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A comment on Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists?. Parent comment

Re:Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists? by aswanson on Thursday September 06, 2012 @05:38PM (#4486414)
Right. No point of conflict there. All I'm saying is that many technically trained and minded people, in the arena of dealing with human/political issues, seem to rely on idealizations, not unlike mathematical models, when in truth they are too complicated to be represented as such. Maybe the prediliction for mathematics and science betrays a deeper desire for a clean, concise, comprehensible truth, which rarely exists in the social/political realm.
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Re:Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists? by HarryHirsch on Thursday September 06, 2012 @08:06PM (#4486996)
Every physical scientist has learned very early in their career that nature does not care about what it ought to be like or what ought to work out. Hell, every experiment one designs ought to work fine the first time every time, and your pet theory ought to work out. But it isn't like that, in that line of work you have pragmatism beaten into you, and that is what is missing from contemporary American politics.

Maybe it's different with computer scientists, who live up there in the realm of pure thought and can bend reality to their will.

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Re:Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists? by enraged_camel on Thursday September 06, 2012 @06:03PM (#4486519)
I think the main benefit is that a scientist elected to a political office would make decisions based on real data when possible. Obviously it is often times not possible - for example, you can't use science to determine whether you should take a pro-life stance or a pro-choice stance - but the insistence on using numbers would greatly simplify many decisions.
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Re:Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists? by waterlesscloud on Thursday September 06, 2012 @08:09PM (#4487015)
If a scientist made decisions based on real data, wouldn't they conclude that the approach used by the current politicians is superior for the purposes of politics?

The data says it works, after all.

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Re:Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists? by aswanson on Thursday September 06, 2012 @07:36PM (#4486893)
Totally agree. There are benefits that a scientific stance would have in some circumstances, so it's a nuanced situation. :)
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Re:Why Don’t Americans Elect Scientists? by Daniel_Newby on Thursday September 06, 2012 @06:17PM (#4486576)
This is particularly true in climate science, where the simple models that cannot possibly be wrong predict anthropogenic global warming, but the complex models that cannot possibly be right are treated as deterministic and used to make detailed political plans for the future.

Science seems to leave the methods of rational thought far behind when it enters American politics.

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