this article made me rather cross! I'll post here what I commented on the article's discus, in case anyone is interested / wants to rebuff me.
Now that the author is done insulting me ("adolescent, in spirit if not in age") let me reply: we know (from science, not from politics) more and more about "how people work" - for example, see here a talk from 2010 about the way the languages we speak affects our perception and preferences ( http://fora.tv/2010/10/26/Lera_Boroditsky_How_Language_Shape... ) - this is not wishy washy philosophy but empirical experimental psychology.
The thrust of this post is downright negligent and while some of what the author says is reasonable, I take objection to this snippet (among others):
"people have different but equally valid perspectives; that the truth is not necessarily hard and precise;"
this sort of relativism is utter nonsense (perhaps excluding some moral judgements) - how economies works is a deterministic thing, which is nonetheless incredibly complicated, highly sensitive to initial conditions including fluffy things like 'public mood'. This doesn't make the truth any less precise or hard, just difficult to calculate, like weather patterns.
Over the centuries we have garnered an awful lot of data, both on state governance and economies, and (one of) the reason(s) engineers and scientists get cross with politics is that humanities graduates do not understand how to look at this data and learn from it.
We are sick of contradictory facts being shouted from one side of the radio argument to the other, without anyone bothering to check them (or the presenters bothering to know what they're talking about by reading a properly researched briefing before going on air, preferring as they do to improvise.)
Now, before someone accuses me of breaking the "firefly rule" ("sooner or later they'll come back around to thinking they can 'make people better' ") let me also add the caveat that I'm not in favour of forcing everyone to learn a second language (although that's actually not a bad idea, we already try to in schools) or anything worse. I am in favour of redesigning our existing institutions (government, education, etc) in line with how evidence suggests they will be more effective at fulfilling their own goals. Evidence-based policy is considerably more valuable than the author seems to realise.
On the other hand, playing the devil's advocate, it's remarkable that a system where, sometimes uninformed people, make decisions based on opinions they hear even works at all. There is very little empirical research on the value of the uninformed, but i wouldn't rule out the possibility it might be found to cause some benefit.
Oh, there are always geeks in the sidelines! :) The party machines have researchers, and there are think tanks which actually try to do some real investigations etc - as long as they sit with the appropriate set of ideological guesses of the politician in question then they get adopted. It's not totally random (like genetics) as with such small populations (of politicians) that really wouldn't work ;)
Now that the author is done insulting me ("adolescent, in spirit if not in age") let me reply: we know (from science, not from politics) more and more about "how people work" - for example, see here a talk from 2010 about the way the languages we speak affects our perception and preferences ( http://fora.tv/2010/10/26/Lera_Boroditsky_How_Language_Shape... ) - this is not wishy washy philosophy but empirical experimental psychology.
The thrust of this post is downright negligent and while some of what the author says is reasonable, I take objection to this snippet (among others):
"people have different but equally valid perspectives; that the truth is not necessarily hard and precise;"
this sort of relativism is utter nonsense (perhaps excluding some moral judgements) - how economies works is a deterministic thing, which is nonetheless incredibly complicated, highly sensitive to initial conditions including fluffy things like 'public mood'. This doesn't make the truth any less precise or hard, just difficult to calculate, like weather patterns.
Over the centuries we have garnered an awful lot of data, both on state governance and economies, and (one of) the reason(s) engineers and scientists get cross with politics is that humanities graduates do not understand how to look at this data and learn from it.
We are sick of contradictory facts being shouted from one side of the radio argument to the other, without anyone bothering to check them (or the presenters bothering to know what they're talking about by reading a properly researched briefing before going on air, preferring as they do to improvise.)
Now, before someone accuses me of breaking the "firefly rule" ("sooner or later they'll come back around to thinking they can 'make people better' ") let me also add the caveat that I'm not in favour of forcing everyone to learn a second language (although that's actually not a bad idea, we already try to in schools) or anything worse. I am in favour of redesigning our existing institutions (government, education, etc) in line with how evidence suggests they will be more effective at fulfilling their own goals. Evidence-based policy is considerably more valuable than the author seems to realise.