Scientists - not just CS, but biologists, chemists, etc. - are not in elected leadership positions very much. I agree they are frequently not willing to represent. But again - why?

A few opinions:

* scientists (computer, life, or otherwise) do not think their talents are best used in making public policy. There are so many other ways those talents and intelligence could be used

* perhaps worse pay (though the benefits, and opportunity for jobs after elected office, are certainly stellar)

* the process seems toxic compared to other ways to make a living

The first and last bullets seem the most important to me. Business and academia have some similarities with government, since in both cases they involve:

* writing, with the intent to better the world somehow

* raising money, whether from selling a product, grants, or donors

* using evidence to decide what to do next

The day-to-day work seems reasonably desirable, but the way that work must be done is, I think, the dealbreaker for many scientists.

At a company, everyone you work with on a daily basis is generally in step with the overall vision. Some teammates may differ on details - which language or data store, how to architect something - but the goal of the finished solution is mostly in agreement.

In government, there are at least two groups of people who publicly profess to have VERY different ideas about what the finished solution should accomplish. And even if you get elected on the team you think has the best goals, you may no get to work towards those goals directly, since the other team might have the majority of seats.

I have so many more thoughts on this, but I'll save that for a blog post. I'm curious what others think of this though.

I remember reading somewhere that the Chinese government is full of engineers/STEM degree holders, Physics, Civil, etc as opposed to lawyers in the U.S.

Assuming that's true, it makes sense from a 30,000ft level. CCP requires leaders to meet some socio-economic goal and that requires competency and a loose ability to apply scientific methodology.

In the U.S. it's much more important to argue your case, sound good and wiggle your way through the rules of law to get your way.

The above is an obviously charitable view of the Chinese system, but I can't help but feel that the U.S. has become too comfortable and apart from reality which this pandemic is now checking us for.

I'm afraid the good old day of engineer/STEM leadership in CCP has long gone due to Culture Revolution. Most of the current CCP leaders grew up during that time, when the education system of the whole country was basically destroyed.

As a result, the education level of the current Politburo members is shockingly low. For example, Xi Jinping barely finished his middle school, then went to Tsinghua as a Worker-Peasant-Soldier student[1]. Apparently he was not well-educated, as he makes so many illiterate mistakes [2] in public speeches.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker-Peasant-Soldier_stude... [2] https://zh.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%AF%B9%E4%B9%A0%E8%BF%91%...

It's likely that these same people would have studied political science, law, or economics had they been born Americans. I think a healthy amount of this is inertia. Future Western bureaucrats tend to study those fields because current Western bureaucrats tend to have degrees in those fields. So when prospects are researching how to break into said field, they discover that those majors are a proven means of achieving that goal.

Another relevant factor I think, is the kind of challenges you must overcome in politics vs technology.

A scientist probably finds the challenges to overcome in technology much more intellectually stimulating than she finds the challenges in politics. Which makes sense because people tend to get good at things they enjoy, and scientists need to get good at overcoming challenges much like technological challenges.

Bingo. Thanks for writing this more clearly and succinctly than I could!

Even though making laws or doing science both require writing and documentation, the challenge in a lab or on a computer is very different than coalition building amongst hundreds of very different people.

Bad pay + toxic process + bad usage of talents. Are you sure you are not talking about academy? (half joking)

An honest scientist abhors it, but those who fudge results have their place in politics.

As an engineer many political compromises make no sense to me to the extent I cannot support it. Compromising between, say, quality of a solution and the available resources to implement said solution makes sense to me and it is clear what the trade-offs are beforehand. A political compromise to keep all parties involved happy that mixes parts of totally different solutions and creates a system you know beforehand it is going to perform significantly worse than either solution, is difficult to accept let alone support for me.

I think you hit the nail on the head and that this is one of the primary psychological reasons many programmers don't pursue politics.

I studied psychology and communications and so much of my studies and to an extent my aspiration were in the political/communications/leadership/management field, where in my earlier teens I was I more focused on programming and anything nerdy.

After university, I realized that I didn't (yet?) want to professionally go in the direction of my studies, so I dusted off my PHP knowledge and started 'doing websites'.

Since then, it's become clear to me that I generally prefer and thrive in this world, much as I sometimes miss the 'attending x meetings, being involved with y projects, going to z meetups' side of things just a little bit.

What I've noticed is a few things: 1) these two 'worlds' seem very distinct and I can't switch between the two easily, 2) the more time I spend in 'programmer mode', the harder it is to draw from the 'political compromise' / meetings well, not just in ability but also in patience. I've had to learn to 'manage' and make sure to feed both these separate energies to do my job as a freelancer/consultant.

For example, if I know that I have a meeting with a client on Tuesday afternoon and it's preceded by a few days of serious, focused programming, I make sure to at the very least keep Tuesday empty until the meeting, and ideally some of Monday. When I don't do this the world won't end, but I notice that I'm much worse at handling the improvisational nature of a meeting. I also need more time to prepare for the various permutations of the conversation I imagine might become true.

On the other hand, if I haven't done much programming for a while, I tend to be much better at handling the vague, suboptimal, compromise-focused stuff. And perhaps I get sloppier with my code too, but I'm not sure if that is true and it strikes me as a bit too neat to be true. Still.

> Is the social status of computer scientists zero, or do computer scientists choose not to go into politics or other leadership positions?

Well the outcome is the same either way. And if none of the institutions have any computer scientists in them now good luck to the first few people trying because they work on social connections.

There's a social ceiling to computer scientists. I won't call it a glass ceiling even because everyone can see it.

Take an institution like the NSA - where probably some of the best computer scientists and mathematicians are working doing some of the most cutting edge work with the best resources. Who leads them? A low social status computer scientist? Of course not. They get in a high social status military officer to do that job - can't trust the computer scientists and can you blame them because they won't have any influence in society to get anything done anyway!

General Nakasone is a lifelong intelligence officer with degrees in the field of intelligence, and he’s been in the intelligence and cyber warfare fields for decades.

He’s not a computer scientist, but he’s also not an English teacher they just stuck in charge because he has a star. He’s highly qualified for that job, as are most people who have been assigned there. NSA does a lot of things that are not computer science, and many senior people there do come out of the engineering and CS fields.

> He’s highly qualified for that job

He is, yes. And one of his essential qualifications needed for the job is being respected by the establishment because he's come through the establishment institutions and a profession respected by society with a combat action badge, rather than a technical contributor, which society does not respect.

One of those essential qualifications is being technically competent, which he clearly is.

Having a CAB is not one of those qualifications, most NSA directors have not had one or had any combat experience.

Just as most CEOs are hired for their business expertise, not only their technical abilities.

It turns out that nobody cares about scientists and engineers going into politics because they have more or less the same spectrum of political preferences as everyone else. We have an MIT electrical engineer that founded and sold a 3D modeling/haptics startup in Congress. You never hear about him among tech people because he’s a Tea Party Republican.

Whatever value we assign to that background plainly weighs less, even among people who might be a natural constituency, than agreement on various issues. Which is fine, but that means we believe the background just isn’t very valuable.

I live in a country in Latin America, where I attended public university for a CS degree. Some computer scientists there, some even with PhDs, got involved in politics later. Some even at the national level.

Not sure there's any conclusion to draw here, just wanted to share my personal experience.

What is someone's status as a chess player if they never play? If computer scientists have no social status - a position I am not necessarily backing - whether it is because they have not sought it or because nobody cares that somebody is a computer scientist would be moot.

The creator of PHP's Xdebug (Derick Rethans) unsuccessfully stood for local elections recently.

I can't think of many others though!

We need "proportional representatives". So people who are known national but not locally can gain access to congress.

It also helps against gerrymandering.

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

I care about politics and participate, just not electorally. ^_^;