Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists? | Hacker News Reader

Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists?

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229 pointsmjfern187 comments

Why don't Americans elect scientists? Because current American culture is anti-intellectual. I can't really back this up concretely, but as an American, it's hard to find anything intellectual around. A long time ago, people went to hear lectures on the weekends, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates were well attended. Now, TV "news" is a joke, and even NPR is becoming a bit entertainy. I get the feeling that few Americans want to think.

That'll be the same reason Americans don't elect a Juris Doctor who was President of the Harvard Law Review, right?

I'd bet fewer than 25% of American adults can tell you both of those things.

Plain and simple:

Obama got elected because he is a great speaker and he's charismatic. Qualities much closer to being a popular actor or religious figure got him elected rather than his intellect.

It didn't hurt that people were tired of the previous party (this is a common pattern).

A JD is not a research degree. It is a second entry degree, meaning there is no necessary reason it could not be an ordinary bachelor's degree. A JSD is the US Law School equivalent to a real doctorate.

Obama was the first President of the HLS in yeeears not to publish. He's a very, very smart man but calling him an intellectual might be pushing it. His popular works are not brimming with ideas.

Don't forget that 46% of the country still voted for John McCain - a person was extremely terrible academically even after the Republican Party had launched two disastrous wars, exploded the deficit and their lack of regulation and oversight had caused the worst recession since the Great Depression. And as others have pointed out, Obama wasn't really elected because of his intellectual ability but because of the state of the economy at the time and because he's a charismatic speaker.

People still go to lectures - or find them on YouTube, download them from the web or torrents, etc. And the debates are as much "attended" and more - people just don't have to be physically there anymore. It's all right with Americans and thinking - it's just most of them don't turn their thinking towards government. Which is a blessing - it is brilliant minds who brought us the current financial crisis, for example, with their delusions about their ability to calculate risks and always stay on top of the game (check out Nassim Taleb about this). Mediocre people bring mediocre failures, brilliant people would bring spectacular - and catastrophic - ones. If a brilliant scientific theory fails, well, a couple of egos are brused, but nobody's hurt. If a brilliant political theory fails, millions die. Look what happened to marxism. They thought of themselves as political scientists building society on a rational scientific basis. No emotions, no stupid democratic politicking, just straightforward implementation of proper science. Worst nightmare of the century. I'd rather take the bumbling mediocrities in the government, thank you very much. I don't like them but at least they are less dangerous this way.

Except Marxism was extremely anti-intellectual. You didn't have scientists in positions of power, instead peasants became majors. Children of intellectuals were forbidden to attend universities and forced instead to work in the industry.

There's nothing marxist in what you describe. Maoist or Leninist, maybe. Then again that's the case for the description you responded to as well.

Really? Have you read Marx at all?

I think you are referring to the Chinese Cultural Revolution (I can not think about anything that fits your description in the Soviet history, for example) - but that has little to do with Marxism and does not follow from it. Of course, almost all communist regimes feature mass purges, especially at the beginning of their rule, but usually these purges are not specifically aimed at intellectuals but at "old elites" in order to destroy the existing power relationships and establish the new ones. I do not see anything specifically anti-intellectual in Marxist theory or practice.

You just got Marxism mixed up with the dictatorial regimes of the 20th century, such as the Soviet Union.

Please read the Communist Manifesto before you lambast it with an uninformed critique.

The Communist Manifesto leads directly to the "dictatorial regimes of the 20th century". The Communist Manifesto is not founded in any reality (psychological, political, economic), and as it is applied but fails to bring the promised benefits as it is completely ungrounded in reality, it also encourages the leaders to come to the conclusion that the only reason this can be is that the people aren't trying hard enough. This requires a stronger centralized rule to fix the problem and force the people to comply, but strengthening the centralized rule just causes more problems because centralized rule doesn't work, and it certainly doesn't work with the horrifyingly wrong Communist economic model. This causes yet more centralized power to be amassed and yet more crackdowns, until it crumbles under its own weight.

It's utterly predictable, mostly because we've seen so many try to apply it and fail in exactly the same way each time. We're well past the point where we can say the Communist Manifesto directly leads to dictatorial regimes. I will recant this statement when someone manages to apply it without turning into a dictatorial regime, but don't hold your breath for that.

You'll have to detail these applications because having studied 20th century history I haven't seen any countries implement anything that looks remotely socialist, except 1930s Barcelona.

Now were I disagree with Marxism is the advocation of the "Dictatorship of the proletariat" which I believe results in these state capitalist dictatorial regimes. I'm not an intellectual, don't take my work for it. Chomsky is a good source of information regarding the Soviet Union: http://youtu.be/K4Tq4VE8eHQ

This is called the "No true Scotsman" fallacy, and it's one of the sloppiest fallacies you can commit. It's astonishing how many people cling to it with regards to Marxism. The same thing can be said of anything. The Nazi regime wasn't really fascist. Obama isn't really a liberal. Bush wasn't really a conservative, etc, etc. All of those statements are true. And no true conservative would start a war of aggression. And no true Marxist would butcher millions.

In fact, the Soviets were constantly justifying their policies based on the writings of Marx and Lennon.

Based on Wikipedia's definition of this fallacy, I don't think your examples fit. From Wikipedia:

No true Scotsman is an informal logical fallacy, an ad hoc attempt to retain an unreasoned assertion.[1] When faced with a counterexample to a universal claim, rather than denying the counterexample or rejecting the original universal claim, this fallacy modifies the subject of the assertion to exclude the specific case or others like it by rhetoric, without reference to any specific objective rule.

The key part is "without reference to any specific objective rule", which I don't think you're taking into account.

This isn't the case. Marx differs from other ideologies in that it was Karl Marx himself that wrote The Communist Manifesto.

I can't do the same for most other ideologies; there's no Conservative Manifesto as it were.

With that in mind we can take Marx's book and compare it against history in these countries. If you do this then you will come to the conclusion that these regimes were not Marxist and in fact not even close to socialism.

Here's the danger of making assumptions about people you don't know on the internet. As it happens, I not only read the manifesto, I was born and raised in the country that had the study of the discipline of "Scientific communism" a requirement for getting any higher education: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_communism So I have a very good reason to assume that my background in both theory and practice of Marxist regimes is no less than yours. While one could have legitimate differences on the merits of teaching of Marx, it is obvious to any informed person that they were presented as the scientific basis for building new kind of society both in theory and in practice. Even if the theory was false and the practice made it degrade into dogmatic repetition of meaningless drivel, it was still presented as the scientific approach and meant to be so.

The idea that gvt should be run by common people is quite old in the US (Jacksonian democracy). I am not American, and this traits always made me wonder every time I go the US, as this is the only developed country where I heve been to where this is so pronounced. This article by Fukuyama was quite interesting in that regard: http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/fukuyama/2012/01/31/w.... He explains it by the fact that the US existed before a bureaucracy, which is the opposite of pretty much any other developed country.

I don't think that essay says what you described. There was a bureaucracy before the US - how did the British, French, and Spanish Empires run without a bureaucracy? And of course the Chinese bureaucracy was established long before the Americas were settled by Europeans.

It looks more like it's saying the US started with a distrust of bureaucracy, which it inherited from experience with the European empires, which caused us to "hobble" our bureaucracy, which were therefore less effectual, which lead to continuing distrust.

This may be a syntax error of my part: I meant that the US existed as a nation before a bureaucracy existed in the US. Obviously, bureaucracies elsewhere predates the US declaration of independency.

I still don't think his essay says that. Before the US independence, the colonies were part of the British Empire, with local legislatures in each colony. How did the British Empire manage the 13 colonies without any sort of bureaucracy?

Instead, the essay you pointed to suggests that the bureaucracy existed, but the new Americans were distrustful of it.

How do you interpret the quote "The origins of this, as Martin Shefter pointed out many years ago, is due to the fact that democracy preceded bureaucratic consolidation in contrast to European democracies that arose out of aristocratic regimes." ? It is possible that I misunderstood it (and would be glad to be corrected if I did).

The word "consolidation" makes a difference. Each of the colonies had its own government and bureaucracy, consolidated under British rule. We of course didn't like the policies of the British Parliament, both temporal and ecclesiastical. When we formed our own national government we first tried to minimize consolidation, via the Articles of Confederation, and then when that proved unwieldy we formed the current national government, which started the consolidation.

I know less about the European democracies. Did the French revolution, and return of democracy after Napolean, keep the existing bureaucracies in place? What about after the German Revolution of 1918–1919? I'm pretty sure that they did not devolve power but instead transferred control from the aristocratic regime to the democratic one.

(Post WW2 separation and latter reunification of Germany might be a counter-example. Iceland had local control, then control by the Norway and by Denmark, so might be another counter-example. Perhaps Belgium as well.)

"Intellectuals and society" by Thomas Sowell is an interesting book on the subject. His central thesis is that intellectuals -- "people whose occupations deal primarily with ideas - writers, academics, and the like" - are having negative effects.

http://www.amazon.com/Intellectuals-Society-Thomas-Sowell/dp...

Fantastic book. He also talks a lot about how being good at one thing doesn't make you good at another. Sowell's notion of effective intelligence is rooted more in experience than in aptitude. So a scientist with no political experience is less likely to be good at politics than someone of lesser intellect with that experience.

One example is president Jimmy Carter. Brilliant thinker, scientist and business man. Mediocre skills in leadership and absolutely dismal in working through beauracracy. He had the one-two punch of having an oil crisis and recession, unlike Obama he just couldn't get it turned around in time for the next election.

I could remember that Carter was in the US Navy - turns out he had a pretty interesting career there - including being in charge of a team disassembling an onshore experimental reactor after a meltdown!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Carter#Naval_career

Yeah I recall him touring Three Mile Island not long after the accident. Carter is not lacking intelligence, but his political skills were certainly lacking and his presidency was pretty much a debacle.

Negative effects on what?

Without reading the book I assume what he's getting at is that the sciences are often the barers of bad news. Cancer this, climate that, death this, unsafety that. Eventually people get fed up with having their worldview turned around and actively choose to ignore the incoming evidence.

My best example would be cellphones in cars. We did just fine without them 10 years ago but now whenever an area talks about legistlation the people get all up in arms. Numerous studies have shown that they're equal or worse to drunk driving but the inconvenience of not being able to text and drive prevents people from accepting that.

Disclaimer: I obviously could be very far off base of what the posted author speaks about because, as stated, I've not read the book.

Of course Sowell would criticize intellectuals. He's an unapologetic conservative Republican.

> Of course Sowell would criticize intellectuals. He's an unapologetic conservative Republican.

Bravo! No need to look at whether he's correct, he's a Republican.

Anti-intellectuality aside. Understanding science is important, but a good scientist ≠ good manager. A scientist is usually someone with narrow, but deep knowledge/experience, as a politician I want someone with a broader set of experiences & knowledge.

I mean, MSc president - sure. PhD president - probably no, thank you :)

But the same is also true of lawyers.

It's unusual for a 'scientist' to be working alone now days. In academia it's fairly common for a single 'scientist' to manage 2-12 graduate and post doc students. And groups of 10's or even 100's of people working together on the same project is increasingly common.

PS: By 'scientist' I mean someone with a PHD doing research. Plenty of people do research that don't fall under that umbrella, but that's a side issue.

This. Also, getting grants is for a large part doing politics as well.

There's also the fallacy that scientists will only make pure objective decisions but scientists are in the end only humans and have their own believes, failings and political agendas. The whole system of peer reviewing and the acknowledgement that every scientific theory can be falsified is a testament to this realization. Unfortunately I have the impression that in politics too often individual experts are only heard and thus the whole system of checks and balances in science is circumvented and particular scientific opinions might get more weight than justified.

Still, I believe that the scientific methodology (not necessarily individual scientists) is still our best hope to actually achieve improvements as shown by our rapidly expanding knowledge since it was more formally defined. It just has to be tempered with clear political goals.

scientists are in the end only humans and have their own believes, failings and political agendas. The whole system of peer reviewing and the acknowledgement that every scientific theory can be falsified is a testament to this realization.

I fully agree with the first part, but care to explain how "believes, failing and political agendas" relates to the concept of falsifiability?

Not sure if that's the falsifiability you meant, but a scientific theory _must_ be falsifiable by definition. As in -- there must be a way to setup an experiment with a possible outcome that would prove this theory to be wrong. It is impossible to disprove a theory that "invisible pink unicorns exist" -- because for every suggested experiment you can just say "well, they are invisible, so we can't see them". Of course falsifiability is not the worst problem with this particular theory (how can something be pink and invisible bothers me more for example), but it is a necessary condition any scientific theory must meet.

I brought up falsifiability casually because it is an important corner stone for my understanding of the scientific methodology and keeps scientists from proclaiming dogmas (or at least it should). It is also an acknowledgement that our current theories mostly reflect our current understanding and may be prone to change in the feature.

This attitude is frustrating and sadly widespread. Basically, you're saying that you can trust someone with some scientific training, but only up to an arbitrary limit. You assume this is a zero sum game, that it is impossible to learn a lot about biology without simultaneously acquiring some compensating deficiency. Or that only the deficient personality would pursue a Phd.

How is it anything but anti-intellectual to say that having too much expertise makes one a less capable leader?

I can only trust someone with substantial experience outside of academia. While there are people who have this and also have a PhD, they're a vanishingly small minority compared to those who have that experience and an MSc.

There is an important distinction between not trusting someone without non-academic experience, and not trusting someone with too much academic experience. I agree with the first, but was refuting the second.

In my experience, as someone who completed a Phd after a few years working, phds often have richer real-life experience than the 'average' person, and almost always richer than the common stereotype inferred in the comment i responded too.

I finished my master's degree in computer engineering in December 2010 and by June of 2011 was put in charge of a team of interns. They left at the end of the summer, but I'm now managing another intern on a year-long project. I'm the local PI on a large, multi-site project; every week, I have meetings and conference calls for that and other projects. I'm not a manager, just a member of technical staff in a research group, but I'm certainly expected to take leadership/management roles and interface with many different groups.

We're not all Doc Brown, weird and secluded in our labs as we work on solitary secretive projects :)

You sir, nailed it.

One thing I absolutely despise about the phrase "anti-intellectual" is the ambiguity about what it means. There was a great explanation of why people should be suspicious of "intellectuals" in an HN comment from a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400310. ESR also had examined the various possible meanings: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4001

In general, though, "anti-intellectual" seems to usually mean, "Why won't those damn hick Republicans just get out of the damn way!?"

Thank you. I often feel the term "anti-intellectual" is used on a person who simply disagrees with a notion thought up by someone that has been labeled "intellectual" by someone else or worse, themselves.

I think when people call the mainstream Republican party "anti-intellectual" they are referring to things like: the quite obvious skepticism of even the most mainstream scientific theories, constant rhetoric deriding intellectuals and artists, policies that are guided by puritan morality rather than a rational evidence-based approach aimed at a certain outcome (drug policy, abstinence-only sex ed., myriad other distracting culture-war issues), policies that place little value in the arts/education (Romney's recent proposed budget would slash the National Endowment for the Arts by half, saving something like $70 mil), etc.

Surely you're not suggesting that the Democrats are more accepting of "science". (They're not - they just accept different things and want to do different things in response to said science.)

As to grant-supported "artists", they've entered the political sphere. That has consequences.

And, very little of it is art, let alone deserving of tax money. (Cowboys can pay for their own poetry and so can rich people.)

> Cowboys can pay for their own poetry

No idea what you're talking about. I'm assuming an utterly insignificant amount of government money went to something that looks at least superficially wasteful and now the right is shrieking about it when they have better things to do.

Has the right done anything else since Obama came into office?

Objections to the National Endowment for the Arts predate Obama.

> Has the right done anything else since Obama came into office?

Yup, plenty.

Are you going to claim that everything Obama has done is peachy keen?

I note that the Dem senate hasn't bothered to pass an Obama budget. That takes 51 votes, which the Dems have. They all voted against the last one. They probably won't even bother to schedule a vote on this one.

I think America has always been "anti-intellectual" in the narrow sense that it didn't have a large elite class like many European countries have, the prevailing attitude has usually been the "self-made man" as opposed to egghead. This may or may not be a bad thing (e.g. elite classes by their very nature are hard to break into).

As far as I understand from your command, you tend to correlate the sentiment you call anti-intellectualism with the right-wing politics on the rise in the US (this is what I infer when you say "even NPR"). This, of course, is true, but is half the story. Many in what may be called left or liberals (again, very loose terms) also exhibit a form of this behavior. An old but interesting read on this matter is The Closing of the American Mind.

> Many in what may be called left or liberals (again, very loose terms) also exhibit a form of this behavior.

That's a good point, but I don't think you really see this reflected on the public stage like you do with the right. For instance, I'm not aware of any barefoot, herbal-medicine/astrology enthusiasts on the national political stage.

American culture has always had an anti-intellectual component. The country was initially settled by merchants and religious fanatics, two groups not exactly known for intellectual curiosity. What's more interesting is how successful intellectuals have been in this country, considering half the population has generally held them in contempt.

This book is a bit dated but is a pretty good history of American anti-intellectualism:

http://www.amazon.com/Anti-Intellectualism-American-Life-Ric...

> What's more interesting is how successful intellectuals have been in this country

They've been successful at delivering concrete, immediate results. Fundamental science at the highest levels is usually done elsewhere.

That used to be the case in the past. However with the increased government expenditure on basic science in the wake of the cold war, more of the fundamental science did happen in the US (foundations of CS, foundations of Crypto, lot of AI & ML, string theory, lot of work in Math, etc.). Now with the decreasing focus on the funding of science, fundamental research (especially in high energy physics but in other areas too) is again shifting to other places like Canada, Europe, Israel, China and Australia.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the shifting of industrial jobs to other countries as well? Maybe when more tangible goods were being produced in the US there was a higher respect for science/engineering, which is in large part a study of the tangible (or physical). Now that many jobs in the US are financial, legal, etc. there's more of a disconnect between what people see as the basis of the economy and what scientists are studying.

I can say for a fact that Israel has very little heavy industry of its own, but its tech sector competes with agriculture for #1 sector in the economy and its R&D spending as a percentage of GDP is (IIRC) first in the world.

Who is a scientist? If you scope this to PhDs who have done serious research in academia, you pretty much just said "no ex-university career before the age of 40." That is going to make it very hard to develop the networks you'll need to advance up the ranks of either party. You'll also likely require substantial external support for initial campaigns because relative to the lawyers, doctors, businessmen, undertakers, and pilots in your cohort you are, ahem, kinda poor. This would be easier if you had married well, and indeed having the right kind of spouse is a huge asset to your political career, but the academic lifestyle is notorious for inducing prolonged singleness.

For a broader definition of scientist which e.g. includes engineers or doctors, Americans elect them quite regularly.

Then the problem is that your connections are more important in American politics than elsewhere?

Among the 435 members of the House, for example, there are one physicist, one chemist, one microbiologist, six engineers and nearly two dozen representatives with medical training....This showing is sparse even with the inclusion of the doctors, but it shouldn’t be too surprising.

The article clearly considers engineers and doctors to be scientists. As it should - they are all well-versed in the scientific method by education and should know how to apply it.

My wife is a medical doctor doing a Phd right now. By her own admission, doctors are _not_ well-versed in the scientific method _by education_. The others in her lab are all biologists, and she spent the first year playing catch-up in terms of being able to do science, and says she still feels like she'll always be behind compared to the biologists in the lab who got a regular scientist training in their 5 years at the University. She's certainly being pessimistic though, her lab is headed by a medical doctor...

Anyways, my point is, doctors are not trained to be scientists.

Disclaimer: This is Hungary. I have four doctors in my close family. I'm a physicist.

Well-versed may be a very relative term. I've been exposed to physics, engineering and computer science. The physicists had the scientific method drilled in deep. The engineers a bit. The computer scientists had vaguely heard about it. We still call them computer scientists. Your wife may suffer from a similar "relative difference". (Coincidentally, I could repeat your story with my wife, who's a computer scientist working for doctors who work with biologists in a lab.)

Does a law degree or an MBA cover the "characterize, hypothesize, predict, experiment" cycle?

One thing that comes up again and again is understanding significances, errors and such. This stuff is second nature to a good (and honest) physicist coming out of University, even before he becomes a "pro".

In my experience, to a doctor, even a good one, _at first_ it's just an annoying thing they have to do to get published and they don't really understand the significance of significances. (LOL.)

I would argue that this type of sensitivity to understanding data should be important if you're running a country. You can't even say that there are underlings for this, because this data is so important, and the possibility of underlings skewing it for whatever reason so sizable, that I certainly would want to have some understanding and feeling for the data before doing a press conference about it or using it to guide my lawmaking.

In my experience, to a doctor, even a good one, _at first_ it's just an annoying thing they have to do to get published and they don't really understand the significance of significances.

There is an entire medical discipline that knowingly uses shitty statistics[0]. Then there are the ones who unknowingly use shitty statistics[1]. Absent someone with a qualification that is impossible to get without learning real statistics as a co-author the default when reading medical research should be that the result is either overblown or wrong.

Biologists aren't much better than medical doctors, to my knowledge.

[0]http://lesswrong.com/lw/72f/why_epidemiology_will_not_correc...

[1]http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-dam...

Just recently Science published, and NASA had a PR hoopla about a bogus paper about arsenic life, after it went through the usual Science peer "review" process. The paper was dicredited by numerous Comment papers for outrageously bad statistics and bad methodology, which Science actually published. For reasons I don't really understand, Science did not redact the paper and called the ensuing outrage normal scientific discourse, even though I think they would have benefited from a mae culpa moment regarding their peer review.

Also important, and related, is my wife claims it took a year or so of fellowship training before she learned how to ask a scientific question. She's an MD who did a research fellowship at NIH; I'm a physicist.

You have my vote.

Lots of policy decisions are made based on statistics. Yet they are easy to fool someone with if he or she does not understand them properly enough.

In my experience, to a doctor, even a good one, _at first_ it's just an annoying thing they have to do to get published and they don't really understand the significance of significances.

Slightly disappointing. I'd have expected doctors to have an understanding of placebo effects, and the field of medicine is one where you regularly hear (even outside medicine) about studies being discredited afterwards for wrong/improper controls, positive results being unreproducible etc.

I don't remember the last time I heard a comp sci paper being withdrawn for bad statistics. (They tend to have none, even when they should)

I'm not saying doctors doing research never learn this stuff, just that they come out of University without this knowledge. (I certainly don't know enough about medical research literature to make a statement like this.)

Curiously, at one biomed lab (can't remember if it's the wife's) they have a dedicated person (shared by several labs) to do the statistics for the presentations and the papers. Kind of weird if you ask me, you'd think understanding whether your results are meaningful is not something you calculate at the end!

Any time some psychologist or economist does a test for Base Rate Neglect or other bias on doctors, they perform horribly.

CS is a tricky term, in that it is actually (mostly applied) math, and math ain't science...

Sorry to go off on a tangent, but this has always bugged me.

I wish there were better standardization on CS degrees. Depending on the school, CS can be part of the math department, science department, engineering department, or a liberal arts department.

My school grouped it in science/engineering and required a bunch of math, and quite a few science classes. I've met people with the same degree from other schools who think it's crazy I took so much science and are surprised I had so few liberal arts classes.

It'd be nice if everybody were on the same page.

For me, it was an engineering track (the actual degree is in Computing Engineering), and we did have basic science courses as well. The 'real' CS stuff though, was mostly math and logic (algorithms, language theory, semantics, complexity theory and so on), but there were more engineering-like courses as well (operating systems, networking, computer architectures, etc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics#Mathematics_as_sci...

I tend to agree, math is closely related to science, but it isn't science. A theorem and proof is different from a hypothesis and test (a hypothesis and test is generally what I would consider to be the "scientific method").

But "scientist" has a folk meaning. If you ask "is math science?", I'd say no. But if you ask "how many scientists are in congress?" and count someone with a math PhD as a "scientist", I'd have no problem with it.

The process of diagnosing a disease works quite like scientific method. You form a hypothesis based on symptoms, and then you test your hypothesis by ordering various kinds of lab etc. tests. You inspect the results and modify your theory on what could be wrong.

The procedure you described just there is susceptible to confirmation bias. You need to take that into account, as well as the power of your tests as Bayesian evidence updates. There are a lot of doctors that order tests even though their evidential value is not high.

For example, consider a test with a 1% false positive rate, for a disease with a 0.1% incidence rate for a particular set of symptoms. If you come through positive for the test, what's the probability that you have the disease? Too many people think it's 99% (the converse of the false-positive rate); but in reality it's more like 10%. But you still formed a hypothesis, did a test, and the result came out OK. You think you're doing science, but in reality you're cargo-culting.

Double-blind trials and high-quality statistics are prerequisites for good work here.

Most doctors won't bother with ordering tests for disease with 0.1% incidence rate (or much higher) until more common and probable causes are excluded. And even then, they would most likely defer you to someone who specializes in the very narrow field who could potentially make correct diagnosis with the existing data.

Double blind trials are for clinical studies. You don't do double blind trials on single patient :D.

One anecdote was related on Econ Talk, Russ Roberts and Arnold Kling: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2007/11/arnold_kling_on.htm... - from the summary, you can listen to the podcast for more:

"Bayes Theorem, 40 year old man with microscopic blood in urine, incidence of serious illness for that symptom at that age in a non-smoker is low, so more sensible to not have the extra test. Doctor didn't understand Bayes Theorem, was deeply offended and yelled at Arnold's wife"

I chose my example to explain Bayes and the base rate fallacy nice and clearly. An example chosen on didactic grounds is easy to attack on realism grounds. But it really does happen. Honest!

My point is, if you're not accounting for bias - an easy mistake to make - you are not doing science. And thus, a doctor's diagnosis is frequently not like science, because it doesn't have good quality objective procedures to exclude it.

My wife is a medical doctor doing a Phd right now. By her own admission, doctors are _not_ well-versed in the scientific method _by education_.

She is wise. A good website about current medical practice and whether or not it is based on science, with a lot of guest authors with varying specialties, is Science-Based Medicine.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/

Some doctors are more scientific than others. The practice of medicine will advance as it becomes more scientific.

Did you read the whole article? The definition used included engineers and doctors.

I think this is close, but the real reason to me is the barrier to entry raised by the current state of campaign finance.

Elections are bought today. No caps on spending. No limits on individual contributors. In addition, not just billionaires electing politicians, corporations get to throw in their millions now too. It's worse today than it's ever been before.

Gingrich has largely been financed by one guy the past month or so. Romney out spent Gingrich in Florida at least 5 to 1. Current governor of Florida bought his seat.

To win today, rich entities have to want you in power. The understanding is that they pay for your allegiance. To get this sponsorship, and NOT be a crook, takes a special person; a true politicker capable of raising the money, keeping them happy enough to sponsor you again the next round, but still work for the citizens of the country as much as possible; rare and difficult.

A scientist is not a politicker. Scientists like facts, scientific laws; concrete and measurable realities. Not deception and corruption (manchurian candidates instead of democratic republic). If a scientist was not completely disgusted by the political arena, they would not get far without pretending or actually being bought by some rich entity.

Its not who you elect that matters. Its how decentralized the system is and how limited the power of the government is that matters.

When the amount of power is great and concentrated, those lusting after power work very hard to get it. And they will do what they need to get it. And then use the power to keep it.

But when the government is limited and very decentralized, its not going to attract sociopaths as much.

In Switzerland, each member of a 7 person council takes a one-year turn presiding.

There's a joke about it actually. A tourist is discussing this with a Swiss man he bumped into.

After asking many other questions, the tourist finally asks "So who is president this year?" The Swiss man replied "Oh, this year its me."

I have a theory that part of Europe's success was due to the fragmented nature of States. Within a small area you have independent nations with their own laws, currency, elections, etc. This represents less single points of failure IMO.

I think the early U.S also had a similar model. State's had their own currencies and regulations, with the right to over-rule federal regulations. Now, the US is essentially one state, one currency, and a giant single point of failure. Now the EU and the US are metastasizing in size/power and crushing anything that poses a threat to their authority.

Yes. And many of the most successful countries are tiny. And leaders accountable. Singapore and Switzerland spring to mind. Singapore isn't even a democracy, but it is very easy to leave, making it accountable, at least economically.

Back when we all lived in tribes, if a leader failed, people simply left the tribe. We need to be able to do virtually the same thing.

If we could remove our property from a city when corruption becomes more than membership is worth. That would impose some discipline. And cities should be able to leave.

And, predictably, Switzerland already has that. People can leave a canton to join a neighboring one or start their own. And it rarely happens. The possibility is a deterrent.

We have this thing in California where a large city can basically harass smaller ones they wish to take over. San Jose recently extracted millions from the city of Campbell which is within its borders to avoid being taken over.

We actually need the opposite thing happening. We need MORE choice about how we choose to live, not more monopolies.

I think the really big factor here is that scientists don't want to go into politics! Maybe I'm painting the world with an overly broad brush here, but politics and science approach the truth in exactly opposite ways.

I'm not going to say that politics is a game of lies, because it's not, but politicians essentially invent the truth as they go along. It's similar in some ways to law or the humanities, where the truth is very much a matter of interpretation, there's a case to be made for each side, and no one is ever objectively "wrong". Right and wrong are entirely a matter of personal opinion.

On the other hand, science is, in the limit, entirely objective. A physical theory can be objectively shown to be incorrect. Scientists can defend their theories, but fundamentally have to accept it if their theory is disproved, or else they become irrelevant. There was a great link earlier today on HN that talked about how the smartest people are the ones who are most skeptical of their own ideas. That's great in science, but if you don't believe yourself totally in politics, no one else will.

This means that scientists, who presumably study under and work with other scientists for decades, think in this scientific mindset. This makes them totally unsuited for the world of politics (and of course, vice versa). Politicians can't admit they were wrong, because that means that they'll probably be wrong again, and no one will vote for someone who's wrong. Case in point: Mitt Romney and universal healthcare.

I'll also make another point that a lot of people miss: Being a politician is roughly as difficult as being a scientist. If we expect our best politicians to get an advanced degree in something like business or law (things related to the process of running a nation) or to spend a long time working in politics or on social issues, why do we think that scientists with no such training will make good politicians? We certainly don't expect most law school grads to do much more than wash bottles in the lab.

  I think the really big factor here is that scientists
  don't want to go into politics!

Pretty much my guess. A lot of people I know say that, if they were mysteriously elected president, their first words would be "I quit!".

Yeah, I've noticed this in Australia... Politics is full of failed ad execs and dis-barred lawyers. The really intelligent people now go into the private sector because politics has lost any semblance of being a respectable or intellectual career. What happens when you have policy dictated by reactionary idiots? What happens when this continues for more than a generation? Very scary.

Plenty of other countries have had memorable scientist leaders. The article itself opens with a picture of Merkel, and then of course, there's Thatcher... And most of the Chinese Communist Party Glitterati are engineers.

Angela Merkel was a physicist before she entered politics, but you have to take into account two things:

1) She was heavily involved in politics while a student and researcher.

2) Even more importantly, she came into politics right after the fall of the Berlin Wall - right after they threw away all the old career politicians. At this point, she abandoned her scientific career to fill this enormous vacuum.

Thatcher got a bachelor's degree in Chemistry, but within three years of graduating college she was in politics and another three years later she had a law degree, I don't think I'd call her a "scientist leader".

I'll admit my ignorance about the Chinese Communist party. But that whole system is very different, especially because the leaders don't need to get elected, so it's a much more technocratic system in general. In the US, there's a difference between people who come up with new policies and the politicians who get them implemented, I suspect this is less true in China.

Wasn't Merkel a chemist, not a physicist? The upper levels of the CCP are full of engineers, not scientists. Don't know about the next or nextnext leadership generations/cadres.

Why don't they want to enter politics though? If we drew up a hypothetical list of attributes for a scientist, how many could cross over into politics?

Significant intellect and a desire to exercise that in significant work? Yes.

Deep interest in a field and a wish to explore that further? Yes. (In the sense that many such people seem capable of maintaining multiple such interests.)

Interest in complex work and ability to hold large datasets in mind? Yes.

Drive to rise above others and push for achievement? Yes.

The more I look, the more it seems that a major factor working against scientist partiicpation in public debate generally and politics more specifically is a strong pervading trend of anti-intellectuallism. In science they can know that, by and large, if they back up their assertions with rigorous testing and data, their viewpoint will at the very least be taken seriously and very likely accepted. Whereas, by current trends at least, in politics their assertion would be rubbished as elitist and talked down with an incoherent anecdote.

Where, in that system, is the motivation for the genuinely capable and informed to use their abilities for the public good?

One of the most failed "experiments" of science and politics was Robert McNamara as U.S. Secretary of Defense under JFK. He used a lot of scientific methods to evaluate his political decisions with war and intervention. All of his evaluations pointed out that the U.S. should intervene in Vietnam and look how that turned out. In politics there are too many variables at play. Perhaps politics is good for the "intellectual" but not for the scientist.

As an aside I think its a little bit dangerous to put intellectual and scientist in the same category.

How many tests did he run? What confidence interval did he establish? What factors did he control for and how?

Good questions of which I do not know the specifics. McNamara's background was with helping turn Ford around by using his statistical and analytical expertise. Later he got involved using those same techniques with the Defense Dept.

Being a scientist (physicist), I think I can answer that question.

I am deeply interested in helping people, and yes, this means if it were up to me, I'd try to replace all sorts of legislation, and I think there are many things that could be dealt with much, much better.

In the end, however, I think I would find a job as a politician extremely frustrating. Sure, I might be able to deal with the bureaucracy, but I like to have a job that I, well, like. Being a politician would mean voluntarily surrendering myself to the plague of bureaucracy, and I would probably go mad. Call me arrogant if you wish, but I simply don't think I could deal with many of those politicians for very long before getting all upset and claiming they're all a bunch of fools who should stop being such ideological illogical idiots.

Thus, I try to help people in a more indirect way, by doing what I enjoy. Namely, science.

I agee. It's also more important that scientists don't involve themselves in politics, especially when politicians are looking to use science as a basis for what essentially is a political decision. When the two get muddled it gets messy. Science can tell us that smoking over the long term can have negative consequences on our health, politics is how we decide what we want to do about it and how. When it comes to the details of 'how', science can provide more insights. However, it's essential that we keep the two separate, just like the separation of church and state. Science does not dictate policy, and it shouldn't.

That may be true. But I also think that our system for selecting scientists may filter out those who would like to go into politics.

A lot of people go to law school who don't really want to be lawyers. They claim they're going to law school to "learn to think". Elite law schools are easy enough that people who aren't completely devoted to the law can still graduate in fine standing in three years with a few hours a day of study - so the system can still work for people with a more diverse set of interests and goals.

PhD programs in STEM fields programs are very different. They are all consuming, and you need to be capable of focusing deeply on narrow research interest for years. Another thing to keep in mind is that a very high percentage of STEM PhDs in the US are international students, which may lower the interest in entering politics somewhat.

There are other approaches that could work - maybe MS degrees, or a more professional degree approach to science doctorates.

Lastly, there just seems to be a cultural notion - humanities and law are considered "broad, well rounded" educations, whereas science and math is considered narrow and technical. This is completely wrong, but it's a sticky notion.

One aspect I've never thought about before is the selection of representatives for parliament/legislature. In the U.S., they're pre-selected in primary elections per party, but the national elections are single-winner per seat, so the candidates are out pandering to the voters constantly. I don't know percentages, but many other countries use multi-winner to select their national multi-seat bodies, and my understanding is that those would-be candidates aren't out campaigning, or at least not anywhere close to as visible as they are in the U.S. or the U.K. where there are direct single-winner elections for seats. As ideologically-driven as political parties are, maybe the parties still tend to select more rational, scientific-minded representatives when the would-be reps do not have a requirement to pander directly to the population prior to the election.

India (from wikipedia) also appears to have direct election of its parliament. India is fairly well known for its stifling bureaucracy. Is that coincidence, or the start of a pattern?

Maybe it's also in part due to other countries (those which aren't degenerate and corrupt enough that the government can fraudulently influence elections) knowing they're not the world's largest superpower, and knowing they can't afford to screw around as much.

I'd love to see the voting system changed to Range Voting (best overall?) or Condorcet (best ordering-based voting system?). For its discrimination against third parties, plurality voting is simply horrible, and IRV is nearly as bad[1]. I'll note that I don't think a voting system change alone will fix the American political system.

http://rangevoting.org, despite its nominal bias, is the best voting system resource anywhere.

[1] for instance: http://bolson.org/voting/irv/ IRV fails monotonicity, which IMO is a huge deal. http://rangevoting.org/Monotone.html

What do you see as the problem with IRV?

The most extreme minority gets their second choice votes counted first. This leads to some absurd non-monotonicities. http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/

It's still single seat. It has most of the same problems as straight plurality single seat elections.

Exactly; so many of the problems of under-representation are due to minority groups having disparate, rather than concentrated, power bases and so failing to achieve the threshold for election in any single seat in spite of having more than enough supporters more widely.

STV (IRV with multi-member constituencies) or regional top-up lists can both mitigate this. Neither is perfect, but they certainly help.

Ultimately it's hard to beat approval voting, since it's the best simple system. There are many systems that are better overall, but they are too complex for people to understand.

A voting system needs to be so simple that everyone understands and trusts it. Approval voting is a really simple replacement under the single-winner system that everyone can understand.

What is the article arguing? Is there even an argument made? Why should Americans elect more scientists? Will it lead to a higher quality of living or more wealth or what?

It mentions China as a pro-scientists country, but why? It's riddled with human rights violations, corruption and environmental pollution. While American politicians decry climate change openly, China just seems to ignore it.

Singapore is a city-state with 5mio citizens, and a high cost of living. Finland also has 5mio citizens, is known for its wealth and the president Tarja Halonen has a degree in law - in fact, the other politicians mentioned on Finlands wikipedia page are missing a scientific degree as well.

I'm not buying it. Just staffing your government with scientists seems pretty irrelevant for the success of a nation.

By way of another example -- Angela Merkel (Chancellor of Germany) has a doctorate in physical chemistry.

Unfortunately her doctorate hasn't prevented her from making one inane decision after the other during the ongoing financial crisis and even on the field she should be at least somewhat knowledgeable (nuclear power) she didn't really evoke any trust into her decision-making (first extending life span of nuclear reactors despite strong criticism by experts and than retracting this decision only a year later in the wake of Fukushima).

Merkel's decision are not so 'inane'. If you look at the German situation (and that's her main job), it is looking pretty good right now.

She is also not only 'somewhat knowledgeable' about nuclear power, she was the responsible minister for several years.

Extending the life span was a political decision - especially moved ahead by her coalition partner - the FDP. Before Fukushima there was a majority of conservatives and liberals against the nuclear exit. This changed with Fukushima.

Merkel often bases her decisions on what is politically possible in Germany. She believes in a politics of small steps which, where the outcome can be verified and one can adapt then. A very scientific approach.

It's just storing up trouble for the future its putting ones head in the sand to appease a minority party.

"If you look at the German situation (and that's her main job), it is looking pretty good right now."

I am a German and the outside perspective is unfortunately somewhat misrepresenting our situation here. As far as I can tell most foreign news sources tell about our unemployment rate and our GDP growth but both come with strings attached.

First of all our unemployment rate does not reflect the true unemployment in any rate due to changing the definition what constitutes an unemployed person. For instance, jobless people over 58, people being forced to do work-fare, people doing mandated education and a couple of other cases are not counted as unemployed although this people live off social welfare. A rapidly expanding part of the work force is also counted among the working poor, i.e. they don't earn enough and have to be subsided by the state. A lot of once full-time positions are transformed into part-time jobs which makes it increasingly difficult for people to make ends meet and leave them susceptible to poverty when becoming old since our pension scheme is mostly based on your work years and your income.

Most of the (slow) GDP growth is attributed to export while our domestic consumption is either stagnating or declining because Germans had in the last 20 years stagnating or declining real wages. So we have growth but the majority does not profit from it in any way.

"Extending the life span was a political decision"

What else? It was just to show that expertise in the respective field has nothing to do with competent decision making. The problems with nuclear power (extremely dangerous in a densely populated country as Germany, no means to store nuclear waste long-term, extremely expensive, etc.).

There is an international standard definition to count unemployed people.

There is no 'true unemployment'. There are several different definitions. By all definitions the unemployment in Germany is at a very low level compared to recent years.

Which really doesn't show, ever. I think being a scientist (and by contrast, a politician) is a matter of thinking, not of degree or title. The currently top rated comment [1] explains it rather nicely.

[1]: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=3589032

Singapore is also a very wealthy state, and it has nothing to do with the population size and the costs of living there. You are comparing countries on a single factor, the population - how is that variable relevant? Then why don't you compare with Turkmenistan, also 5 million people, no scientists in charge and a ridden with poverty ? How about Sierra Leone, 5 million people. no scientists, ridden with civil war? One can pick up stupid examples everywhere then, if population is indicative of something.

Just to clarify: I didn't want to say that Singapore is successful due to its small-ish population size, just that another country is almost as successful _without_ scientists at the top of the government. I chose Finland as an example since its population size is the same, the per-capita income is similiar and it enjoys a low rate-of-crime as well.

Actually, the president of Turkmenistan has a PhD in medical science [1] and the vice-president of Sierra Leone has a bachelors degree of science [2]. So both have more scientists in the top government positions than Finland. The politicians education really doesn't seem to be an important factor for the countrys success.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gurbanguly_Berdimuhamedow

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Sam-Sumana

Allright, seems like I picked up the wrong examples :) I agree on your last sentence as least, that the educational background of politicians is irrelevant to the success of a nation.

Then again, there are many different ways to define what "success" truly means. It really depends what you consider: wages / welfare / freedom of expression / perceived happiness, etc... It's hard to compare two different countries unless you take a look at a bunch of criteria.

One thing I would add, though: you cannot judge a country's current success by the politicians currently in charge. For all you know, they may not be the ones responsible for the current situation and may just benefit from what was done years ago. Economics trends are very much happening on the long term, you would not see a net difference in a few years of policy (unless something very drastic is done). Europe is, for the most, now suffering from poor decisions made during the 80s and 90s regarding sovereign debt, and only recently the massive problems seem to surface while the policies have been going on for about 30years+.

China is socially repressive and an environmental catastrophe in progress, but it's also one of the fastest-advancing nations in the world. Chinese citizens were starving to death en masse as recently as the 70's. The fact that they've pulled themselves out of that kind of industrial slump is amazing.

Wikipedia says that Singapore is the best trade center in Asia and one of the best in the world. It also has the best credit and the best markets. Socially, it's a bit repressive, but it is apparently doing very well economically.

Of course, without much data the argument is useless. It would be interesting to see a pile of charts comparing scientists and engineers in politics to economic success; with only three or four data points it's a a toss-up.

One thing to consider here is that it may be fast advancing because it is advancing from such a low positions. With more than a billion people, Chinese economic potential is enormous, far exceeding any other country. The fact that the have almost the same GDP as Japan while having more than 10 times more population and huge natural resources can be explained only by broken political and economic system. It is slowly moving out towards being somewhat less broken, but one would be deeply mistaken taking this as a sign that one should take it as an example to follow in its current state.

What I tried to say (and perhaps didn't) was scientists won't necessarily be good for a country, not that they'd be bad.

The german minister of justice, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, did a lot of good for the german internet. Her decisions were very rational and fact-based, yet she holds a law degree.

There just are too many good politicians without science degrees for the sweeping generalisation "scientists are good and lawyers bad".

American politicians decry climate change openly? The way things have been going the last few years, you could have fooled me. Huntsman was notable as the only republican candidate to say he believed in climate change.

I think the idea behind the article is that scientists are generally trained to work with/find factual information and grow their understanding, while engineers are generally going to take scientific knowledge and apply it to solve problems. These are both approaches our country could use more of in government.

While I believe that humans are having a significant, negative effect on the climate, I can see how there might be some doubt and skepticism as to the magnitude of the damage and how much of that is caused by humans. I'm not saying I agree with full-on denial, but there is probably some room for discussion. The problem is that we aren't really having that discussion.

Our more fundamental science problem is that a significant portion of Americans and several of the Republican presidential candidates don't believe in evolution, despite the fact that civilization has benefited from the application of it for centuries.

To be fair you are a bit off. They tend to reject the concept of macro evolution of humans from primates/fish/randomly combining proteins.

> It's riddled with human rights violations, corruption and environmental pollution.

More likely because it's a poor country than because it is pro-scientist.

> While American politicians decry climate change openly, China just seems to ignore it.

They are doing significant efforts in green technology. Furthermore, China isn't all that bad if you look at per capita statistics which is arguably more fair to compare.

The EU proposed a carbon tax on airlines, which the Chinese disagree with:

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2011/1222/break...

EU leaders will be going to the Chinese in a few weeks, cap in hand, looking for the Chinese to help bolster the European bailout fund (otherwise the euro could well be toast). The Chinese are going to use the carbon tax as negotiating leverage. Ah, politics.

Also I read a very interesting article (in the guardian paper i believe) from an insider at one of the major climate change treaties a few years back. The official story was that the different leaders couldn't come to an agreement and that there would be another summit in a few years. The real story was that the Chinese delegation blocked every proposal, thereby sinking the talks (as any major climate change treaty would require the backing of the major industrial powers).

While in the meantime, US cries about China's 'unfair' advantage in developing green technologies and lifts tariffs for imports. Perhaps just another difference between a lawyer driven society and an engineering driven society.

Americans don't elect scientists for a simple reason: scientists by their nature lack the skills necessary to succeed as a popular politician.

Singapore isn't a democracy in the same sense as the US or Britain. China is a not a democracy at all. So comparing the education levels of elected officials isn't really an apples-to-apples comparison.

In the US, a person's charisma, ability to relate to and attract the attention of voters, ability to build a political organization and ability to get things done within the political system define your success as a politician. Politicians start local, and build tight social networks as city councilmen, mayors, state legislators, etc. They then use those networks to get into Federal offices.

The great exception are candidates that skip the political process and reach high office by spending prestige capital (ie. President/General US Grant) or by spending lots of financial capital (ie. New York City Mayor Bloomberg). Even in these cases, these folks are actually buying access to someone else's political infrastructure.

None of this means that the US government does not have scientists working on policy. Scientists do work for the government as political appointees (ie. Secretary Chu of the US Department of Energy), as civil servants (ie. employees of NOAA), as contractors to government (ie. the RAND Corporation), or indirectly via unaffiliated think-tanks (ie. Federation of American Scientists).

>In the US, a person's charisma, ability to relate to and attract the attention of voters, ability to build a political organization .... define your success as a politician.

Exactly. In the US, being a successful Politician is a popularity game, much like Hollywood. Unfortunately, it has little to do with intelligence or if that person will actually do anything good for anyone.

Elections can not be anything but the "popularity game" by the very definition - one that is most popular, i.e. appeals to the most people - wins the election. The only way to avoid it is to abolish the elections and the democracy. Now what constitutes the basis of this popularity - is it good looks, smooth talk, shiny awards or ability to promise most appealing bribes to the least moral populace - can differ. It would be nice if everybody would be so educated as to use only the "right" criteria to choose the most appealing candidate - the only wrinkle is nobody has any idea what those right criteria are and what makes one a successful manager on the scale of millions of people. We do know that many of the criteria in popular use - like spousal fidelity 30 years ago, formal education degree, or ability to successfully fake sincerity - are pretty bad predictors, but since we have very short supply of good ones, people have to do with what we have.

Why do Americans elect lawyers?

Laws and contracts are the operands of government. Money and a convincing demeanor are the operators of elections.

Government is not really an experimental enterprise. Science is about constructing interesting subsets of general-purpose reality to eliminate variables, then testing other variables and seeing what happens. The history of Legislative attempts to eliminate real-world variables is the history of horrific side-effects: wars, market crashes, value destruction, and freedom-trampling.

The chief complaint about current US reps isn't that they're not scientific, but that they're not aware of facts and that they're only aware of some people. Scientists make no claims on being aware of people, and are deeply aware of some facts.

What we need in Government are intelligent yet humble people who have personally experienced some tragedy brought about by ill-conceived legislation, tensioned by CFOs who in their personal lives give a shitload of money to the poor.

Good luck on that talent search, America.

"Why do Americans elect lawyers?"

Because they're good at making a case. Any case. Including the case for electing them.

I seriously doubt if many people think "He's a lawyer. He'll be a good steward of the country."

Instead it's more like "He talks about exactly the things that I'm afraid of. I'm voting for him."

>Why do Americans elect lawyers?

I think you're overthinking it. Lawyers make good politicians because they're good debaters. A good debater and charismatic individual garners votes. So long as you're not 110% bat-shit insane you'll win votes and the better you are at making the opponent look bad the better on you.

Too much of American politics isn't so much about making realistic promises and outlooks on the future that are obtainable as it is about extremism and making the others look bad. To me it seems like that style of politics wins because "it makes good TV".

Perhaps we're both overthinking it. Lots of people are good debaters.

Lawyers are good debaters and more of them want the job.

As Isaac Asimov complained years ago, “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” There was a brief period, roughly coincident with the Apollo space program, when rockets were cool and so were rocket scientists. Since then, the public image of science and scientists in America has been in decline.

I believe that religion plays a strong role here. Religious dogma is threatened by scientific knowledge, and nowhere in the developed Western world has the backlash been as strong as in the US, which also happens to be the most religious of Western prosperous democracies. What's worse, the anti-science campaign of the religious is smashingly successful: only 40% of Americans give credence to biology's strongest and most useful theory, that of Evolution. Among the countries sampled in this study: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/08/060810-evolu... that's almost at rock bottom, undercut only by Turkey.

The article points this out at the end, but the reason is clear: because scientists are supposed to be pragmatic, not ideology-driven. Therefore, in a bi-party political world like the US, it would be difficult for them to fit in, in terms of policies. Most of the policies (on either side) are not evidence-based and actually have counter-productive effects in the long run (Charles Murray explained this through several cases, for example, in his book "Losing Ground").

However I am not sure about how relevant it is for the Singaporean examples to have had "scientific background". If you do not work in the actual science field and never used it, your background is worthless. If your everyday occupation is to gather support to get elected, I question the validity of the term "Scientist" in this case.

Nobody who has worked in academia would claim that scientists are somehow "more pragmatic". Capricious, scheming, vindictive... just like the rest of the population :)

Plus the fact that scientists are typically paid by tax payers', in a stable governmental position (at least in Europe), and many never held any real job in their whole lives, only adds to my doubts.

We have a lot of career politicians here as well who only worked in their respective parties usually starting in the youth organizations and then working their way up the ranks.

I'm curious though what you consider a to be "real" job.

I don't think it's too unreasonable to expect the minister for health, say, to have had a successful career working as a doctor in a hospital before entering politics, for the chancellor to have succeeded in business, for the defence minister to be a decorated soldier, etc etc.

There are numerous examples of politicians who have the matching formal education but make horrible politics irregardless. Here in Germany the minister of health was a physician and despite that he mostly was a lobbyist for the pharma industry (among other wrongdoings) and many of his decisions actually worsened the situation of regular patients. We also had lawyers in the ministry of justice who without blinking an eye issued laws which later were proven illegal by the high court. From a politician I expect a clear political vision and use expert knowledge to find the best way to achieve these goals. The necessary expertise can be acquired by, uh, experts which has to be done most often anyway as the minister himself does not usually have the time or specialization to deal with specific complex issues. What I expect from a minister though is to make a wise selection of experts he draws knowledge from and still make the final call whether he will follow the recommendations.

Heh. We are definitely just as vindictive and scheming as anybody else, I'll admit. The thing is, though, that our worldview is based on evidence. No matter how vicious the funding committee meetings get, we are expected to have rational arguments for all of our claims and we are expected to back up our arguments with factual, tested evidence.

We may sink as low as anybody else, rhetorically speaking, but when we choose to we can do a lot better than the average person.

Not all scientists are government-employed. It may be a majority in some countries, but I would not disregard the amount of scientists employed in the private industries as well. They may not be involved in fundamental research, rather "applied sciences", but they are scientists nonetheless. Anyone who produces data through experimentation, analyses it, uses critical judgment and appropriate tools to make evidence-based decisions is basically, in my eyes, a "scientist", no matter the exact field of work.

Regarding your first point, the scientists who are not pragmatic will take severe hits to their reputations down the road. Data and methodology is what matters, not personal opinion.

'Anyone who [...] uses critical judgment and appropriate tools to make evidence-based decisions'

Except for the experimentation part, that could describe a lawyer. Which begs the question,

Where does it go wrong?

Why do people from an evidence-based career become embroiled in the kind of back[stabbing/scratching] politics that seems to be the norm today? And how can it be fixed?

Experimentation is mandatory to conduct Science. You need to be able to form theories or hypotheses from data or observation, and then conduct a controlled experiment to validate your point. There can be no science without validation and repeatability.

I disagree though. Merely having a PhD in the science field would change the (future) politician's worldview - from how to view data (you gotta admit it, if more US politicians were scientifically literate, they'd be less likely to claim climate change is false) to basic skepticism.

Having work done in the field of science, imo, is a plus

Why would a scientist want to be a politician? So they can spend their days fighting over paperwork instead of solving problems they're passionate about?

The kind of people that want to be scientists would have no interest in politics, beyond what it takes to get them funding.

My impression is that being a scientist involves a whole lot of fighting over paperwork instead of solving problems (at least in America, when it's time to apply for grants!).

Depending on how much money you need to raise and how good you are at it, fundraising can take from 10% - 80% of your time. Note that even at the high end, you still get 20% of your time to work on scientific problems, which is better than 0% -- what you get in most administrative/political jobs.

[All numbers very approximate.]

Here's what's missing from that article ... how many 'scientists' ran and lost compared to 'non-scientists'?

I do think that Americans have this weird 'anti-nerd', culture where being brainy without being rich (ever notice how having money makes it okay to be nerdy in the States?) is something to be mocked or made fun of, but I also think that the way the American political system is set up discourages scientists/engineers from running.

Just take a look at Ron Paul (whom I disagree with on a lot btw) in some of the debates, trying to tell Americans the hard, very obvious truths about their country and getting roundly booed and you can understand why ... say ... a software developer would never even want to go near the process.

It isn't that Americans don't elect a particular type of person, it's that Americans do elect a particular type of person. Americans by and large voluntarily limit themselves to candidates showcased by the two prominent marketing wings of American politics. This minimizes the amount of effort required to make a decision, the hallmark of not just the American masses, but humanity in general.

From there, you need only look at the type of person those two marketing organizations are likely to champion. I'll refrain from stating what I think they are but they decidedly are NOT celebrated academians.

While I'd definitely want to see more people with science/engineering background managing countries, I keep wondering, whether this wouldn't be solving a wrong problem. How much problems are there because western politicians supposedly are morons who can't handle the complexities of this world, and how much problems are caused by Upton Sinclair's "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"? The latter case would probably affect scientist-politicians as well.

That is an easy one. Scientists are good at objective truth, facts, etc.

Most political decisions are however highly subjective, and based on values, principles and opinions.

Scientists are great for advising politicians on things that are obviously and provably correct or false, but once it gets beyond that, their biases tends to get in the way.

Asking a scientist if NASA should get more or less funding is about as useful as asking the chief bishop if the church should get state funding as a silly example.

And non-scientists take a more rational, balanced view that is more free from bias?

I think bias is intrinsic to being human, and unavoidable (all we can do is mitigate its damage). But someone who can admit they are wrong when faced with evidence (aka a scientist) is probably better equipped than one who is adamant that if they keep saying "no", eventually the universe will shut up and behave (most politicians).

Operations Research is the science of resource allocation. I would certainly ask an OR guy about NASA funding.

If you take the view that government is needed to protect people's rights (you know, "to secure these rights governments are instituted among men") as opposed to providing people with solutions for their problems - then the question becomes easy. Why should we? Who said scientists are better in protecting one's rights than, say, cops or doctors or lawyers or plumbers? I do not see anything in scientific training that makes scientists uniquely suitable for that. I would prefer, naturally, to have smart people protecting my rights, as this way they will be more effective in it, but one can be smart without being a scientist.

Of course, the government would always have a lot of purely technical questions where scientific training would allow one to decide them efficiently - but these always would be secondary roles and rarely need to be elected, but rather properly hired, which can be done by any decent manager. So why should we elect more scientists?

False dichotomy.

If politicians were people who give difficult problems to a team of scientists to allow them to come up with the best solutions, and then choose from the equally good ones based on the underlying philosophical principles they stand for, then no, we wouldn't need scientists in the government.

Failing that, I'll take the group who at least in principle deals with new problems through a better method than guesswork or trial and error.

How do you think science is made? Guesswork, trial and error are inherent instruments of the science - it's called "hypothesis" and "experiment". Only in the case of politics and economics an experiment may cost lives and wrong hypothesis may lead to millions losing their livelihoods and their very lives. I'd rather prefer them doing it with the lab mice than myself.

And the dichotomy is very real - governmental redistribution and social engineering is very different thing from defending people's rights. You can claim the government could do both - though practice suggests it is often contradictory as redistribution and social engineering involves coercion - but it is still very different things and very different approaches. If one subscribes to the "rights" approach, than asking to elect more scientists is the same as asking to elect more plumbers - one would recognize plumbers are extremely helpful in their area of expertise, but what it has to do with the elections?

The reason is fairly straightforward. Power moves in social circles.

It is the same reason why there aren't many lawyers who make it politically in China.

Secondly, support has to be nurtured, and potential candidates groomed by power brokers or king makers. These people act like VCs and are generally very conservative when it comes to investing their scarce political resources.

Do we have the stats for how many scientists/engineers run for office to begin with?

The central qualification to successfully run for office - straight faced insincerity - might be counter to the training of most scientists/engineers.

The second qualification - enormous personal wealth - is not such a common possession of most scientists, either.

It's not just the United States that has this problem:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/only-scientist...

In India we the Indians have elected DrManmohan Singh as our prime minister. He was very known internationally as a good economists. He was also governor of Reserve bank of India before coming to politics. Because of his reputation of a good economist he was offered the post of finance minister in the late nineties. He supported very much to the policies of globalization,liberalization and India became a member of this draconian policy. The poor people of India thought that by this change in economic policy their standard of life will change. But it is very unfortunate that after two decades of its implementation the poor people are ruined now. The marginal farmers are ending their life by taking pesticides and insecticides due to debt. More and more people are coming under below poverty line. Every night some million Indians are going to the bed in empty stomach. Inflation level is increasing day by day. Industrial workers are losing their job on daily basis. On every part of this universe Indians are working as daily wage laborers. Employment is a very big problem. Day by day the crime graph in India is increasing. Transparency International in its annual survey report termed as a most corrupt country. So leadership is not measured by some sort of degrees or phd.

A short comment on why scientists are usually not interested in politics. Scientists are in pursuit of the Truth, not power. Politics is too narrow field to play on. Carl Sagan used the picture of the Earth from Space to show that great leaders are basically men whose reach is limited to borders and time, while astronomers were above all those considerations. That was a powerful way to describe this.

For one, i'd like to say:

It doesn't matter for Angela Merkel to have studied. What far more important is to have knowledgable persons in the groups that make decisions and evaluate new laws and for the ministers.

For what i can see in germany, most of those politicians and decision makers are lawyers. It's terrible if you actually see what is said in a committee, just a bunch of old people not knowing what they talk about.

There's a far more fundamental problem in the US: The system and methods of government have degenerated to the point of not producing anything of value. A visitor from another planet would probably laugh hysterically at how ridiculous the whole thing looks like from the outside.

Is this what the Roman Empire looked like?

I don't think you need to find a visitor from another planet, just another country.

My attempt to be culturally neutral. You can always blame Martians and nobody will get upset.

You don't even need to be from another planet. I'm from Germany and I'm baffled at US politics pretty much every time I read about it.

That isn't to say that it's better in any way here - we just have more political parties, so the nonsense is spread out a bit more, but that still doesn't mean we have less nonsense.

>"China has even more scientists in key positions in the government."

Party elections are a bit of a stretch.

I think part of the problem is that American's don't read enough. They don't seek knowledge and understanding outside their own field. I mean it doesn't take a lot to read a book about the scientific method, or a book about statistics and try and learn it. Sure you won't be as good as someone who studied it, but you can at least try and be well versed in the concepts. I frequently read text books and do the exercises in them on my spare time. However, American's are so enthralled in media culture that you can probably make a good guess that most American's don't read on a regular basis, or read those $2.00 novels you get at the gas station. In other words, what they read doesn't have much substance.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDX9dyjqimA

I guess this is why China is in such great shape socially and environmentally. The engineers and scientists have created a utopia.

"One needn’t endorse the politics of these people or countries to feel that given the complexities of an ever more technologically sophisticated world, the United States could benefit from the participation and example of more scientists in government. "

You can't make a claim "scientists make better leaders" then in the very next paragraph, state the outcome of this leadership doesn't matter.

I believe one of the main points the article is highlighting is that science would have better representation in U.S. law if more elected representative were scientists, but this is not really true. Most laws aren't derived from regulatory law, but rather from common law set through court cases. In my opinion scientists are most useful as scientists, expert witnesses, and lobbyists in that order.

I hugely respect science per se -- but scientists and most other types of intellectuals are typically people stuck working in a bureaucracy.

Working in a bureaucracy induces a particular type of thinking on an individual -- I call it statist thinking -- that bureaucracy is not evil (note: it is), that difficult decisions should be made through careful deliberation and possibly collaboration with others instead of on your own (a precondition for groupthink and a bad quality in an executive position which by definition requires a degree of mental toughness). People who got rich and successful outside of the bureaucratic system often become an object of envy by people inside the system, even if they will consciously deny it, which then leads to the perverted notion that the only way to make the world a fair place is to increase the reach of the bureaucracy.

Now, America was founded by intellectuals (though not of bureaucratic kind). The thing that distinguishes America from most other countries in the world is that in America one specific type of freedom is respected: "freedom to rise". In the old Europe people at the top were often members of aristocracy and it was obvious to everyone that they didn't have to work as hard as everyone else to get where they are. In America, people at the top were often (though I admit not always -- just more often than in Europe) the hardest-working, smartest, and toughest-minded individuals, and it was obvious to everyone that they got there on their own. Bureaucracy, in a way, is a lot like aristocracy (actually it is more like a medieval guild system), since it has its own system of ranks, and you can't easily get from one to the other just through working hard -- it has to be "bestowed" on you. Hence why Americans tend to disrespect bureaucracy, and, by the way, that is a very good thing.

EDIT: downvoted: time to leave Hacker News.

Charismatic people with great oratory skills get elected, its as simple as that!

In the south indian state (Tamilnadu) where i grew up most of the chief ministers (governors) are former actors with no college degree. Yet that state is relatively wealthy, what do you say about that?

The economist wrote a similar piece a few years back: http://www.economist.com/node/13496638

I remember seeing a good discussion here on HN about the article, though it seems to have disappeared.

Because we're not qualified. We barely elect officials let alone scientists.

Because they wouldn't pander to the dumbed-down majority.

This "article" belongs on Reddit.

What's with the China bashing? We all believe in what we are used to. That simple.

The author, as many commenters stated, does not define his article correctly? To say America does not elect scientists assumes that the US has many scientists who are rejected at the polls. A better question...Why don't more scientists run for office.

First, an engineer or scientist in Germany is not the same as an engineer/scientist in the US. The Bachelors degree (4 years of college), from what I hear, is almost non-existent in Germany where a Diploma is standard.

Science is not Enough to Affect Change

The author does not state what problems scientists could solve. And science is not everything. No policy can be implemented without the people's support. Example, South African scientist Ivor van Heerden being told "Americans don't live in tents" by US Army Corps of Engineers when discussing ways to house citizens after a Hurricane, pre-Hurricane Katrina.

transcript http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9178501/ns/nightly_news-nbc_news...

Many engineers and scientists in the US are immigrants. Herbert Hoover's, the only engineer/scientist president, parents or grandparents came from Germany. Their original name was Huber. Hoover's technocrats were discredited after the 1929 stock market crash.

From my knowledge and little experience in advocacy, politics is ahem ...politics. Your successes are more about knowing and coercing the right people, not really if the numbers add up. For instance, defunding a program to balance the budget, might cost you and your party their hold on power.

Look how many scientists and doctors were researching HIV/AIDS. Their effect was miniscule. The major investments did not come from scientist advocates. The investments into HIV/AIDS came largely because Gay and Lesbian activists (e.g. ACT-UP) pressured and coerced the pharmaceutical industry. The most infamous act being the real 1987 occupation and shutdown of Wall-Street which resulted in real concessions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDS_Coalition_to_Unleash_Power

This is how politics changes, by dedicated action.

As for Singapore, Singapore was ruled by Lee Kuan Yew (sp?) for about 36 years (1970-1990s) so it should not be compared to democratically elected governments,

Science has to be Accepted by the Population

As for climate change due to pollution. Politicians can't single handedly change the climate, only a curtailing of the excessive consumption patterns of the public can do that. I think it's silly to point at "anti-intellectuals" as the source of climate change when 50% of the nation turns the air condition to 20C/68F when it is 30C/88F in the summer time. The air-condition being the most energy expensive item in the household.

http://205.254.135.7/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electric...

Electricity use and hence pollution is more affected by climate and price in the US as opposed to politics.

US Electricity Use vs. price and climate (grouped by color)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/60012884@N00/4921667405/in/phot...

Until the meme or whatever of people smugly laughing under their coats at people for trying to sound smart or understand difficult concepts (and sometimes getting it wrong) changes, which exists for whatever large number of various mostly individualistic reasons, this will not change.

Rather the politician (silver tongues) who can convince both the aforementioned types as well as those truly caring for reason will be elected. The reason is large and without making too many blanket statements, I think they are merely trickier to defeat when the game is all about making someone look more wrong. The game is sadly enough, victorious for those who care more about merely looking intelligent by a definition more widely accepted (by being less wrong) than actually being intelligent (read:scientific, by postulation and diligence even in regards to self) -- and largely the same game is scrimmaged in courtrooms all day every day.

To be honest, many people that have PHDs that I have met have horrendous people skills. Yes, I want an intelligent person to run our country, but serial killers also many times have very high IQs.

I want someone that is good with people and has intelligence.

And bush is the only president so far with an MBA. Is the USA becoming socialist? [/sarcasm].

http://www.americanthinker.com/2004/02/gwb_hbs_mba.html

  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. Tan won the 
  very close election and joined the government of Prime Minister Lee Hsien 
  Loong, who also has a degree in mathematics.

Whoa ho, hold on there nigga. Is you seriously holding up Singapore, of all countries, as a shining example of flawless governance, to be emulated by other nations?

The same Singapore that Amnesty International says has the highest per capita capital punishment rate in the world? The same place that hangs people for drug possession? 133rd out of 175 in Reporters Without Borders "press freedom" index? The country where a quarter of the population is migrant workers, for whom, conviently, labor laws don't apply?

Man, you're right! Sign me up for some Singapore-style government! Sounds great!

It's possible to admire the scientific research of the Nazi Party while simultaneously denouncing the horrific ways they conducted their experiments.

I think a Singaporean would be amused to hear this comment emanating from (or at least served by) a nation that contains Detroit, Oakland, etc.

I've visited Oakland a few times in recent years. I haven't been impressed by its wealth or modernity. No capital punishment, however. And as for drug possession - woo-hoo! The labor laws are quite strict as well, I'm told.

Tolerance of other cultures isn't just a slogan to be mouthed at freshman orientation. Sometimes it actually requires a nigga to consider dissonant perspectives.

Why the f' does everyone keep saying nigga? Is there a meme that I don't know about?

Sbierwagen, as a white male living in Seattle, whats with the offensive faux-ebonics?

I felt like burning some karma.

point taken.

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