
Urge President Trump to give scientists a seat at the table - vqc
http://www.314action.org/home
======
Broken_Hippo
The thing is that I don't care if a politician has a background in STEM
subjects - in fact, if they have a STEM background, I prefer they also have a
political science background or something that has to do with public policy.
It doesn't need to be a formal degree if the person has a long history of
political experience. This is for state level or higher. Local elections I
doubt it matters so much.

I do, however, fully expect elected officials to take those in the STEM fields
seriously and listen to their advice like they would listen to any expert.

I do want the elected officals to appoint STEM folks to the appropriate
departments. I want someone well-versed in science to head the EPA and the
like. Similarly, I want someone with teaching experience (and confidence in
bettering public education) to head education. And so on.

~~~
eatbitseveryday
> I want someone well-versed in science to head the EPA and the like.
> Similarly, I want someone with teaching experience (and confidence in
> bettering public education) to head education. And so on.

Canada's Cabinet [1] is diverse and the positions are individuals
representative of those fields.

Quoting from the article:

> The defence minister, Harjit Sajjan, a decorated lieutenant-colonel in the
> Canadian armed forces, was the first Sikh Canadian to command an army
> regiment

> appointing two Aboriginal politicians to cabinet, along with indigenous
> affairs minister, Carolyn Bennett

> The veterans affairs minister, Kent Hehr, has also overcome adversity to get
> to his current role. A one-time hockey player, he was struck in the neck by
> a bullet in a drive-by shooting, and rendered paraplegic in his early 20s.
> He went on to become a lawyer and an advocate for the disabled before
> jumping into provincial, and now federal politics.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/05/canada-
diverse...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/05/canada-diverse-
cabinet-includes-astronaut-badass-colonel)

~~~
dingaling
> Canada's Cabinet [1] is diverse and the positions are individuals
> representative of those fields.

I don't know if that's necessarily a good thing.

Secretaries of State are supposed to be advisers to the
{elected|appointed|self-selected} leader of the Government. If they already
have some personal 'skin in the game' then that may influence the advice they
give, rather than listening to _their_ experts and selecting the options that
are best for the _country_.

For example a Lt Col certainly knows how a regiment of 5000 men works, but why
should that qualify him to advise a Prime Minister on, say, the strategic
implications of nuclear deterrence? He's going to have to go and ask the
experts first.

In that example it might actually be better to appoint him to a totally
different department, so one still benefits from his management skills but he
in turn has to start from a blank slate without preconceptions.

------
cloakandswagger
The majority of Einsatzgruppen (SS) officers had PhDs.

Anecdotes aside, I used to think this way until I realized that being a leader
is about a lot more than raw intelligence.

The best leaders (business, political or otherwise) have a unique mental
resolve that is a lot stronger than the rest of us. They need to be able to
thrive in chaos and stay motivated when everything is falling apart.

I arrived at this conclusion after years of looking at various CEOs and
scoffing at how easily I could do the job--just make arbitrary decisions, take
credit when they work and deflect when they don't, right?

It wasn't until I worked for a company that was teetering on failure that I
realized there was more to it. While I would have felt completely overwhelmed,
frustrated and defeated, this CEO somehow managed to stay positive and kept
fighting for years until the business was in the clear.

~~~
refurb
This is really true. After working my way up in a mid-sized organization, I've
learned being a CEO is hard and really easy to screw up.

As you mentioned it's about motivating people when they all want to go in a
different direction. And it's not about saying "do this". That doesn't work.
It's about _convincing_ them it's the right path forward.

------
jgord
This will help, but isnt the real issue .. which is that the main qualifier
for high office is having immense wealth.

The measure of wealth in and of itself selects for people without the depth of
experience in fields other than personal-wealth-generation. Due to effects
explained in Piketty's Capital, it also has a secondary selection bias,
preferring inherited wealth over entrepreneurial wealth.

Given the prior, that we do have money-in-politics, it makes sense to erode
that bias in a minor way by having more STEM [ and poor but innovative
entrepreneur ] people get involved in politics.

It also helps as a partial measure to reduce the power of the daily
alternative facts, post truth media barrage we now face [ itself partly due to
big-money owning the media ] - STEM practitioners are familiar with sifting
facts from noise.

We should also solve the real problem - big-[old]-money in politics - perhaps
by flushing the big-money out with little-money : a torrent of 27 dollar
contributions from citizens.

The massive womens rally and the Bernie movement give me hope we might achieve
this - but clearly the DNC itself is afflicted by the same cancer, and must be
taken over by real/progressive Democrats for there to be any hope of sane
policy in America.

[edit : clarity, intent ]

~~~
woofyman
Overturn Citizens United and publicly fund elections.

~~~
jeffdavis
I think blame on Citizen's United is misplaced. Even without it, rich
interests can (and do) simply buy media companies and promote politicians
without any regulation at all.

In theory at least, the pooling of money into PACs allows ordinary people with
small donations to make a dofference.

Maybe we should encourage ordinary citizens to put some money into PACs, which
will have a greater impact than trying to prevent rich people from having
influence (which doesn't usually work).

------
candiodari
Because it works so well in China ?

Also Ahmadinejad has a master in civil engineering, a PhD in transportation
engineering, and has taught as a professor (apparently he has returned to that
job).

~~~
bumblebeard
The Soviet Union had a bunch of engineers in their government too and they
made all kinds of stupid decisions anyway. I don't think the composition of
the government matters as much as its structure and as governments go I think
the US has a decent one.

I think the problem is more _who_ our politicians are listening to then what
they actually believe themselves. Banning lobbying would probably do a lot
more than just trying to elect a bunch of scientists and engineers.

~~~
_delirium
The engineers may have even exacerbated some things, especially in the
1950s-70s, as they were more optimistic about rapid advances in (what was then
called) cybernetic control than turned out to be warranted. It seemed within
short term reach to have rational, data-driven optimization of large sections
of the economy, but neither the technology, nor theory, nor data was there at
the time to make that actually work. It's an interesting question what
would've turned out differently if expectations of rapid advances turned out
to be accurate, and they had 1960s USSR-level political resources paired with
something closer to today's level of data-collection and ML technology.
Central economic planning, but run by an engineering-bureaucracy with the
resources of 2017 Google.

~~~
_yosefk
You mean today's computers can assign prices to existing products and decide
which new products to develop better than the market? The iPhone coming out of
a neural network which isn't close to passing even a pale shadow of the Turing
test (which a lot of humans pass who certainly cannot develop new products or
set prices better than the market)? I wouldn't put my money on it.

(BTW Botvinnik, the first Soviet chess champion, was trying to push his
(weaker than competition) chess-playing program as a basis for running the
entire Soviet economy (he explained the weakness of his program for chess by
it being more general than the competition; it apparently did not occur to him
however that the fact that it lost to other machines and of course to people -
this was 1990 - could perhaps mean it might run the economy somewhat worse
than say a person. He was an engineer.))

As to electing engineers - let's put it this way: all else being equal, I'd
rather be ruled by an EXPERIENCED ex-engineer (not just a guy with a degree)
with a track record of achieving something, for which people who worked with
them can vouch, than an ex-lawyer or an ex-journalist. But "engineer" by
itself is not even a certificate of basic sanity, let alone the ability to
lead someone somewhere other than the abyss, and for this HN's comment section
provides ample evidence on a daily basis.

~~~
_delirium
I'm not betting my labor vouchers either for or against it, just an
interesting thought experiment. Some of the technical problems with 1960s
cybernetics are solved now, especially for more defined tasks. The USSR had
huge problems getting to work things that would now be called "supply-chain
optimization" and similar and are now routinely done, in a pretty centrally
planned style, at large vertically integrated companies with complex
logistics. This kind of stuff just didn't work at the time at the scale Soviet
planners hoped to use it (scales like "optimize agricultural production in the
whole USSR"), and when people tried to use it it produced bad results. I do
agree that how to switch production into new sectors and products and how not
to have a terrible bureaucracy capture all these decisions is a different,
probably more difficult question though, certainly having some logistics
optimization tools that work isn't solving the full picture (it's just better
than having those problems and also having logistics optimization tools that
_don 't_ work).

~~~
_yosefk
There's a huge difference between a vertically integrated company competing
for customers and vendors and the entire economy of a country, IMO. One
evidence is that large companies keep ossifying and failing to adapt all the
time which means the economy needs more than one giant company to move
forward. A new Google needs a way to tell the state/the giant
computer/whatever, "you're wrong, search works badly and we can do better."
It's very hard to do that if the giant computer is running everything and
effectively decides what you do (and it cannot run the economy if it cannot
decide who does what, or at least what projects are funded and which aren't.)

Also the USSR didn't just have problems optimizing supply chains. It had a
problem deciding what to make. You couldn't buy woolen sweaters so you bought
woolen socks and made sweaters from the woolen threads making up the sock
(yes, I fucking participated in this fuckery). How is a giant neural network
going to figure out how many socks and sweaters people want better than demand
affecting prices affecting production, even if I grant you the assumption that
the problem of managing the socks supply chain is nailed today?

~~~
_delirium
What, A/B testing not good enough for you? Please rate how you liked these two
socks, this will be taken into account in order to serve you better.

~~~
_yosefk
I hear you, I just think you're a lot like that Soviet cybernetician [1],
meaning that you think you're very close to the technology of that ever-
elusive tomorrow, but you aren't :-) Of course it's not really fair to say
that since you qualified your statements, it just sounded good and I can't
miss an opportunity to fire a cheap shot at the AI/big data bubble :-)

[1] Nobody was called that as cybernetics was declared "a servant of
Imperialism", I guess nominally because automating away jobs hurts workers or
something, which is one reason the USSR never produced particularly good
computing machinery. But I get whom you refer to.

------
philipov
The problem isn't that politicians are stupid, the problem is that they have
adverse incentives. Education is no vaccine against corruption, and if you're
not a team player you won't get advanced by your party.

------
resfirestar
Anecdotally I don't think choosing leaders with STEM backgrounds would produce
improvements in acceptance of climate science. Here's some members of congress
who are climate deniers despite their STEM backgrounds.

Joe Barton, Texas 6th, industrial engineer and climate denier.

Tom Coburn (senator from Oklahoma from 2005-2015) is an obstetrician and
leading climate denier.

Thom Tillis, climate denier and senator from North Carolina, has a degree in
"technology management".

Timothy F. Murphy, Pennsylvania 18th, climate denier with a Ph.D in
psychology.

Steve Scalise, Louisiana 1st, climate denier with a B.S. in computer science.

And that's just what I found off the top of my head plus 5 minutes of clicking
through the bios of some of the Republican members of the House Committee on
Energy and Commerce, then googling to check if they were climate deniers. I'm
sure people will take this opportunity to bash medical doctors, but I think it
definitely counts as STEM, and they generally have abhorrent views on health
policy as well.

~~~
FireBeyond
I wonder how many of these people truly disbelieve climate change, and how
many are "towing the party line"?

~~~
resfirestar
Toeing the party line would be voting no on climate change bills and keeping
your mouth shut. I came across a couple of people apparently doing that, and
they of course didn't make the list. I think all but one or two of the people
listed gave some wacky statement invoking the Bible to say that humans can't
change the climate.

------
DonaldFisk
I didn't like her politics, but Margaret Thatcher had a BSc in Chemistry, and
went on to work as a research chemist.

Credit where credit's due: she understood the problem of climate change:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnAzoDtwCBg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnAzoDtwCBg)

~~~
hliyan
Angela Merkel has a similar background, doesn't she?

~~~
peter303
She had a doctorate.

------
Taek
I'm not hopeful. I am young but my experince has been that moving up the
leadership or management ladder requires a vastly different set of skills than
stem and if you are serious about doing it you will have to leave your stem
behind, or you simply won't be able to compete.

~~~
bassman9000
True. But your background lasts. Management gives you people skills,
organizational ones, teaches you to listen, and a sense of duty towards your
team members. Couple that to a solid technical/scientific background, and you
got a prepared leader.

------
Mikeb85
Dear god the last thing I'd ever want is a country ruled by engineers. Most
have one track minds, can't multitask, and can't see the forest beyond the
trees. Maybe if they also have some sort of background in
philosophy/economics/humanities or anything that can add perspective on the
human condition, managing people, etc...

~~~
DonaldFisk
Here's a list of PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) graduates from
Oxford:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_University_of_Oxford_p...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_University_of_Oxford_p..).

They're very much a mixed bag.

------
peter303
President Carter had training in nuclear engineering. President Hoover had a
geology degree, later practicing mining engineering. Neither were particularly
exceptional Presidents.

~~~
general_ai
Saying that Carter wasn't "exceptional" is quite an understatement. He kinda
sucked at his job in general, and at getting the Congress to support his
agenda in particular.

------
myf01d
From my experience, guys with the highest IQs are the worst leaders and they
inexplicably, usually lack vision and courage.

~~~
throwaway5752
Hey, just a clarification. Could you ballpark, roughly, the ballpark that
you're talking about for "highest IQs" and the IQs of the better leaders
you've worked with? Because I think in software development, we fail to
appreciate that 100 - by definition - is the median IQ and that half of people
are below 100. I'd say the bulk of highly effective leaders in software I've
worked with were substantially over 100. Before software, I have worked with
different populations with greater variance. Unintelligent people usually make
poor leaders.

Anyway, people have written and research a lot about this (MBTI, EQ, etc) and
IQ is just a component and IQ itself is a very coarse grained metric that has
many subcomponents. High IQ certainly doesn't hurt in general.

~~~
myf01d
I meant real high IQ like most engineers & scientists, maybe IQ > 125 or 130.
I guess there may be some relation between higher IQs and poor communication
skills, less courage and other traits. But that's just a personal view with no
scientific evidence.

~~~
throwaway5752
That's what I guessed. I have seen some very smart individuals lack empathy
for people that weren't as smart or otherwise capable, or undercommunicate
because they thought more things were tacitly understood than really were. I
have no idea if there's a negative correlation there.

------
jekrb
Elect more leaders who come from a Philosophy background.

------
thinkloop
Wanting more STEM seems like an indirect way of wanting more critical,
evidence-based, thinking. Atheism is probably a better proxy.

~~~
rayiner
Do I want more critical, evidence-based thinking, or more decent human beings
who want to serve rather than play god? I wasn't thrilled with say Cass
Sunstein's ideas when he was appointed by Obama.

~~~
grzm
_I wasn 't thrilled with say Cass Sunstein's ideas when he was appointed by
Obama._

Would you expand on this? I was quite impressed with what I read in _Nudge_.
Did any of this practical thinking carry over to OIRA? Or was that perhaps
part of the problem?

~~~
rayiner
It's impressive, but falls into the "playing God" bucket for me.

~~~
grzm
Gotcha. I'll admit I was hoping for more, but I can understand not wanting to
get into it in a comment. Can you point me to a critique (your own, or someone
else's) of Sunstein that would elaborate on this for me, in particular his
work under Obama?

------
hefeweizen
Of course, it is a fallacy to assume that leaders from STEM backgrounds may be
qualitatively better than others, or even perform better for their
constituents. But then again, such leaders would definitely not ignore climate
change wholesale.

If there is indeed a correlation between education in any of the STEM fields
and "leadership qualities", would it not be better to reform education to
introduce skills implicit to these fields at an early age (logic, reasoning,
rational discourse, understanding of the scientific process) instead of
selecting for these qualities later on?

------
forgottenpass
This is doomed to fail. Even if they succeed, it will be a cosmetic victory.
The explicitly defined object of desire is the trappings of power. The SEAT
rather than the influence. But nobody is taken seriously because they have a
seat at the table, they have a seat at the table because they're taken so
seriously that the meeting is worth less without them.

The only setback Trump has caused to science's input to policy was removing
it's current cosmetic status. Nobody in government, in either party, takes
science seriously when it conflicts with their policy goals. It's just a
cudgel that sometimes aligns with their goals, and is wielded the same as any
other block of useful idiots with fancy nametags.

In other words: if the government had actually taken science seriously when
Democrats were in power, this would have never been a problem.

------
samfisher83
Jimmy Carter was an engineer and he turned out to be bad president. I think
the president should be someone who can work with people and gets things done.
You could be the smartest person in the world and if you can't deal with
people you will end up not being an effective president.

------
Tloewald
We need fewer leaders with legal backgrounds as well. The law trains you to
argue a case by selectively ignoring unfavorable evidence, and guess what our
politicians are incredibly good at?

~~~
dragonwriter
> The law trains you to argue a case by selectively ignoring unfavorable
> evidence

No, it doesn't.

~~~
state_less
A law degree is great thing for a leader to have, but not sufficient. You need
people with integrity too. I think a lot of the common backlash against
lawyers is due to the fact that a lawyer lacking integrity is good at
circumventing the law. Similar to how a doctor, usually a profession known for
healing, would also know how to make many people sick.

~~~
Tloewald
> A law degree is great thing for a leader to have, but not sufficient

A law degree has an opportunity cost. That's a bunch of years you didn't spend
learning something else. Is that the best thing you could have spent that time
learning?

Bear in mind that a huge proportion of our politicians have law degrees. If we
had as few people with law degrees as have backgrounds in statistics or
economics or engineering then sure, we'd want more -- but we are in no
immediate danger of that.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Is that the best thing you could have spent that time learning?

If you are going to be writing laws and evaluating the practical impact of
proposed laws written by others? Yes, learning law is pretty much the most
relevant thing you can learn. Political science, public policy, public
administration, economics, finance (both public and private), international
relations, history, and game theory in any context are also quite broadly
useful. (And while most of those are fields you could get a degree in, they
have substantial overlap.)

Most STEM subjects are pretty far from being broadly useful; each would be
relevant to a small minority of the work of any legislator (and even where it
was relevant, multiple of the previously mentioned fields would also be
relevant.)

------
CalChris
Margaret Thatcher comes to mind. Jimmy Carter comes to mind.

~~~
whorleater
Angela Merkel comes to mind.

------
snomad
For reference, here is link [http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2012/02/by-
the-numbers-th...](http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2012/02/by-the-numbers-
the-jobs-jobs-jobs-of-the-first-congress-vs-the-112th-congress/) to 2011 -
2012 congress and their career backgrounds.

------
JetSpiegel
Might as well go the extra mile and demand people to elect only the good
politicians.

Just like demanding programmers to not write bugs.

------
to3m
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2015/11/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-
cage/wp/2015/11/17/)

------
blazespin
Elect more leaders like me! Seriously? This is seriously at the top of HN?
What is so great about science? Didn't science create nuclear weapons? Isn't
it rushing us towards the AI Singularity? Why are you so confident that STEM
is the answer to all our prayers?

I do STEM because it provides for my family. However, I appreciate and
understand that I might very well be the problem rather than the solution.
But, I am good at it and pays well and sometimes it seems to do good when in
the right hands.

If you ask me though - elect more leaders who are anti-violence and anti-
consumption. But hey, one person one vote - right?

~~~
state_less
You owe your life to STEM. We don't get to ~7 billion without it. You are the
roadways that bring you food. You are the pipes that bring you water, and
carry away your feces.

I agree with your assessment though, STEM isn't sufficient to be a good
leader. You need to care about people and want to improve their well-being
too.

------
MR4D
How about electing more leaders who know how to solve problems and can do a
decent job of breaking down complex problems?

I don't care where they learned how to do that.

------
tigeba
When I clicked the link I expected to be presented evidence this approach
would create better outcomes than the status quo.

------
maxxxxx
It definitely wouldn't hurt to have less lawyers in leadership. they seem a
little over represented.

~~~
lkbm
Congress' job is to write, evaluate, and vote on laws. It makes sense that we
have legal experts--IE, lawyers--doing that.

I can definitely see a good argument to the contrary: Politicians should be
the experts in negotiating/being the interface between field experts
(scientists, lawyers, economists) and public values (voters or all citizens).
Having them distinct from the legal experts seems sensible.

But right now, law is the language of politics/policy, so I'm not sure how
this separation would work. Congress can say "NASA, based on your input and
the public's preferences, you get these resources to do aeronautics" and
leaves the details up to NASA, and that's fine, but if Congress just says
"lawyers, based on your input and the public's preferences, write a law on
decriminalized cannabis use" and let's the lawyers handle the details....I
dunno. Somehow, it feels like law requires less delegation and more technical
understanding on the part of Congress than aeronautics does.

I see the problem not as too many lawyers, but as corruption (though not in a
literal bribery sort of way) and--for lack of a better term-- _politics_.
(e.g., the problem isn't lawyers don't believe in climate change. The problem
is that climate change has become a political issue that half of the country
rejects ideologically.)

~~~
maxxxxx
Politicians in congress don't write laws themselves. They are written by staff
and unfortunately often lobbyists. I would much prefer if they had real
expertise in some areas and left the detail of writing laws to the lawyers in
their stuff.

------
guest-speaker-4
Gotta fix the top of operating system before suggesting a lowly cabinet
position that will be ignored anyhow. There are fundamental problems with the
incestuous corporations buying off the news media and the politicians,
combined with a broken and corrupt system which has failed in Romantic ways.
Things which the illegitimate, corrupt politicians cannot or will not address.
This doesn't mean throw everything away or wait by the phone for
incrementalism, but multiple, major, decisive changes are vital in order to
level the playing field for public servants.

0) Only allow X dollars per campaign from named, naturalized, human beings to
fund specific candidates, and the candidates must disclose how it must be
spent only on that campaign. No more super PACs or dark money pools.

0.5) No more special interest political smear ads. Again, the clear and
present danger to the republic by manipulating elections supercedes unlimited
"freedom" to persuade people that "clean coal" is good for them.

1) Make it a felony for any elected official to accept any compensation, gift
or privilege including food, goods, services, vacations or exclusive event
participation. Politicans are there to be public servants, not cut book deals
or consulting gigs.

2) Matching public campaign funds to private funds.

3) Make it a felony for a for-profit news organization to be funded by
advertisements or politicians.

4) Eliminate the electoral college: it has failed, twice. Replace it with
national popular ranked vote (1st Sally, 2nd Joe, ...)

5) Eliminate jerrymandering by redrawing all districts based on a simple,
deterministic, open-source algorithm finding population centroids. Tweaks to
this law can only be enacted to fix flaws and edge-cases without predetermined
favoritism.

6) News media embargo on manipulating election results from a day before early
voting starts until after all final results are in, punishable by a 10 years
in prison and/or a $250,000 fine.

7) National voter conformance: national vote on the same day, permanent
absentee voting by mail, early voting (two weeks), same day registration for
in-person and open-source blockchain tabulation with a paper (non-thermal)
receipt. No discriminatory "poll tax" or bureaucratic hoops laws. Period.

------
general_ai
People with decent STEM backgrounds can be MUCH more gainfully employed
elsewhere. Higher echelons of US government are badly underpaid, which is why
they attract the kind of "talent" they do. A Google search shows that it takes
$110K to decently get by in DC. $175K for someone who is expected to be at the
top of their game is a bad deal when a professional can make two to three
times as much in the private sector. So you get a bunch of has-beens who
aren't good for anything else. The only exception I can think of is the USDS,
where idealistic young people go to serve their country and take a massive pay
cut (which is even more massive if you factor in the opportunity cost), but
sooner or later life will catch up to them, too, and they'll discover they
need to save for retirement and college, pay for private school for their
kids, etc, etc. Shit's expensive.

~~~
makecheck
Worse, there is a _massive_ chicken-and-egg problem here.

At least with normal jobs, I only have to risk _occasionally_ encountering
someone who is difficult or slightly incompetent. While dealing with difficult
people is normal, at least right now it isn’t a daily occurrence.

Conversely, I can pretty much guarantee that a _huge_ number of future
colleagues would be making my life miserable when in Congress. Some of them
apparently cannot be reasoned with at all (“I’m sorry, you have the wrong
letter after your name _therefore_ your idea sucks <turning brain off now>”),
and a pretty insane number of them just do whatever they want without obeying
rules.

It reaches a point where you have to decide where you can do the most good,
and there just doesn’t seem to be a way to do much “good” by being in public
office. I feel better working on engineering projects that go somewhere.

------
diogenescynic
Just stop electing republicans for a start.

~~~
Mikeb85
So you are proposing a Democrat led dictatorship?

~~~
diogenescynic
There are other parties. The two party monopoly is exactly what led us to this
disaster of an election.

