-based thinking, or more decent human beings who want to serve rather than play god? I wasn't thrilled with say Cass Sunstein's ideas when he was appointed by Obama.

Why does it need to be either/or?

To me, being a decent human being who wants to serve rather than play god is a minimum requirement for public service. I also want that person to be able to think critically and base policy on evidence (when there is evidence to be had). Sometimes, these things even overlap: For example, criminal justice.

The problem is the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Everyone thinks they're decent.

Few would disagree that reducing illegal immigration is OK, the issue is ordering a wall with little consideration of costs, effectiveness, game theory, political reactions, etc. The hard stuff.

I wasn't thrilled with say Cass Sunstein's ideas when he was appointed by Obama.

Would you expand on this? I was quite impressed with what I read in Nudge. Did any of this practical thinking carry over to OIRA? Or was that perhaps part of the problem?

It's impressive, but falls into the "playing God" bucket for me.

Gotcha. I'll admit I was hoping for more, but I can understand not wanting to get into it in a comment. Can you point me to a critique (your own, or someone else's) of Sunstein that would elaborate on this for me, in particular his work under Obama?

I assume you joke, but I'm truly worried that the Fundamentalist Christians are making progress towards their goal of imposing Christian sharia law on us all. They are a powerful and single issue voter block. They will show up to vote for anyone, even a "pussy grabber", if they feel it will help their cause. If you've never been to the South and think I"m exaggerating, check out Jesus Camp[1] to get an idea of how this group thinks. People rarely acknowledge the danger of our own religious extremists.

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0486358/

You won't believe the number of aerospace/mechanical engineers in the federal government that believe in Creationism.

No doubt, being good at cal 8 doesn't mean general smarts.

Most Chinese political leaders have an engineering background, yet if you asked me what's the main characteristic of Chinese leaders when compared to leaders of other countries, "critical thinking" wouldn't be among the first definitions coming to me.

Of course, it is a fallacy to assume that leaders from STEM backgrounds may be qualitatively better than others, or even perform better for their constituents. But then again, such leaders would definitely not ignore climate change wholesale.

If there is indeed a correlation between education in any of the STEM fields and "leadership qualities", would it not be better to reform education to introduce skills implicit to these fields at an early age (logic, reasoning, rational discourse, understanding of the scientific process) instead of selecting for these qualities later on?

This is doomed to fail. Even if they succeed, it will be a cosmetic victory. The explicitly defined object of desire is the trappings of power. The SEAT rather than the influence. But nobody is taken seriously because they have a seat at the table, they have a seat at the table because they're taken so seriously that the meeting is worth less without them.

The only setback Trump has caused to science's input to policy was removing it's current cosmetic status. Nobody in government, in either party, takes science seriously when it conflicts with their policy goals. It's just a cudgel that sometimes aligns with their goals, and is wielded the same as any other block of useful idiots with fancy nametags.

In other words: if the government had actually taken science seriously when Democrats were in power, this would have never been a problem.

Jimmy Carter was an engineer and he turned out to be bad president. I think the president should be someone who can work with people and gets things done. You could be the smartest person in the world and if you can't deal with people you will end up not being an effective president.

We need fewer leaders with legal backgrounds as well. The law trains you to argue a case by selectively ignoring unfavorable evidence, and guess what our politicians are incredibly good at?

> The law trains you to argue a case by selectively ignoring unfavorable evidence

No, it doesn't.

A law degree is great thing for a leader to have, but not sufficient. You need people with integrity too. I think a lot of the common backlash against lawyers is due to the fact that a lawyer lacking integrity is good at circumventing the law. Similar to how a doctor, usually a profession known for healing, would also know how to make many people sick.

> A law degree is great thing for a leader to have, but not sufficient

A law degree has an opportunity cost. That's a bunch of years you didn't spend learning something else. Is that the best thing you could have spent that time learning?

Bear in mind that a huge proportion of our politicians have law degrees. If we had as few people with law degrees as have backgrounds in statistics or economics or engineering then sure, we'd want more -- but we are in no immediate danger of that.

Lawyers value and spend more time training themselves on breaking apart flimsy arguments and constructing good ones. Yes I do think this skill is worth the opportunity cost. And one of the skills to be learned early, so subsequent knowledge can be placed on solid footing.

As an aside, given I had to learn what little I know of argumentation on my own, I wonder if this is a coincidence or something intentionally kept out of the minds of the populace to disempower?

Anyway, I'd be in favor of a higher proportion of STEM reps. Beware, I think you'd find STEM folks who would/do ignore facts that don't support their pet conclusion. Integrity is critical in these roles in any case. I wish people were a better judge of character.

> Is that the best thing you could have spent that time learning?

If you are going to be writing laws and evaluating the practical impact of proposed laws written by others? Yes, learning law is pretty much the most relevant thing you can learn. Political science, public policy, public administration, economics, finance (both public and private), international relations, history, and game theory in any context are also quite broadly useful. (And while most of those are fields you could get a degree in, they have substantial overlap.)

Most STEM subjects are pretty far from being broadly useful; each would be relevant to a small minority of the work of any legislator (and even where it was relevant, multiple of the previously mentioned fields would also be relevant.)

> No, it doesn't.

Yes, it does. (Not the body of knowledge; the practice of law.) Just look at the numerous cases where district attorneys -- incidentally the most popular first stop for people with law degrees planning on a career in politics -- are found to have suppressed unfavorable evidence for career advancement.

That's an example of politics, not law, teaching people to suppress unfavorable evidence. The advancement and incentives you discuss are political, not legal.

Margaret Thatcher comes to mind. Jimmy Carter comes to mind.

Angela Merkel comes to mind.

For reference, here is link http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2012/02/by-the-numbers-th... to 2011 - 2012 congress and their career backgrounds.

Might as well go the extra mile and demand people to elect only the good politicians.

Just like demanding programmers to not write bugs.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/1...

Elect more leaders like me! Seriously? This is seriously at the top of HN? What is so great about science? Didn't science create nuclear weapons? Isn't it rushing us towards the AI Singularity? Why are you so confident that STEM is the answer to all our prayers?

I do STEM because it provides for my family. However, I appreciate and understand that I might very well be the problem rather than the solution. But, I am good at it and pays well and sometimes it seems to do good when in the right hands.

If you ask me though - elect more leaders who are anti-violence and anti-consumption. But hey, one person one vote - right?

You owe your life to STEM. We don't get to ~7 billion without it. You are the roadways that bring you food. You are the pipes that bring you water, and carry away your feces.

I agree with your assessment though, STEM isn't sufficient to be a good leader. You need to care about people and want to improve their well-being too.

How about electing more leaders who know how to solve problems and can do a decent job of breaking down complex problems?

I don't care where they learned how to do that.

When I clicked the link I expected to be presented evidence this approach would create better outcomes than the status quo.

It definitely wouldn't hurt to have less lawyers in leadership. they seem a little over represented.

Congress' job is to write, evaluate, and vote on laws. It makes sense that we have legal experts--IE, lawyers--doing that.

I can definitely see a good argument to the contrary: Politicians should be the experts in negotiating/being the interface between field experts (scientists, lawyers, economists) and public values (voters or all citizens). Having them distinct from the legal experts seems sensible.

But right now, law is the language of politics/policy, so I'm not sure how this separation would work. Congress can say "NASA, based on your input and the public's preferences, you get these resources to do aeronautics" and leaves the details up to NASA, and that's fine, but if Congress just says "lawyers, based on your input and the public's preferences, write a law on decriminalized cannabis use" and let's the lawyers handle the details....I dunno. Somehow, it feels like law requires less delegation and more technical understanding on the part of Congress than aeronautics does.

I see the problem not as too many lawyers, but as corruption (though not in a literal bribery sort of way) and--for lack of a better term--politics. (e.g., the problem isn't lawyers don't believe in climate change. The problem is that climate change has become a political issue that half of the country rejects ideologically.)

Politicians in congress don't write laws themselves. They are written by staff and unfortunately often lobbyists. I would much prefer if they had real expertise in some areas and left the detail of writing laws to the lawyers in their stuff.

Gotta fix the top of operating system before suggesting a lowly cabinet position that will be ignored anyhow. There are fundamental problems with the incestuous corporations buying off the news media and the politicians, combined with a broken and corrupt system which has failed in Romantic ways. Things which the illegitimate, corrupt politicians cannot or will not address. This doesn't mean throw everything away or wait by the phone for incrementalism, but multiple, major, decisive changes are vital in order to level the playing field for public servants.

0) Only allow X dollars per campaign from named, naturalized, human beings to fund specific candidates, and the candidates must disclose how it must be spent only on that campaign. No more super PACs or dark money pools.

0.5) No more special interest political smear ads. Again, the clear and present danger to the republic by manipulating elections supercedes unlimited "freedom" to persuade people that "clean coal" is good for them.

1) Make it a felony for any elected official to accept any compensation, gift or privilege including food, goods, services, vacations or exclusive event participation. Politicans are there to be public servants, not cut book deals or consulting gigs.

2) Matching public campaign funds to private funds.

3) Make it a felony for a for-profit news organization to be funded by advertisements or politicians.

4) Eliminate the electoral college: it has failed, twice. Replace it with national popular ranked vote (1st Sally, 2nd Joe, ...)

5) Eliminate jerrymandering by redrawing all districts based on a simple, deterministic, open-source algorithm finding population centroids. Tweaks to this law can only be enacted to fix flaws and edge-cases without predetermined favoritism.

6) News media embargo on manipulating election results from a day before early voting starts until after all final results are in, punishable by a 10 years in prison and/or a $250,000 fine.

7) National voter conformance: national vote on the same day, permanent absentee voting by mail, early voting (two weeks), same day registration for in-person and open-source blockchain tabulation with a paper (non-thermal) receipt. No discriminatory "poll tax" or bureaucratic hoops laws. Period.

People with decent STEM backgrounds can be MUCH more gainfully employed elsewhere. Higher echelons of US government are badly underpaid, which is why they attract the kind of "talent" they do. A Google search shows that it takes $110K to decently get by in DC. $175K for someone who is expected to be at the top of their game is a bad deal when a professional can make two to three times as much in the private sector. So you get a bunch of has-beens who aren't good for anything else. The only exception I can think of is the USDS, where idealistic young people go to serve their country and take a massive pay cut (which is even more massive if you factor in the opportunity cost), but sooner or later life will catch up to them, too, and they'll discover they need to save for retirement and college, pay for private school for their kids, etc, etc. Shit's expensive.

Worse, there is a massive chicken-and-egg problem here.

At least with normal jobs, I only have to risk occasionally encountering someone who is difficult or slightly incompetent. While dealing with difficult people is normal, at least right now it isn’t a daily occurrence.

Conversely, I can pretty much guarantee that a huge number of future colleagues would be making my life miserable when in Congress. Some of them apparently cannot be reasoned with at all (“I’m sorry, you have the wrong letter after your name therefore your idea sucks <turning brain off now>”), and a pretty insane number of them just do whatever they want without obeying rules.

It reaches a point where you have to decide where you can do the most good, and there just doesn’t seem to be a way to do much “good” by being in public office. I feel better working on engineering projects that go somewhere.

Just stop electing republicans for a start.

So you are proposing a Democrat led dictatorship?

There are other parties. The two party monopoly is exactly what led us to this disaster of an election.

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