Be careful, there are lots of people passing themselves off as scientists who aren't these days.
It is all over the place. From medical research where they call people who try to check the data analysis "parasites"[1], to psychology where they call people who do replications "bullies"[2], to physics where they want to get rid of the need for evidence altogether[3].
Bill Nye is a science "presenter". I think he was a mech eng at Boeing.
Degasse Tyson is a trained scientist but has a tendency to espouse opinions on subjects he's not an expert in, but with the authority of his professional background.
I'll be frank, if supposed "actual scientists" were better at science communication, may be there wouldn't be a need for "science communicators."
I say this as an actual scientist who mostly dislikes communication. I'm happy there are communicators out there that raise our profile a little, I don't feel jealous or spiteful for some reason towards them.
I think you're mistaking "communication" for "vulgarization". Most decent scientists are good at communicating their findings via publications. Making those findings understandable by laypeople, maybe not so much.
No, that's not what I mean. Of course he like everyone else can have an opinion on anything they want to opine on.
What I'm saying is because of his background, that offers him imprimatur on things which he's not an expert but people will presume that because he's an expert elsewhere he's opinion in other areas are equally valid.
That parasite website is so weird. It sounds so negative, like a piece of satire, but then you read the actual text and it sounds like a serious award whose goal is to encourage rigor in scientific research.
Whose stupid idea was it to call it the Parasite Award
Maybe natural scientists are more accustomed to using the strict, cold, definitions of biological concepts without being emotionally influenced by any cultural value judgement attached to them.
I think it's too much to ask to expect every little scientific niche, every subculture, to have to adapt their local personalized context-aware terminology to the global culture, just because a random person coming from outside the niche might be confused by their language. It's like demanding that no part of a public speech should be able to shine a poor light on the speaker when a substring of it is taken out of context. It's an unnecessarily harsh constraint.
The name is tongue in cheek. It's taken from a NEJM editorial that attempted to negatively characterize people who just analyze data without doing the grunt work of collecting it as "research parasites".
(Obviously the editorial is gesturing at a real problem: that by unbundling data collection and analysis and, as is unfortunately typical, only giving credit to the result of analysis, there could be a dearth of data collection from lack of incentive. But characterizing pure analysis negatively is obviously the wrong response.)
I would then ask: "what is science?", "who defines it?", "who is science?"
Readiing the last article you linked, it seems like a legitimate debate about the scientific method and what constitutes scientific theories. Every scientists (but especially "science fans") need to acknowledge the fact that all science rests on certain axioms (partially laid out in the scientific method) that can't be proven by science. So going with the newest developments in the philosophy of science, the people developing science itself, seems only reasonable. What you call "getting rid of evidence" is only the exploration of other types of evidence aside from classical empirical evidence
Up until this weird new thing where people want to dream up models and not worry about empiricism, "science" has always been characterized by the fact that you can strip out all the dependence on philosophy and reduce it to statements about procedures and algorithms. Every metaphysics has to reckon with our ability to act in the world, but they don't all have to include particular statements about the ontology of (say) numbers. As a result, statements about similarities between processes (for example the way counting in your head, a neurochemical process, is similar to putting stones in a bucket, a mechanical process) can be "independent" of the underlying ontological model. After all, whatever "similarity," means on the inside, those processes are "similar."
In a sense, it's similar to how mathematicians write proofs in natural-ish language and call them true under the idea that they could convert them to purely formal symbolic manipulations if they wanted to put in the effort. Scientists talk about things as if they had all kinds of ontological statuses that they can't be shown to have - (ever heard a chemist describe electrons as "wanting" to occupy the lowest energy state?) - but that's nothing but language. The only reason any of it works is because you could cut out all of the weird stuff if you really wanted to.
I can't quite tell if I agree with you; so I shall attach this opinion. Science is characterised by being able to strip everything out of it down to a procedure to gather data and some guesses at how future data will look.
Taking gravity as the classic example, in theory any person with any set of biases can put together a table with column A being mass and column B being distance to the ground and column C being time to fall the distance. From that, they could reconstruct Newton's Laws of Gravity if they measure everything carefully enough and are honest.
Maybe the theory they come up with is F = g m / r^2 and the mechanism is tiny goblins. Cool. They can call that science as long as the goblins will always follow the rules. But the rules of evidence are very important, we can't claim the goblins are going to do something differently sometimes if we haven't observed it in the data.
The data is the science. The formula and mechanisms are useful, but they are inevitably wrong in detail. Gravity isn't ever going to be the only effect measured in a data set, so no data set can ever perfectly confirm a theory correct, and certainly cannot confirm a mechanism.
We don't need to rely on the scientists getting the mechanisms right. But we do need science to have a very high standard of measurement. It would help if they hold themselves back from coming up with crazy theories, but I don't know what a crazy theory looks like so I'm not going to try and police that today.
The models are also the science, because they come packaged along with statements about how well they fit the data. It's the "mechanism for the sake of having a mechanism" stuff that usually ends up as egg-on-face.
Strings sit in the same group as "flux-as-actual-fluid," Boltzmann's atoms, and caloric fluid: intellectually interesting guesses that remain guesses until the empirical side gets advanced enough. The fluids lost, atoms won, and we're waiting on strings.
> to physics where they want to get rid of the need for evidence altogether[3]
I don't see how you got that from the article you cited.
Take string theory. It was created to unify gravity and quantum mechanics.
Afterwards it was found that it also could correctly solve problems from several other areas of physics outside of the unification of gravity and QM. It had not been designed to solve those. That came out of it unexpectedly.
If the existence of those problems had happened to have been discovered after string theory instead of before, they would have been testable predictions of string theory that it would pass, and would count as evidence for string theory.
It seems ridiculous to disqualify them from being evidence for string theory just because of the historical accident that they happened to have been discovered earlier.
>"Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them."
Your position seems to be different from that described in the article. Anyway, post-dicting is not as impressive as pre-dicting. How much less impressive is determined by the flexibility of the model. My understanding is that the string-theory/multiverse model is extremely flexible.
Your quote is coming from some people quoted early in the article (around paragraph 5). My position is based on quotes quite a ways farther into the article, from people who are disagreeing with the earlier quoted people.
Only in the sense that PhDs are often extremely specialized. They are experts in one field, not general-purpose "science" experts. It may not be immediately clear why someone with the most advanced knowledge in the world on an esoteric organism in Indonesia would be a good advisor to the President.
A PhD functioning as an advisor does have valuable experience that would help them understand how some desired research needs to get done, or discern whether a particular study is quality or junk, or be able to communicate effectively in an environment full of technical jargon. Indeed, those are the characteristics that are really needed - but those are merely qualities that are hopefully picked up on the way to a PhD, not the research project which the PhD certifies.
A PhD alone wouldn't necessarily make a good scientific advisor, but someone who came from a high-level position in a university might.
Beyond a certain level, scientists become managers rather than practitioners. The successful ones have insight into the process of raising funds, the politics of large-scale research facilities, and sometimes the process of major international collaboration.
Discerning whether a given study is junk probably doesn't fall under the remit of Science Advisor. That's more of a tactical issue that would be delegated to a specialist policy wonk.
Many current congress members are lawyers and physicians. I welcome additional people with backgrounds demanding rigor. For example, in SF we have policies to help the homeless, but often fail to live up to their expectations. Politicians push through feel good measures that aren't based on rigorous studies.
Npr will often cite some idea based on a small study somewhere which hasn't been replicated elsewhere. Maybe technologists will require more rigor than we now do.
Why would technologists do that? Especially in those circles there's an incredible belief in easy solutions (i.e. technological solutions). For your homeless problem sociologists and anthropologists would probably be most appropriate
Is this a good thing? Governing is at its essence people management, and the best scientists don't always make the best managers. They may not be persuasive enough to rally others to their cause, or see the importance in doing so, or understand the give-and-take of politics, just the crusade for "truth." A scientist may be better and smarter, but impotent and walked over if he can't actually do politics with other messy humans.
> I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
You're making a lot of assumptions and leveraging old stereotypes. There "seem" to be plenty of great managers, department heads, professors who are in charge of large programs with many stakeholders etc.
The stereotype of the aloof scientist who's unable to connect with people really needs to go away imo.
I think it's a good thing. Just because scientists are running doesn't mean they'll be elected, meaning it will weed out the people who can't manage, especially over time. A larger pool of potential elected officials means that the government is more likely to reflect the people. Plus, having these smart-yet-non-politicians available for election would be very good for times when trust in typical politicians is faded.
Well, "scientists" isn't a uniform population in terms of people management skills, and scientists who self-select to run for office are already in one important way outside of the norm for that population. So while it makes sense not to assume someone would make a good politician just because they're a scientist, it doesn't make sense to assume a scientist who runs for office will necessarily make for a poor politician.
As we have seen in recent elections, replacing politicians with non-politicians has been a disaster for the country. Why is a scientist running better than a science-aware politician running?
I think I'd be fine with a politician with a non science background if they had excelled in Math/Science based courses in highschool and were generally curious as to how our world works. The problem is that most politicians I've met have a strong legal background (good), but a non existent technical background. How can you make key decisions if you don't understand these topics? You just take the word of advisors? If two advisors tell you two different things, how do you know which to trust?
Given the data from the 20th century, when scientists are in charge not only do you get a lot less liberty, you get a lot more rationalized wide scale atrocities.
My company has two engineering departments. 1 that has a very traditional management chain (non-technical) that is very bureaucratic with lots of meetings. The other promotes only the best technical engineers with ~10 years of experience and people skills. The latter typically performs far better finishing all projects on time and under budget. My boss's boss knows every table in our database, how each interface to our various apps works...etc. All our management in that department can speak on the same level as our vendors and drive key design and architecture decisions and the next day be talking to shareholders in the political realm. When someone asks them a question they can give an answer down to the lowest level of granularity if need be. So my experience based theory of management is to take high performing domain experts with people skills and put them in management in lieu of typical Harvard MBA types. Then pay for them to take some finance classes to round off that skill set if needed.
I know what you're saying, but I don't think you're catching my meaning. I believe good leadership involves specific skill sets applied to a particular area and that very few people can truly serve in the generalist role that the MBA & politicians try to sell you.
This could go really well or really badly. Scientists are good for making good scientific decisions, but they might (probably?) not be the best at managing a country. I think the best thing would be more people with political experience to run with the position of having lots of scientists as advisors.
Scientists generally pursue truth whereas politicians spend most of their time pursuing power by building a constituency, trying to get and stay elected, raising money, etc.
And I'm not saying "scientists are bad politicians". I'm saying what the two groups do don't overlap a ton.
For a gross example, most scientists will have to learn to lie to be good politicians, because all good politicians play fast and loose with the truth.
This is such a cliche criticism of scientists running for public office and frankly I’m tired of it as it detracts from the fundamental truth.
There is no reason why scientists cannot run for public office. Reason, logic and strategic thinking is what we need - doesn’t matter if it’s a scientist, engineer or an accountant.
Compared to the shit we have today, this would be a huge step forward.
Plenty of scientists have leadership and political skills. It’s not like scientists are just completely incapable of dealing with people - that is the cliche and we need to objectively think about this.
I honestly think Mitch McConnell employs a lot of “reason, logic and strategic thinking”. Those things are not enough by themselves — you need to have something to build towards besides short-term partisan points.
Gerrymandering is another example of the abundance of misguided cleverness in the American system.
All I am saying is that "Reason, Logic and Strategic thinking" is minimum that a scientist offers.
There are so many scientists and engineers that lead multi-billion dollar corporations. They have, in addition to reason , logic and strategic thinking - organizational, political and people skills.
My point is that just having a scientific background should in no way be a limiting factor. In fact, it should be a positive thing.
> Reason, logic and strategic thinking is what we need
Reason, logic and strategic thinking (hereafter, "they") don't get you palatable slogans like "Yes we can" and "The Buck Stops Here".
They don't empower you with the ability to shake a man's hand on the campaign trail and remember their name, their wife's name, and the details of their situation a year later (or the con-man ability to pretend they can through cold-reading).
They don't teach you when to talk, when to shut up and listen, and how to effectively communicate your ideas to an audience.
They don't teach you how and when to compromise your ideals to get somebody else's bill passed so that you can effectively curry political favor and capital on the issue that matters to you enough to uphold your campaign policies.
Past that, the constitution (and thus, law) cannot be parsed in any programmatic or logical way. Without that understanding, you can't know what is or isn't constitutional, or even if something is or isn't constitutional, whether or not it's likely to be upheld by a system of courts, or what words to use during its planning phase such that the legislative record reflects the best chances of ensuring it be read by the courts in the manner you desire.
All that said, I freely acknowledge that the abilities to schmooze, read and write law, and effectively sway others to your belief do not necessarily empower you to understand climate data, or the ecological impact of a tariff on solar panels, or the technological impact of a blockchain.
Either way, we need a diverse group of people in power - true diversity, in the usual ways as well as in the experiential, cultural and viewpoint diversity metrics to truly represent the many valid ideas to be had within the electorate. Of course, the more diversity you have within a legislature, the more they tend to disagree on things ,and the less likely you are to get compromise. Personally, I maintain that's a feature of the legislature, but considering every time Congress is seen as 'do-nothing', their approval ratings drop, which is why political parties tend to coalesce behind a few divisive issues and then just kind of fall in line or not give much credence to the remainder, using rhetoric to blame the other party for its woes.
But scientists can become CEOs of multi-billion corporations. There are scientists that also sit in the lab and have a hard time communicating.
People with a political science degree become Presidents. There are political scientists that also sit at Walmart cash registers.
I am not saying that all scientist are eligible for public office. I am saying that if someone is a scientist running for the office, that should not be a limiting factor.
A point I agree with. Just felt it needed pointing out that reason, logic and strategic thinking aren't nearly all the attributes that we need to have within a legislature to make everything work, and stuffing our elected offices with characters containing those (and only those) attributes isn't nearly good enough.
That’s what the Obama administration did, but it didn’t yield political dividends. American voters seem to view all career politicians as equally suspicious regardless of who their advisors are. Hence scientists running for office themselves.
Reason and logic are the domain of the wonks and civil servants. We have politicians to litigate questions of values and identity. Subjects with generally respected expert consensus are handled at department-staff level.
As a scientist, I'm biased on this issue. Being a scientist involves dealing with data and making/testing hypotheses. Being a scientist helps you understand scientific results, and then you can make a value decision with how those results affect policy.
Germany seems to be doing very well with many scientist leaders. Angela Merkel has a PhD in physical chemistry. Just because America doesn't respect scientists that much, doesn't mean they don't make good leaders.
If it were balanced, there should be some mention of medical scientists who have concerns for humans in development. Science has made tremendous progress in this area, but they are not covered in the media often.
Scientists are running because they feel their class interests are being threatened. Typically, scientists are apolitical because they feel they get more benefits by maintaining the status quo (e.g. military and civil funding). In the face of a bald attack on the EPA and climate science, scientists are attempting to show class solidarity.
Unfortunately, many of the problems we have are not technical problems, but are clashes between left and right. The favored positions of both sides have long been established. Science will help implement an ideological solution, but will not replace ideology. To the extent that the scientists running are leftists compared with centrist democrats, this will be somewhat significant.
However, I suspect that many established scientists are ignorant of politics and see the current struggle as some kind of surface level fact vs fiction debate. They will be disappointed.
It bothers me so much that 2-4 years of taking classes about how nature works classifies you as this generic category of people as “Engineers” and they’re considered as not capable of running for the office.
The emphasis we give to our education background is so very unfair.
I am trained as a mechanical engineer but I write low level C++ programs for embedded electronics. In fact I’ve done that for more than 6 years which is longer than what it took to get a ME degree.
It is complete and utter bullshit that mere 4 years of your life defines your entire character for 40 years that follow.
Let me put it another way:
If two people are age 50 have been in public office for 36 years, one with a political science degree and the other with an engineer’s degree - does it really matter?
This is nasty business, the turning of "science" into a partisan wedge issue. After all, no need to debate if you can just call someone "anti-science". There's no significant difference in the number of STEM candidates this cycle, this is fake news stuff generated by a left-of-center advocacy group and HuffPo.
It used to be fun sport on Facebook to kid those who followed "I fucking love science" for not having the first clue about science. But as science became more and more a partisan word, it just became sad - the birth of a new religion who's adherents didn't even care to learn their new dogma.
It's not even consistent. The people who are convinced that global warming is going to kill us all (because science) are generally the same people who go into hysterics over nuclear power and GMOs, despite the fact that the science tells us that both of those are quite safe.
"Science" doesn't say either of those things are safe. Studies (often paid for by the companies trying to sell the technique) say that the core concepts and techniques are safe. The problem is that side-effects are left out of scope of the study. Hence, the environmental impacts of both are swept under the rug.
Really? I guess if you factor in all the externalities of solar and none of those of nuclear you could probably make an argument they solar killed more kids than Tschernobyl, but that's of course dishonest.
The U.S. nuclear power program has been running for over 60 years without a single fatality to a member of the general public. That is a better safety record than any other method of power generation.
*Or am I missing something?
You're missing the fact that judging a technology by Soviet-era implementations of it is ridiculous.
Soviet airliners crashed a lot, too. That doesn't make airliners in general unsafe.
"Sampling bias"? I'm not the one who's pretending that Chernobyl is somehow representative. Nuclear power is operating safely in more than 30 countries, and has been for decades.
You're picking a crap Soviet reactor and pretending that it's somehow representative. Then you accuse me of "sampling bias".
Whatever, dude.
Next thing you tell me that Fukushima doesn't count either.
Fukushima doesn't count either. Magnitude 9 earthquake. Devastating tsunami. Outdated reactor that lost all power to its control systems.
Still didn't kill any members of the general public (some plant workers were killed fighting the fire, but that hazard exists with any technology).
So tell me, why should Fukushima "count" and just how safe do you expect something to be?
Edit: to put things in perspective, suppose a similar magnitude 9 earthquake struck near the Three Gorges Dam in China.
What do you suppose the death toll would be?
Hundreds of thousands, minimum. Possibly millions. Compared to zero at Fukushima.
Magnitude 9 earthquake. Devastating tsunami. Outdated reactor that lost all power to its control systems.
...and its entire supply chain of backup power was limited to generators that were located in an area totally vulnerable to flooding (tsunami or otherwise).
When your evidence says that something or another is harmful, and that something or another is a trillion dollar asset for someone else, that someone else is not going to be like, "ah well, I guess it was nice while it lasted". The "debate" only exists in domains where people stand to lose lots of money.
A lot of atrocities of the 20th century were purposefully committed in the name of science and progress, claiming over a hundred million lives.
I much prefer candidates who care more about ethics the rights of individuals over those who's primary concern is the scientific method.
[EDIT] As a modern example, John Holdren wrote in a 1977 book, Ecoscience, that forced abortions and mass sterilizations were required to save the planet. Being a good enough scientist to become appointed president Obama's scientific advisor, doesn't mean you can't easily rationalize atrocities on a wide scale.
No doubt we need to get rid of the climate change/global warming/call-it-what-u-want deniers, and the outright false information being disseminated without batting an eyelash is pure insanity, but I still have to wonder if folks who have spent their lives in academia are compatible with government?
It is possible to swing the needle too far in the opposite direction and end up with just as many problems.
Ha! The overwhelming majority of congressmen and senators are lawyers or businessmen. The number of scientists, between both chambers, is in the low single digits.
All I'm saying is, academia and government are 2 different ballgames -- I'm sure there are lots of similarities, but the stakes are on 2 vastly different levels. I'm not saying having scientists in the government would be bad, to the contrary -- right now that's what we need.
But replace all the lawyers and businessmen in government right now with professors and administrators from academia and we would still have lots of issues.
Here in Germany we literally have a nuclear scientist running the government and frankly politics have become a bit boring. Now that may be a good in a way but vision is not really her thing.
Doesn't that allow you to treat your government as infrastructure and your culture as your source of vision though?
Granted I don't live there, but that sounds appealing to me. A boring, efficient, and well-run government would be like giving your society a great COO. Which then opens up the possibility for the people of the society to be their own visionary CEO.
Here in the USA we have an entire congress, whitehouse staffed by religious fanatics.. Our President is a womanizing fool who treats nobody with respect at all, and is probably going to start world war 3....
I'll take boring any day of the week... Germany also seems to have better quality of life for low to middle class people than USA...
"The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook."
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadIt is all over the place. From medical research where they call people who try to check the data analysis "parasites"[1], to psychology where they call people who do replications "bullies"[2], to physics where they want to get rid of the need for evidence altogether[3].
[1] http://researchparasite.com/
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
[3] https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-and-philosophers-d...
Degasse Tyson is a trained scientist but has a tendency to espouse opinions on subjects he's not an expert in, but with the authority of his professional background.
I say this as an actual scientist who mostly dislikes communication. I'm happy there are communicators out there that raise our profile a little, I don't feel jealous or spiteful for some reason towards them.
What I'm saying is because of his background, that offers him imprimatur on things which he's not an expert but people will presume that because he's an expert elsewhere he's opinion in other areas are equally valid.
Whose stupid idea was it to call it the Parasite Award
(Obviously the editorial is gesturing at a real problem: that by unbundling data collection and analysis and, as is unfortunately typical, only giving credit to the result of analysis, there could be a dearth of data collection from lack of incentive. But characterizing pure analysis negatively is obviously the wrong response.)
Readiing the last article you linked, it seems like a legitimate debate about the scientific method and what constitutes scientific theories. Every scientists (but especially "science fans") need to acknowledge the fact that all science rests on certain axioms (partially laid out in the scientific method) that can't be proven by science. So going with the newest developments in the philosophy of science, the people developing science itself, seems only reasonable. What you call "getting rid of evidence" is only the exploration of other types of evidence aside from classical empirical evidence
In a sense, it's similar to how mathematicians write proofs in natural-ish language and call them true under the idea that they could convert them to purely formal symbolic manipulations if they wanted to put in the effort. Scientists talk about things as if they had all kinds of ontological statuses that they can't be shown to have - (ever heard a chemist describe electrons as "wanting" to occupy the lowest energy state?) - but that's nothing but language. The only reason any of it works is because you could cut out all of the weird stuff if you really wanted to.
Taking gravity as the classic example, in theory any person with any set of biases can put together a table with column A being mass and column B being distance to the ground and column C being time to fall the distance. From that, they could reconstruct Newton's Laws of Gravity if they measure everything carefully enough and are honest.
Maybe the theory they come up with is F = g m / r^2 and the mechanism is tiny goblins. Cool. They can call that science as long as the goblins will always follow the rules. But the rules of evidence are very important, we can't claim the goblins are going to do something differently sometimes if we haven't observed it in the data.
The data is the science. The formula and mechanisms are useful, but they are inevitably wrong in detail. Gravity isn't ever going to be the only effect measured in a data set, so no data set can ever perfectly confirm a theory correct, and certainly cannot confirm a mechanism.
We don't need to rely on the scientists getting the mechanisms right. But we do need science to have a very high standard of measurement. It would help if they hold themselves back from coming up with crazy theories, but I don't know what a crazy theory looks like so I'm not going to try and police that today.
Strings sit in the same group as "flux-as-actual-fluid," Boltzmann's atoms, and caloric fluid: intellectually interesting guesses that remain guesses until the empirical side gets advanced enough. The fluids lost, atoms won, and we're waiting on strings.
I don't see how you got that from the article you cited.
Take string theory. It was created to unify gravity and quantum mechanics. Afterwards it was found that it also could correctly solve problems from several other areas of physics outside of the unification of gravity and QM. It had not been designed to solve those. That came out of it unexpectedly.
If the existence of those problems had happened to have been discovered after string theory instead of before, they would have been testable predictions of string theory that it would pass, and would count as evidence for string theory.
It seems ridiculous to disqualify them from being evidence for string theory just because of the historical accident that they happened to have been discovered earlier.
>"Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them."
Your position seems to be different from that described in the article. Anyway, post-dicting is not as impressive as pre-dicting. How much less impressive is determined by the flexibility of the model. My understanding is that the string-theory/multiverse model is extremely flexible.
This is petty drivel, from the pointless and nonsensical jabs, to the bizarre assumption that PhDs make better politicians.
A PhD functioning as an advisor does have valuable experience that would help them understand how some desired research needs to get done, or discern whether a particular study is quality or junk, or be able to communicate effectively in an environment full of technical jargon. Indeed, those are the characteristics that are really needed - but those are merely qualities that are hopefully picked up on the way to a PhD, not the research project which the PhD certifies.
Beyond a certain level, scientists become managers rather than practitioners. The successful ones have insight into the process of raising funds, the politics of large-scale research facilities, and sometimes the process of major international collaboration.
Discerning whether a given study is junk probably doesn't fall under the remit of Science Advisor. That's more of a tactical issue that would be delegated to a specialist policy wonk.
From this perspective, PhDs would on average make better science advisers than your average person.
edit: lol @ downvotes
Npr will often cite some idea based on a small study somewhere which hasn't been replicated elsewhere. Maybe technologists will require more rigor than we now do.
> I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
The stereotype of the aloof scientist who's unable to connect with people really needs to go away imo.
I am genuinely curious.
And I'm not saying "scientists are bad politicians". I'm saying what the two groups do don't overlap a ton.
For a gross example, most scientists will have to learn to lie to be good politicians, because all good politicians play fast and loose with the truth.
There is no reason why scientists cannot run for public office. Reason, logic and strategic thinking is what we need - doesn’t matter if it’s a scientist, engineer or an accountant.
Compared to the shit we have today, this would be a huge step forward.
Plenty of scientists have leadership and political skills. It’s not like scientists are just completely incapable of dealing with people - that is the cliche and we need to objectively think about this.
Gerrymandering is another example of the abundance of misguided cleverness in the American system.
There are so many scientists and engineers that lead multi-billion dollar corporations. They have, in addition to reason , logic and strategic thinking - organizational, political and people skills.
My point is that just having a scientific background should in no way be a limiting factor. In fact, it should be a positive thing.
Reason, logic and strategic thinking (hereafter, "they") don't get you palatable slogans like "Yes we can" and "The Buck Stops Here".
They don't empower you with the ability to shake a man's hand on the campaign trail and remember their name, their wife's name, and the details of their situation a year later (or the con-man ability to pretend they can through cold-reading).
They don't teach you when to talk, when to shut up and listen, and how to effectively communicate your ideas to an audience.
They don't teach you how and when to compromise your ideals to get somebody else's bill passed so that you can effectively curry political favor and capital on the issue that matters to you enough to uphold your campaign policies.
Past that, the constitution (and thus, law) cannot be parsed in any programmatic or logical way. Without that understanding, you can't know what is or isn't constitutional, or even if something is or isn't constitutional, whether or not it's likely to be upheld by a system of courts, or what words to use during its planning phase such that the legislative record reflects the best chances of ensuring it be read by the courts in the manner you desire.
All that said, I freely acknowledge that the abilities to schmooze, read and write law, and effectively sway others to your belief do not necessarily empower you to understand climate data, or the ecological impact of a tariff on solar panels, or the technological impact of a blockchain.
Either way, we need a diverse group of people in power - true diversity, in the usual ways as well as in the experiential, cultural and viewpoint diversity metrics to truly represent the many valid ideas to be had within the electorate. Of course, the more diversity you have within a legislature, the more they tend to disagree on things ,and the less likely you are to get compromise. Personally, I maintain that's a feature of the legislature, but considering every time Congress is seen as 'do-nothing', their approval ratings drop, which is why political parties tend to coalesce behind a few divisive issues and then just kind of fall in line or not give much credence to the remainder, using rhetoric to blame the other party for its woes.
People with a political science degree become Presidents. There are political scientists that also sit at Walmart cash registers.
I am not saying that all scientist are eligible for public office. I am saying that if someone is a scientist running for the office, that should not be a limiting factor.
Germany seems to be doing very well with many scientist leaders. Angela Merkel has a PhD in physical chemistry. Just because America doesn't respect scientists that much, doesn't mean they don't make good leaders.
If it were balanced, there should be some mention of medical scientists who have concerns for humans in development. Science has made tremendous progress in this area, but they are not covered in the media often.
Unfortunately, many of the problems we have are not technical problems, but are clashes between left and right. The favored positions of both sides have long been established. Science will help implement an ideological solution, but will not replace ideology. To the extent that the scientists running are leftists compared with centrist democrats, this will be somewhat significant.
However, I suspect that many established scientists are ignorant of politics and see the current struggle as some kind of surface level fact vs fiction debate. They will be disappointed.
The emphasis we give to our education background is so very unfair.
I am trained as a mechanical engineer but I write low level C++ programs for embedded electronics. In fact I’ve done that for more than 6 years which is longer than what it took to get a ME degree.
It is complete and utter bullshit that mere 4 years of your life defines your entire character for 40 years that follow.
Let me put it another way: If two people are age 50 have been in public office for 36 years, one with a political science degree and the other with an engineer’s degree - does it really matter?
Yes, it does. Sorry.
Nuclear power is orders of magnitude safer than any other energy source (including solar). We've got 60 years of real-world data on it.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-ener...
Headline is that nuclear power has saved about 1.8 million lives relative to probable alternatives, even ignoring the GHG effects.
Or am I missing something?
Yes. Really.
The U.S. nuclear power program has been running for over 60 years without a single fatality to a member of the general public. That is a better safety record than any other method of power generation.
*Or am I missing something?
You're missing the fact that judging a technology by Soviet-era implementations of it is ridiculous.
Soviet airliners crashed a lot, too. That doesn't make airliners in general unsafe.
Of course if you look only at a country where there hasn't been an accident yet then it's safe...
Next thing you tell me that Fukushima doesn't count either.
I'm not against nuclear power generation actually. But your way of arguing is utterly unscientific and dishonest.
"Sampling bias"? I'm not the one who's pretending that Chernobyl is somehow representative. Nuclear power is operating safely in more than 30 countries, and has been for decades.
You're picking a crap Soviet reactor and pretending that it's somehow representative. Then you accuse me of "sampling bias".
Whatever, dude.
Next thing you tell me that Fukushima doesn't count either.
Fukushima doesn't count either. Magnitude 9 earthquake. Devastating tsunami. Outdated reactor that lost all power to its control systems.
Still didn't kill any members of the general public (some plant workers were killed fighting the fire, but that hazard exists with any technology).
So tell me, why should Fukushima "count" and just how safe do you expect something to be?
Edit: to put things in perspective, suppose a similar magnitude 9 earthquake struck near the Three Gorges Dam in China.
What do you suppose the death toll would be?
Hundreds of thousands, minimum. Possibly millions. Compared to zero at Fukushima.
But includes everybody who'd be seriously affected by that.
1) Like the people employed by those people who'd lose lots of money.
2) Like the customers of those people who'd lose lots of money.
Part 1 is a LOT of people, and 2 is just about everybody everywhere.
What were the numbers in past cycles?
I much prefer candidates who care more about ethics the rights of individuals over those who's primary concern is the scientific method.
[EDIT] As a modern example, John Holdren wrote in a 1977 book, Ecoscience, that forced abortions and mass sterilizations were required to save the planet. Being a good enough scientist to become appointed president Obama's scientific advisor, doesn't mean you can't easily rationalize atrocities on a wide scale.
It is possible to swing the needle too far in the opposite direction and end up with just as many problems.
https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R44762.html#_Toc49835...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2013/01/17/an...
I don't think we're remotely close to "swinging the needle too far in the opposite direction"...
But replace all the lawyers and businessmen in government right now with professors and administrators from academia and we would still have lots of issues.
Please, Frau Merkel, come to America and bore us.
Please.
Granted I don't live there, but that sounds appealing to me. A boring, efficient, and well-run government would be like giving your society a great COO. Which then opens up the possibility for the people of the society to be their own visionary CEO.
I'll take boring any day of the week... Germany also seems to have better quality of life for low to middle class people than USA...
http://orwell.ru/library/articles/science/english/e_scien