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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

> deep thinkers like scientists and engineers

That doesn't work, either, because they tend to be rather dismissive of human concerns, and, at its heart, government is all about humans.

I don't have a solution, but I don't think that declaring that only one-or-another "class" of humans is fit to govern, is it.

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The U.K. has a system where experts in various fields like medicine and engineering are put in the lawmaking process, in addition to experts in becoming elected (ie raising money and selling non tangible ideas to people)

It’s not perfect of course, but in my opinion it’s better than a fully democratic system.

Do those unelected experts advise on new legislation, even write it (why not? We don't expect elected politicians to be experts in much more than ordinary people) or do they also vote to approve or reject those laws like elected politicians do?

Theoretically they do both. I think the system that the above commenter is alluding to is the House of Lords, where a bunch of unelected "lords" can vote on legislation. The idea is for the lords to be people with particular expertise who we want to be voting on stuff. For example if you have some very highly thought of scientist or engineer you reward them with a peerage and they can sit in the house of lords and vote on stuff. Of course the reality is not so great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_peer

That's a stereotype and probably not true. Many deep thinkers are humanists.

It's probably more likely around the hyper rational types, but my boss is the most empathetic engineer I've ever worked for. This is anecdotal but your comment seems fairly clearly overbroad

I've seen the stereotype confirmed on HN several times already. Whenever I, a blind pedestrian, voice my concerns about driverless car technology, I am being downvoted and outright critizised. The undertone is "How can this single person try to block an emerging technology". That pretty much confirms the statement that tech people sometimes have a hard time with human concerns.

i think it just confirms that in any given group of people, a majority percentage of them will be self absorbed dickheads.

I don't think it's always necessarily a majority - it's just always going to be more than we estimate.

I am empathetic to your concerns but I may or may not agree with your proposed solutions. I do think it's always important to keep in mind that empathy and compassion aren't the same thing, or always aligned. Compassion is more utilitarian. Driverless cars will save a lot of lives when the technology is good enough, and the compassionate thing is implementing the technology when it saves more lives than it endangers. If that's the non-empathy you are getting from the HN community then the community is right, but again, I genuinely empathize even so.

> Many deep thinkers are humanists.

That's the deal, though. Engineers and scientists don't have a monopoly on "deep thinker™".

My sister is a "deep thinker." She has an economics degree from Princeton, and has been working at very high levels, for decades.

Very decent human being. Not sure if she'd be interested in being a "leader," though.

That's part of the problem; it's almost as if wanting the job, automatically disqualifies you.

But you are right. It's an overbroad statement.

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