The great irony is that in writing this, he exposes the fundamental conceit of the "poli-sci" complex that has brought the USA to its knees. The things he quotes as the reason poli-sci-types and not engineers should be the ones running government is that they learn "that people have different but equally valid perspectives; that the truth is not necessarily hard and precise; that judgments of value cannot be reduced to judgments of fact; that society will never be a smoothly functioning machine."
The problem is that those things are all INTUITIVE CONCLUSIONS. You could learn them by never getting a Lib Arts degree and never really even studying them formally. In fact, I would say most Lib Arts people I know struggle with those things and most engineers/scientists seem to get them on a fundamental level. The difference is that engineers and scientists dedicate themselves to understading how to dissect and solve problems - even when the solutions might be difficult or counter-intuitive to get to.
We are categorically worse off as a nation for handing our government over to the poli-sci complex. It is just the epitome of conceit that someone who never solves any complex problems should be allowed to annoint themselves as legislators over those that do.
Go down the chain of control for the Presidency. You have to get to like 16 (Secy of Transportation or something like that, I forget) before you find someone with a real science or engineering degree. It's pathetic and IMO, it's the source for most of this country's problems.
While i'm fond of it, there is nothing like a proof that empiricism is right and everything else (even metaphysics) is wrong. That said, i also don't believe running a government is much different than organizing any other kind of hierarchy, be it of animals or machines, it's a sort of engineering. In that sense, the practice of turning everything to popularity/likability contests is at least baffling; yet there is nothing better than democracy, and people still believe in invisible hands, political or otherwise.
The problem is that those things are all INTUITIVE CONCLUSIONS. You could learn them by never getting a Lib Arts degree and never really even studying them formally. In fact, I would say most Lib Arts people I know struggle with those things and most engineers/scientists seem to get them on a fundamental level. The difference is that engineers and scientists dedicate themselves to understading how to dissect and solve problems - even when the solutions might be difficult or counter-intuitive to get to.
We are categorically worse off as a nation for handing our government over to the poli-sci complex. It is just the epitome of conceit that someone who never solves any complex problems should be allowed to annoint themselves as legislators over those that do.
Go down the chain of control for the Presidency. You have to get to like 16 (Secy of Transportation or something like that, I forget) before you find someone with a real science or engineering degree. It's pathetic and IMO, it's the source for most of this country's problems.