Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists?

Re:Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists? by kolinko on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @03:40AM (#3589194)

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 :)

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Re:Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists? by Erunno on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @05:16AM (#3589417)

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.

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Re:Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists? by UnFleshedOne on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @12:25PM (#3590855)

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.

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Re:Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists? by Erunno on Wednesday February 15, 2012 @03:45AM (#3593595)

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.

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Re:Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists? by gcp on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @06:35AM (#3589588)

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?

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Re:Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists? by Retric on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @04:29AM (#3589313)

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.

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Re:Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists? by gcp on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @06:37AM (#3589594)

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

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Re:Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists? by twstws on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @08:52AM (#3589939)

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?

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Re:Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists? by lmm on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @12:40PM (#3590917)

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.

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Re:Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists? by twstws on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @07:00PM (#3592361)

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.

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Re:Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists? by jff on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @12:32PM (#3590894)

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 :)

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Re:Why Don't Americans Elect Scientists? by wisty on Tuesday February 14, 2012 @04:25AM (#3589302)

But the same is also true of lawyers.

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