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Comment by friedman23 | Hacker News Reader

How many people that are good at math and love science / engineering decide to go into politics? I'm just talking without evidence but my guess is politics self selects for ambitious people that are completely inept when it comes to mathematics and critical thinking in general.

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I think quite a bit. Congress regularly beats high end Wall Street investors when it comes to playing the equities market. This involves a great deal of understanding on mathematics topics involving everything from stats, probability and economics. They manage to do this part time while governing, so I'd have to say they are pretty adept.

I could be missing something though.

Insider trading is what you're missing. As evidenced by the March 2020 dump

Uh, what? The sharp drop in equities in February and March 2020 was a massive deleveraging caused by panic selling and leveraged traders being margin called.

> I think quite a bit. Congress regularly beats high end Wall Street investors when it comes to playing the equities market

Politicians are not using math to decide which stocks to pick, they are using insider information.

edit: ok, it's clear that the parent comment was sarcasm now but you never know

No they dont - they already thoroughly investigated themselves

Are you not able to see the special font that sarcastic comments are rendered in?

I suppose it's a disability of mine.

I really hate sarcasm tags and I really appreciate this comment.

Is there any evidence for this or is this just trendy and shallow politician hate?

https://hundred.org/en/innovations/student-government-lotter...

99pi did a story on this some time ago. Having an election means that kids who are shy or not popular miss out. But who would otherwise have valuable skills and want to contribute. So randomly selecting kids but giving them an out if they don’t like the job ended up working really well.

Can this be applied to government???

Sortition is classic and worth trying in modern times.

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