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Should Science Be King In Politics?
Layzej writes "According to former Republican representative Bob Inglis, being conservative means dealing in facts. He suggests that energy and climate policy warrants a conservative approach based on science and accountability, rather than a populist approach based on denial and wishful thinking. He also proposes an intriguing free market solution to our energy and climate challenges."
Surely this subject will instil nothing but the most civil, logical, and objective debates. After all most debates about climate change somehow morph into a left versus right debate, and it's that transition that's really hard. But now we can have the debate in parallel to each other. Throw in the libertarians, and I'm positive that we will all get through this one with not a swear in sight.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Start a "The Scientific Party" and let the democratic process do it's work. If there's a demand for such thing, it will be.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
The world is run on emotion as much as logic. Anyone that thinks logic can be king either has never been married, or is rapidly headed towards a divorce...
The two solutions that are in line with both past experience and economic theory are:
(A) cap-and-trade, where the government sells a limited number of pollution permits, allows the buyers of those permits to trade them, and then sends inspectors (funded by the proceeds of the original sale) to ensure that nobody goes over the number of permits they have. This was successfully used to reduce SO2 emissions back in the 1980's and 1990's.
(B) A CO2 tax, where the more you pollute the more you're taxed. This gives companies a financial incentive to reduce their emissions, and means that those that do reduce their CO2 emissions aren't at a competitive disadvantage from those that don't. Again, inspectors are needed (funded by the tax) to ensure that nobody cheats.
Both of these basically rely on putting a price on pollution, and then making sure nobody cheats on paying that price. It's enforced by the government because nobody else can - nobody owns the country's air, and nobody reasonably could.
I am officially gone from
If only more conservatives felt the same way. But American conservatives (and Republicans in particular) are about as far as it gets from "dealing in facts" these days and are more anti-science than the far left.
"Dealing in facts" means recognising evolution. That's unacceptable in the US Right. So something even mildly controversial, like climate change, has no hope.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
While I can see many will knee-jerk themselves into an emphatic "YES" to scientific superiority in government, there should still be a place for philosophy and morality in politics as well. And in some cases, philosophy should trump science.
When you might ask? How about in terms of macroeconomics? It makes little scientific sense to provide welfare to people who will never be productive citizens ever again. Yet it goes against our values to not take care of our most vulnerable who are unable to care for themselves.
It also makes little scientific sense to protect individual rights to the extent that we do. My friends over in Europe and Asia often point out that the banning of hate speech has a demonstrable effect on reducing bigotry. Yet our non-scientific culture values free speech.
So, science should play a big role in determining the fundamental facts of a political discussion, but after that it is all about values and philosophy.
Normally, the country can count on conservatives to deal in facts.
News flash: neither party can be counted on to deal in facts. I will also say with utter confidence that your party line (of which there are only two) will not determine how factual you are. There are goddamn liars among all the ranks of any party.
We base policies on science, not sentiment, we insist on people being accountable for their actions, and we maintain that markets, not mandates, are the path to prosperity.
If you based your policies on science, then why isn't it a completely open process? Anonymize the names (if any) and release the numbers (especially who pays what in taxes from which areas) behind your policy making. Of course you don't and on top of that, paltry though it may be, we have to wait until Obama to get that ball started rolling.
Oh, yeah, accountable of their actions? Yeah, you rich bastards love to hold each other accountable for your actions -- especially your financiers.
You would expect conservatives to stand with 95 percent of the scientific community and to grow the 13 percent into a working majority.
Oh, wait a minute, I see what's going on here. You're not really a conservative. You're like Zell Miller who is a Democrat only by label and paperwork.
Your proposal, though noble, is a fool's errand. I believe this has been tackled before and the real problem is that you can always find more and more ties to pollution or non-renewable resources being used to make your product and get it to the consumer and then even after that you have the whole usage of it followed by proper disposal and returning the resources. That cheap Dell computer your secretary is playing Bejeweled on? Yeah, that's a nightmare.
What if we attached all of the costs -- especially the hidden costs -- to all fuels?
Once you lay out a comprehensive and complete list of what the costs are -- especially the hidden costs -- then I'll hop on board. For now you're basically scratching the surface of a very deep and complicated rabbit hole that is hard to trace backward for many reasons. Some of them supply line problems, some of them scientific problems, some of them statistical problems and some even privacy problems for the users.
Companies already try to regulate themselves by paying a so called 'carbon tax' by being 'carbon neutral' or by planting just an assload of trees so they can say X trees for Y products sold. But you know, that's all really neither exact nor assuredly truly undoing all that is done in their dealings. And while they might tell the public one thing, I don't think they believe it.
Could someone please enumerate every true cost of getting one gallon of gasoline into my car tank? What about what happens as I use it? What about what happens after I've used it?
And the best part is that at some point, as you noted, loss of life is going to be on that list of true costs. Whether you're buying an Apple iPhone that some worker committed suicide while making at the Foxconn plant or BP's little explosion killing 11 oil well workers, you're going to have to say at some point that 1 human life = X million dollars in cost. And that makes people really uncomfortable. It gets even more uncomfortable when whoever deciding that cost considers nationality in influencing that ratio.
My work here is dung.
Less 'learn science' than 'learn the scientific method' and its application to everyday life. Or just critical thinking in general.
Too many people stop learning at the end of high school/university. If they just memorize some state of the art science related facts at that time our situation will not likely improve as new facts are discovered.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Examples
Bad: There is plenty of evidence to support this (*goes on to show evidence)
Good: Nope that is wrong!
Bad: Here is the explanation for why this is a problem
Good: God wants it this way
Valid science's biggest weakness in politics, is a shortage of 5 second soundbites that work. (and before you say less then 1% of voters know what E=MC squared means.)
You clearly don't live in the United States. A professed belief in God is an absolute requirement to be elected president, and damn near essential for any other federal or high-level state elective office.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Bob Inglis was my (republican) congressman until the tea-partiers ran him out on a rail during the primaries. He was accused of not being sufficiently conservative. On fiscal and economic policy he was consistently conservative, but not so much on social issues. In other words, he is pretty much a Liberterian, and has not shifted his positions since leaving office. I do not know him personally, but he appears to be a thoughtful, principled man.
He was originally elected in the Clinton era, promised to limit himself to two terms, and kept that promise. He was succeeded by Jim DeMint, and was persuaded to return to congress when DeMint was elected as a senator.
Republicans are often accused of being dismissive of science and beholden to religion. I agree with this view. However, from my point of view as a non-religious person, the Democrats are the same, but in different ways. They have a mystical conviction of environmental catastrophe which is unsupported by real science. Environmentalism should be labeled a religion and treated as such. Also, Democrats propound economic theories of "fairness" which demonstrably lead to worse outcomes for the people they claim to represent. Remember, Republicans are no better.
For myself, I believe global warming is happening, but I am unconcerned about the consequences. So I am more worried about the response to global warming, than I am about the warming itself.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I think it's important to understand why conservatives are rejecting certain scientific facts. People like me on the left often make fun of them as being ignorant or anti-intellectual, but the reality is that it's very difficult for anyone to accept a fact that conflicts with your worldview. For example, history has turned the lawyer William Jennings Bryan from the famous "Monkey Trial" into a caricature of ignorance of foolishness in the face of scientific fact, but that belittles his motivation for fighting against the teaching of evolution: the textbook in question was pro eugenics and used the theory of evolution to argue that society should breed people the way we breed dogs. The Theory of Evolution was a fact, but the public policies people were proposing from it were an anathema to our human values. The theory of evolution has never recovered from the damage the eugenics movement did to it in the early 1900s.
The same thing is happening now with Global Warming. Whether conservatives know it or not, they are not resisting the Theory of Global Warming, they are resisting the policies that many conclude from it. Publicly accepting the theory and taking a more nuanced position about what we should do about, if we should do anything about it at all, isn't as straightforward as simply running a campaign against the theory itself using the same tactics the Tobacco industry used as recently as 15 years ago to defend smoking against its link to cancer (Yes, 15 years ago. I recently listened to a 1996 Larry King interview with Presidential candidate Bob Dole where they argued about whether smoking was safe or not).
It's a natural human reaction to reject facts that conflict with our vision of the world. That's why I love the term "Inconvenient Truth" to describe an empirical fact that generates cognitive dissonance. Just today I was reminded of one such truth as the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to the discovery that our Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, a fact I resisted for a decade because it paints such an incredibly bleak picture of our Cosmos where the galaxies will eventually vanish from the night sky as they fly away from us and the Universe eventually freezes at absolute zero. But you have to accept the fact and adapt your worldview to it.
Liberals have their own anti-science views: resistance to GMO Foods goes pretty far into unscientific scaremongering ("Frankenfoods" and anti-corporatism), the idea that smaller classes sizes are the only way to improve student performance (teacher accountability does demonstrate equal results for less money), and anti-vaccination scares come mostly from the left (mostly). The science behind these issues are inconvenient to certain aspects of liberal ideology, so it's easier to go off the anti-science deep end rather than refine their positions. The problem is that we the media finds nuanced debate and finely articulated positions inconvenient to ratings.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
No, not quite; It would get very few things done... nearly all of them the RIGHT things. Government is meant only to be the collective tool belt, replete with powers of leverage and enforcement, wielded by the citizenry for the benefit of the citizenry. One isn't meant to play with tools, nor use them any more often than any give job calls for.
Calling it "basic logic" implies that at some point in time most people had it. But that is false - they never did.
There is no shortage of 5 second soundbites that work, they just happen to hand out a straw man to your opponents on a silver platter. For instance: "WE WILL ALL DIE" works to get people to care about climate change. Of course, that statement is false and ridiculous, but nuance in a statement will never fly against the lack thereof. Reasonable people cannot be heard by the masses unless they resort to the same type of rhetoric as their opponents, in which case they cease to be reasonable, but start being effective. Pretty unfortunate, really :(
We're not talking about "politics", we're talking about governing.
It's not just the political system that's broken, it's us. Precious few citizens of any country except maybe Finland and a handful of others actually understand how their society works.
Look at the currently popular notion in the US that to run government, we need someone with experience running a private corporation. As if running a business had anything in common with running a government except they are both organizations. If that were the true measure, then a general would make the best president and we've seen that's not usually the case. In fact, I'd say that "business experience" or "experience" in general (other than experience dealing with people) is highly overrated. Right now, there's going to be only one person running for president in 2012 that actually has on-the-job experience as president of the US. Does that make him automatically the best person for the job? Does the fact that a leading candidate on the other side ran a business that successfully cannibalized other businesses make him the best person for the job?
I think the notion (mentioned by someone else in these comments) that understanding "science" in the most basic sense of the word, as a system of understanding that things have explanations and effects have causes would be extremely important in government. Certainly more important than the current notion, that the guy who has the most money gets to rule. I would have thought we were disabused of that notion a few centuries ago.
You are welcome on my lawn.
> we have a hard time even making people identify themselves at the polls
Actually voter fraud is quite rare. There's been something like a couple dozen cases in the last decade or two, and most of those were just mistakes (eg: people voting in the wrong precinct). Election fraud, on the other hand, is a real reason for concern. With recent revelations on the weakness of electronic voting machines, that seems a far greater hazard.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
The scientist Ben Franklin (No, it wasn't Albert Einstein) said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
We had 8 years of a science-and-fact-loving conservative government, after which we had a doubled national debt, two wars, an economic crisis second only to the Great Depression, the demonizing of evolution, and oh yeah, a new attitude in the country that climate change was questionable and that it was probably the scientists that were to blame. Please excuse me if I remain skeptical that a single former representative is going to change much.
There is a reason why Mr. Inglis is a "former" Representative - his commie ideas about actually believing the scientists were clearly not well received by his former constituency.
According to former Republican in name only representative Bob Inglis
Text in italics added. Mr. Inglis refutes his own thesis by indulging in fantasy regarding the nature of "conservatism."
This gets back to the myth of US politics. The traditional modern Republican party isn't about conservative values; it's about ruling for the benefit of the richest fraction of a percent of the population. If you look at what Republicans actually *do* instead of listening to what they say, it becomes glaringly obvious that their political philosophy is that the proper role of government is to ensure that the rich get richer faster than they would without having a government around to help.
The problem for that political philosophy is that there aren't enough rich people to win enough elections to rule a republic. So they have to convince half the population to vote against their own best interests. That's where "conservative" comes in. Appeal to White bigots and sanitize it by calling it "the Southern Strategy". Throw an occasional bone to the religious right so they'll vote for your politicians. Pretend there's some scientific doubt about evolution. Stir up Anglo-Saxon bigots and call it "Immigration Reform" - historians will someday call it the Southwestern Strategy.
Mr. Inglis is just objecting to the current race to the bottom. When I wrote "traditional modern Republican party", that was to distinguish the old guard from the nutters they've been suckering into voting for them for at least 50 years, but who are now taking over the asylum. You reap what you sow, kind of thing. But lots of "traditional modern Republicans" don't like what they're reaping. A lot of those nutters don't think ruling for the rich is their top priority.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Your post reminded me of a quote from Sagan's book "Demon Haunted World (Subtitled: Science as a candle in the dark)";
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United State is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
You mean logical fallacies or rhetorical fallacies.
e.g. Affirming the consequent == logical fallacy. Argument ad Personam == rhetorical fallacy.
Generally, logical fallacies are actually worth learning, while a focus on rhetorical fallacies tends to lead to a duel of "who is arguing wrong."
Logical fallacies are in "basic logic" rhetorical fallacies are part of "critical thinking."
Remember: When you wind up fighting about process, the status quo wins.
-GiH
You appear to be saying that raising the minimum wage has no bad effects, only good ones.
?
He's doing nothing of the kind. He's pointing out that a very large body of actual data demonstrate that the proposition, "Normally constituted minimum wage laws designed to provide basic subsistence wages for low-paid workers do not increase unemployment." That is what people mean by and have implemented as minimum wage laws, you know: basic subsistence wages.
You have completely fabricated your beliefs about what he is saying based on god knows what. Certainly not anything he has said, which could in no wise be used to support claims that arbitrarily high minimum wage laws would be a good thing. That claim is a straw person purely of your own making, made doubly funny by being in response to a comment that points out Republican's inability to understand the higher-order effects of economic changes. You should perhaps read Hazlett's "Economics in One Lesson" before making your side of this debate look even more foolish than it already does.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
If we simultaneously eliminated all subsidies, we'd unleash real competition among all fuels. Markets would powerfully deliver solutions.
Have gnu, will travel.
Your implication is the his lack of experience led to the adoption of policies that you don't agree with. That's hardly a condemnation of his ability to be president. Overall, his approval ratings are far better the GWB's at the end of his second term - a guy who at that point had plenty of executive experience.
Obama also had no military experience and little foreign policy experience, yet even most conservatives think that he is doing well on the "war on terror."
I agree with your last point, but experience is overrated in a presidential candidate. They bring a team with them and their ability to succeed in a primary and federal election is a reasonable proof of basic competence. Now, if a candidate has experience running a large organization and seriously screwed it up, that's another issue.