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Comment by starpilot | Hacker News Reader

Is this a good thing? Governing is at its essence people management, and the best scientists don't always make the best managers. They may not be persuasive enough to rally others to their cause, or see the importance in doing so, or understand the give-and-take of politics, just the crusade for "truth." A scientist may be better and smarter, but impotent and walked over if he can't actually do politics with other messy humans.

> I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.

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You're making a lot of assumptions and leveraging old stereotypes. There "seem" to be plenty of great managers, department heads, professors who are in charge of large programs with many stakeholders etc.

The stereotype of the aloof scientist who's unable to connect with people really needs to go away imo.

Well, "scientists" isn't a uniform population in terms of people management skills, and scientists who self-select to run for office are already in one important way outside of the norm for that population. So while it makes sense not to assume someone would make a good politician just because they're a scientist, it doesn't make sense to assume a scientist who runs for office will necessarily make for a poor politician.

My company has two engineering departments. 1 that has a very traditional management chain (non-technical) that is very bureaucratic with lots of meetings. The other promotes only the best technical engineers with ~10 years of experience and people skills. The latter typically performs far better finishing all projects on time and under budget. My boss's boss knows every table in our database, how each interface to our various apps works...etc. All our management in that department can speak on the same level as our vendors and drive key design and architecture decisions and the next day be talking to shareholders in the political realm. When someone asks them a question they can give an answer down to the lowest level of granularity if need be. So my experience based theory of management is to take high performing domain experts with people skills and put them in management in lieu of typical Harvard MBA types. Then pay for them to take some finance classes to round off that skill set if needed.

In this case the domain is politics not science. If anything your argument is in agreement with the parent.

I know what you're saying, but I don't think you're catching my meaning. I believe good leadership involves specific skill sets applied to a particular area and that very few people can truly serve in the generalist role that the MBA & politicians try to sell you.

I, for one, could do with a lot less "people management" in government, and a lot more liberty.

Given the data from the 20th century, when scientists are in charge not only do you get a lot less liberty, you get a lot more rationalized wide scale atrocities.

I think it's a good thing. Just because scientists are running doesn't mean they'll be elected, meaning it will weed out the people who can't manage, especially over time. A larger pool of potential elected officials means that the government is more likely to reflect the people. Plus, having these smart-yet-non-politicians available for election would be very good for times when trust in typical politicians is faded.

As we have seen in recent elections, replacing politicians with non-politicians has been a disaster for the country. Why is a scientist running better than a science-aware politician running?

I think I'd be fine with a politician with a non science background if they had excelled in Math/Science based courses in highschool and were generally curious as to how our world works. The problem is that most politicians I've met have a strong legal background (good), but a non existent technical background. How can you make key decisions if you don't understand these topics? You just take the word of advisors? If two advisors tell you two different things, how do you know which to trust?

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