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Geeks In the Public Forum?
cedarhillbilly writes "In his new book The Geek Manifesto, Mark Henderson 'pleads for citizens who value science to force it onto the mainstream political agenda and other main walks of life.' There are some important questions that need answers: 'Do you have to give up your tech practice to undertake a public role?' Also, 'Is political life (compromise, working by consensus, irrationality) antithetical to the "geek" values?'"
The Guardian's coverage sums up the idea nicely: "What I desperately want is a move toward an evidence-based culture in politics. Politicians are free to say: 'I think people on drugs should be punished because drugs are immoral.' That's a moral call, albeit a rather stupid one in my opinion. What they shouldn't do is say: 'I want to reduce drug use, and sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to achieve that.' That's not a moral call, it's a factual statement; as such it should be evidence-based, or else the person making it should shut the hell up."
In short, Mark Henderson wants Technocrats not Politicians running our system. I tend to agree.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Policy analysis generally uses longitudinal analysis as well as qualitative analysis to provide data to decision makers with the information they need to make informed decisions. Unfortunately, politicians generally don't always pay attention to factual evidence but this isn't the fault of the staff working the projects.
There's also the fact that factual analyses are influenced by interpretation of data. This is always a grey area which is impacted by morals, etc, etc, etc.
This is a much bigger problem than most people are willing to admit.
Coercion is immoral (except in pure self-defense, where it is moral). This would, of course, challenge the very foundation of government, and that is exactly why you will never hear a politician say it.
The same skills that get your laid also get you elected...
Facts have not been relevant in American politics in a long time. The lawyers are in charge. Lawyers are not taught to find the truth. Lawyers are taught to make the best argument they can for their client. Politicians (who are mostly former lawyers) do the same thing. Instead of "What is best for my country?" the question is "What is the best argument I can make for my party/constituents/re-election bid?"
Engineers are taught to find solutions, so they have a hard time understanding this political reality.
Okay. I understand logical statements, but what we need is Hypothesis, Tests, CONTROL GROUPS, etc. The scientific method should be applied.
I want to reduce drug use, and sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to achieve that.
Who gives a flying fuck what you think. If we did science this way we'd still be fighting against flat-earthers. TEST RESULTS, or STFU.
Politicians say things that they think will cause us to vote for them. When they say stupid shit, the fault isn't so much in the limited realm of "politics" but rather the much wider realm of all of us. Do most people argue in terms of evidence? You're not going to make politics become evidence-based, until you can answer that last question with a confident Yes.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Every time some politician gets a brainwave for a law, it needs to be tested in the real world. Laws are the programs for social order. To make them and roll them out without testing is as mad as writing a computer program and rolling it out without testing.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I agree with Henderson's point. I also think that we should make basic education in statistics part of the math curriculum in schools. When you don't understand statistics, don't know what a standard deviation from the mean is, don't understand the concept of "statistically significant," etc., it's very easy for someone to lie to you by manipulating numbers or misrepresenting study results. Newspaper reporting has never done a particularly good job of accurately reporting study data or scientific findings, but today's news environment (consisting of old-school newspapers desperate for ratings, politically-slanted news organizations, and of course the blogosphere) is orders of magnitude worse. (People should also understand what an order of magnitude is.)
I mean, people are always going to try to lie with numbers and cook their data, but a better-educated public will be inoculated against it to some extent. When a politician says, "Look, this study shows that we save money by sending drug users to prison," you'll have more people who can say, "Wait, those numbers don't look right. How was this data collected? I don't agree with those findings" rather than simply saying, "Oh, okay, someone did a study so it must be true."
In short, Mark Henderson wants Technocrats not Politicians running our system. I tend to agree.
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
Isaac Asimov
Theoretically, this is one of the arguments in favor of Federalism. Local communities can beta-test new ideas before they go into general deployment.
Doesn't always quite work that way, but that's the idea.
Yeah, you tell 'em Anonymous Coward.
Ah. Replace Politics with Discourse.
Another fantasy, based on the assumption that the human animal is a brain on legs...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Politicians are free to say: 'I think people on drugs should be punished because drugs are immoral.' That's a moral call, albeit a rather stupid one in my opinion. What they shouldn't do is say: 'I want to reduce drug use, and sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to achieve that.' That's not at moral call, it's a factual statement; as such it should be evidence-based, or else the person making it should shut the hell up."
This is a terrifying position. The government should never ever regulate morality. If you think something is immoral, don't do it. When you force your moral values on others, that's tyranny.
Government exists for practical reasons. We are trying to accomplish something by having a government, so every law should have a basis in practicality.
Politicians absolutely should say, 'I want to reduce drug use, and sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to achieve that.'. Because if they say that, that's a falsifiable claim that we can disprove with evidence. That means we can potentially change their minds by presenting evidence. You can't do that when someone has made a subjective moral judgement.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If it worked, maybe. It does not work though.
More FORMER scientists in public office is great. But don't start politicizing science. For the same reason you don't want to politicize the military... it has serious negative consequences.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
politics and logic have no place together in our time. Except for the insanely rich... and those who have no morals and will kiss butt rather than work hard to achieve success. Oh wait - that's politics.
The best person I know putting forth the cause of reason and sense is Pope Benedict XVI. Go read his address to the University of Regansburg if you don't believe me. Remember though it's the one that the religions you so deride decided to kill priests and nuns over, because the Pope was stupid enough to tell the truth about how certain religions deny reason.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Even without religious influences we are going to be stuck with some stupid laws. Drugs are not illegal because some politician thinks they are immoral; drugs are illegal because some fascist racists discovered a convenient way to increase the power of the police, pump up the profits of certain corporations, and attack minority communities while pretending to be working for the benefit of the people. For every idiotic law that you can attribute to religion, there is a dangerous law that can be attributed to lobbyists.
Palm trees and 8
I am deeply involved with party politics in my state. There is a deep need to get more technical people involved. Many friends I have talked to either "don't have the time" or think "it's so broken it can't be fixed". I say that the only reason it requires so much time and is so broken is precisely because normal everyday people aren't getting involved.
Politics takes time and energy, but it is run by those who show up. Please take time and get involved. I really couldn't care less which party you choose because the more people that get involved, the better the process will work. The SOPA fight was just the start. Let's get involved and show the world what this country can do.
I've been working fulltime in an elected, political position for about six years, so I kind of know what I'm talking about here:
If you get the chance, do it. This is a real win-win for everyone when it happens. It will help you do things with real meaning and bring about some important changes. I'm modest when I say that my approach to the office revolutionized it and most of the methods I developed are still in use today, four years after I left. That is the "evidence-based" approach TFA talks about, but more. Geeks in general have a less ideological approach to methods and procedures: We tend to have it easier dropping stuff that doesn't work instead of clinging to it "because we've always done it this way". That does get you into political fights sometimes, when you unceremoniously dump the pet method of someone, but it works and that's where you get the credit and trust you need to push more changes through.
And it also benefits you tremendeously. My social skills advanced greatly in this time. Instead of sitting at a computer most day with occasional meetings, my job suddenly was mostly about meeting people.
Negotiations are the greatest thing, ever. A geek with some negotiation training is most opponents worst nightmare. Most of us don't care enough about our own image to be tricked with the various ad hominem dialectics, and we have a great ability to cut through the bullshit and hit the facts of the matter. And since numbers and math are our friends, we aren't easily fooled by bullshit statistics.
And finally, you will almost certainly find that law is not the evil enemy, but just a different type of code. After a few years on the job, I was regularily discussing with full-time lawyers at eye level. A basic understanding of the law - not of any particular law, but the way the law in general works - is a benefit that will pay you back for the rest of your life.
So yes, yes, yes - if you geeks find an opportunity to enter politics, by all means do it. It doesn't have to be a for-life choice. I would've certainly been re-elected for a third term, but decided not to run again because I'd had enough. It isn't always easy, and sometimes all the politics and the people with their pet agendas and all the personal crap gets on your nerves, a lot. I wouldn't want to do it for live, but it was more than worth it doing it for a few years, and I know that both myself and the office profited from it.
Did I say you should go and do it?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Out-of-country operations are just a cover for counter-insurgency, or for clearing land in Columbia and driving out peasants so multi-national corporations can come in for mining, and resource-extraction, and agribusiness, and macra production, and so on. Which is why you have (outside of Afghanistan) probably the largest refugee population in the world in Columbia. The War on Drugs is not effecting drug production. In fact, it's going up.. But it's going to continue because that wasn't the purpose.
Here in the United States, the drug war has been associated, clearly, with a very sharp rise in incarceration. If you go back to 1980, the prison population in the United States, per capita, was approximately like other industrial countries -- kind of toward the high end, but not off the chart. Now, it's five to ten times as high and still going up. And most of it is drug related (also, length of sentences, and repeated sentences, and so on.)
And it mostly targets what are called the "dangerous classes," the poor, minorities, and so on. So like, black males, is astronomical. On the other hand, drug use among wealthy people is barely prosecuted. So it's a class-based form of control of superfluous population, and for that purpose, it seems to be working.
It's also making a lot of money for commercial enterprises. What some criminologists call the prison-industrial complex has been a pretty substantial development, especially for rural counties, it's a Godsend. When they build prisons, it brings in construction work, jobs, and surveillance. A couple of years ago, maybe still, the fastest growing white-collar profession was security officer, and it gets rid of people you don't want anything to do with. They don't have a place in the current industrial system. And there's also racial elements involved. So you can say the drug war is a success for what its real purpose is, but not for its proclaimed purposes. -Noam Chomsky
the US Constitution was a result of months of bitter argument and bickering. same with politics in almost every democracy on earth. except that you will normally have a party win 40% or so of the vote and they will have to make a coalition with lots of smaller parties and make political deals as a process
this is called life. the US has 300 million people. say almost 200 million adults who can vote. almost everyone will have different opinions on every subject based on their home location, upbringing, etc.
to pass laws that affect different people you have to make political deals
this childish star trek fantasy of an all wise council making the right decision is just a fantasy. there is no right decision for most people
That's not at moral call, it's a factual statement; as such it should be evidence-based, or else the person making it should shut the hell up."
When you say that the person making it should shut up, that is also a moral call. Who are you to tell anyone what they should or shouldn't do?
In short, Mark Henderson wants Technocrats not Politicians running our system. I tend to agree.
I haven't read this book and I think the article discussing it doesn't accomplish much aside from briefly agreeing with the author on everything. I think this whole argument is sort of a nonstarter. Oftentimes I try to look at "soft" issues as an ethical engineer and I come to the conclusion that you can approach a lot of hotly debated issues from two sides. And, like the limit as x approaches zero in y(x) = -1/x, you can sort of logically come to two extremely different conclusions. As an oversimplified example, take anti-trust laws. From the left we start with something really innocuous like it's the government's job to protect an individual's basic rights which means that if they wish to enter a market then other individuals shouldn't be able to collude to keep them out of that market by price fixing which means that we should have government regulations against it ... and we're at positive infinity. But if you approach from the right you start with something really innocuous as well like governments should enable individuals to follow their dreams and if their dreams are price fixing so be it because the free market will decide whose product is better and the consumer will be smart enough to buy the new product if it is indeed made better and the price fixing will result in a loss to the colluding parties and so therefore we need to make the free market freer and truly free to alleviate all these issues ... and we're at negative infinity. Both sides are clamoring for one extreme and the engineer is just sitting there saying "Technically it's undefined."
Basically, two strong narratives will ruin an ethical engineer's best intents.
Another topic that I'm not sure how it is addressed is that you only get one experiment. There is no control group for your political policies. On top of that a negative stigma has been attached to people being used as lab rats so don't even try to divide your populace into statistical experiments -- they have to do that themselves. If an engineer does not have absolute control over an environment, he or she usually considers the experiment flawed and the resulting data potentially worthless. This is one of the defining hallmarks of our political process -- no one person controls all of the variables.
I'm left wondering why any ethical engineer would desire to be a technocrat.
I am 100% behind pushing science in the public forum and seeking more data and more models. I will argue, however, that the first decision an engineer makes in office will likely be as emotionally, personally and financially motivated as it would had Governor Evil been there instead.
My work here is dung.
I don't think religion is the root of the problem. It's just the most visible sign of the complete irrationality of the human race.
Personally I don't think we can solve this one without leaving behind 99% of the human race, so we're stuck with what we have.
I'm tired of suffering at the hands of stupidity, and I don't want to bite my tongue over it, anymore.
You have a point. But you're missing another. You may suffer just as much or more at the hands of intellectuals.
You know who has societies where "geeks" (engineers, mainly) are highly placed throughout government? China, Iran and many other closed societies run by authoritarian states. Geek arrogance toward the common man combined with political power is an extremely dangerous combination. Thanks, but no.
"Scientific government" sounds great until you realize that in practice it'll be run by people who think statecraft and philosophy are nearly worthless endeavors and that it'll likely have an attitude of "hey, let's try this radical restructure of people's lives because the theory sounds great and looks applicable on paper."
The "evidence" is typically found in an envelope discretely left on a senator's desk. What more does one need to make a decision? The more zeroes, the better the evidence!
While I agree that we'd be better off without "religous types" such as Pat Robertson and Rick Santorum, I'd like to remind you that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi were also "religious types."
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
...the day after the rapture, when all of the Unitarians get sucked up into the sky
"That's not at moral call, it's a factual statement; as such it should be evidence-based, or else the person making it should shut the hell up."
Right there is the problem. Geeks are often, by nature, chock full of hubris. Assuming that you have all the evidence, and that all your evidence is correct, and that you have interpreted the correct conclusion from your evidence, and therefore anyone who questions your evidence should just "shut the hell up", is not conducive to compromise or cooperation. It is precisely THAT attitude that got the U.S. into Iraq, to cite a recent example ("We KNOW there are WMD's, and we KNOW Saddam is going to use them, so we're going to invade Iraq and the rest of you can just shut the hell up.").
This is a constant problem at my office, where the .Net developers are so bloated with hubris that they think their applications are perfect, and always want to blame the DB2 database first when something goes wrong. And they continue to do this, even though evidence indicates that 99% of the time they have a bug in their application.
"Evidence" is not always objective, or correct, and geeks are just as prone to ignore facts as anyone else.
Proverbs 21:19
There was nothing natural about the way she slipped that comment in there. She clearly just slid it in there for her constituents.
Please re-read your sentence, except this time try substituting "niggers" or "gays" or "jews" for "religious types".
I'd hate to see the laws we'd be stuck with if you were in charge.
Proverbs 21:19
If you want governments to start basis decisions on logic and sense, you'll need to remove all influence from the religious types first. Until then, we're stuck with some pretty depressingly stupid laws.
Yes, because things like "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not steal" are just horrible public policy. Damned zealots.
Some people seem to think that taking religion away will lead to a utopia for humanity. I think it'll just be replaced with something else... communism, fascism, some new-ism. And it would be hellish.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"At last I went to the artisans, for I was conscious that I knew nothing at all, as I may say, and I was sure that they knew many fine things; and in this I was not mistaken, for they did know many things of which I was ignorant, and in this they certainly were wiser than I was. But I observed that even the good artisans fell into the same error as the poets; because they were good workmen they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom..." -- Plato, _Apology_
Err, no and I didn't say it would be. It would however be a step forwards.
Luckily I don't live in the US or I think I'f go mad. I don't know a single person who goes to church and only a handful who profess to any particular faith although none of those appear to actively practice it. Some of the comments to my original post are frankly disturbing in their knee jerkism.
It's also always fun to see any comment that dares to diss religion getting rapidly modded down by a group of people that ought to be in theory above all that.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Good luck getting an evidence-based culture developed in the face of the entrenched Bulverism of modern political discourse. Even more generally, we don't argue over the issues at hand, we argue over why the other side shouldn't be listened to (and Bulverism is just one tool in that arsenal). Not even the geeks or the scientists are immune. If you really want to move to an evidence-based culture, you're going to first have to pull people's focus off of defeating the opposition, and onto actually investigating the truth or falsity of particular issues. As C. S. Lewis put it "Until Bulverism is crushed, reason can play no effective part in human affairs". There's your assignment. Get to it.
Yes, because things like "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not steal" are just horrible public policy. Damned zealots.
It's not about the rules, it's about where they come from. If you say, "Thou shalt not kill because it's the root of X socioeconomic problem" then fine, but if you say, "Thou shalt not kill because some invisible ghost told me so" then you don't belong in politics...
The people who run the world are the ones who want to rule the world. They do what it takes. People want to hear familiar ideas framed in familiar terms. Politicians and marketers deliver just that. Moving to an evidence-based society, if accomplished, would remove all the alpha-male characteristics from leadership. It would favor hard thinking and research, and it would not favor personality and manipulative abilities. The world is as it is. I know deep in my heart that Facebook is evil, that people could be doing exactly the same thing without relinquishing their privacy, and that what people are doing on Facebook is idiotic in any event. That does not change the fact that influencing people and weaving a web of social relations is what people want to do, and what they will do. Denying human social traits is stupid, in politics, in social networking, in religion, and everywhere else. People are what they are. If geeks want to change the game, they need to learn to play the game. To be manipulative, to believe that the end justifies the means, and to not let ethics interfere. Yes, wielding power is incompatible with geek values. The sooner we learn that, the better.
You think your religion *invented" thou shalt not kill? Please, come on...
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
I think people on drugs should be punished because drugs are immoral.
I'm so fucking sick of fucking moralists! Whatever your idea, if it implies this stupid know-it-all assholes get kicked, I'm onboard.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
Here in the UK, it was £41,000 per year, so around $64,000.
So presumably not here.
"Thou shalt not *blah*" were fine when they were needed, the point is that we should be at a place in our societies where we can derive moral guidance from logic, not from old books. Laws have a role that requires them to evolve with society, and basing laws off of books that don't evolve leave us with ridiculous laws like "life starting 2 weeks before conception" - WTF is that? Anti-marriage laws are passed not because LGBT couples marrying hurts anyone, but because religious doctrine pushed in laws that should never have seen the light of day.
Granted, this issue has many facets - one being that THOSE OPPOSED RARELY GO AND VOTE. At least in these cases. I'm from NC and the recent passage or Amendment 1 is ridiculous, particularly because there are so many people I know who complain about it but didn't bother to take 15 minutes to fill out a ballot.
Somehow, I seem to have posted this, writing in the persona of Mark Corrigan.
All that's missing is a Stalingrad reference.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I wonder how much this idiotic douchebag would complain if someone said, "'I want to reduce drug use, and sending all users to prison doesn't do that.' He'd praise them for their insightfulness, even though they have no evidence to back it up.
Actually, there is plenty of evidence supporting that:
1. Criminalizing drug use and drug distribution costs trillions to the tax payers, to no effect.
2. Legalizing drugs, all of them, no exceptions, generates new tax revenues (which is why prohibition was repelled, btw) in addition to removing the costs related to 1).
3. It also decreases the healthcare costs by keeping the drug quality in check and maintaining specialized structures (see Switzerland or Portugal: if you must, do it; but preferrably here, with a clean needle and a doctor on hand).
4. Criminals deprived of their revenue fizzle out (as happened when the prohibition was repelled), further extending the benefits in 1).
5. Educating and informing drug/booze/tobacco users does work, as seen for tobacco and alcohol, and this comes at no additional charge given the prior points. In fact, the tax revenue alone handily pays for boosting information and education campaigns.
Anyway, your point was?
I agree that the relationship between children and parents is not a volentary one. Parents choose to create children while children do not choose to be born. Children do not have the ability to support themselves via pure voluntary association due to inherent biological limitations.
This means, however, than any injunctions against coersion are more applicable to children. Parents have even more responsibility to avoid using coersion against their children than they have to avoid using it against other adults because other adults can choose not to associate with them while their children do not have that option.
The situation which you are proposing (which has been the status quo for most of human history) is the very definition of tyranny. You propose because parents have the ability to impose their will on children than they should be allowed to do so without being condemned for taking advantage of the power disparity.
Parents do not own their children. They are trustees who care for children on behalf of those children's future adult selves. In any fair and moral society they would be explicitly accountable to their children for misusing or negelecting this responsibility..
Carl Franklin, co-host of the popular ".NET Rocks!" podcast has a great show about this very subject. http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=768 Don't worry, it's not Microsoft focused. You really should have a listen. He actually went to Washington DC to get involved. That's more than most of us can say.
Religious people make up a decent chuck of society. They should have representation, that's the point of goverment. The majority of our presidents have been religious, and that didn't mean they were all personal-value-imposing zealots. The problem of not making informed, objective decisions can't be solved by taking away people's ability to make decisions at all - the problem with overkill religion in politics is when they're forcing their beliefs or values on people, how can you solve that problem by forcing yours on them?
The cost of housing them may be $64k, but then your forgetting about the externalities, for example the lost wage they would earn on average.
so $64k + $36k (uk average) = $100k
While I agree that we'd be better off without "religous types" such as Pat Robertson and Rick Santorum, I'd like to remind you that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi were also "religious types."
They understood the difference between having your personal faith and respecting that others have the right to do (or not do) the same, versus implementing a theocracy.
Gandhi had no problem with the teachings of Christ even though he was thoroughly Hindu. His only complaint about Christianity was that the Christians who practice it are not enough like the Christ they claim to follow.
I personally admire the teachings of Christ. I believe he was better and more advanced than myself, and therefore I should listen to him (as I do with anyone meeting that criteria). I believe that practicing his teachings makes me a better, more loving, more forgiving person. But I cannot stand the way it's paraded around like it's a political issue.
One's faith should be a personal thing. I am spiritual, but spirituality is not something I can give to another person. If they want it, they have to find it themselves in their own terms. If they don't want it, I respect that even though I don't personally agree. In either case, telling someone else how they should live goes against everything I believe in. Selling one's faith in exchange for votes makes that person a sort of whore and calls into question the sincerity of their faith.
Not only do I not care what religion a candidate practices, I don't even want to know. Candidates should be judged on whether they promote freedom and prosperity, not whether they're in the same denominational club as oneself.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
He doesn't mean it's factually correct, he means that it's a statement of fact - something that can be objectively proven wrong or right.
A parent does not own a child, a parent is the "CUSTODIAN" of a child, in many cases children can choose their own guardians or emancipate.
Just as genesis was misinterperated by the christians, where it says that man was given stewardship over the earth.
If you want governments to start basis decisions on logic and sense, you'll need to remove all influence from the religious types first. Until then, we're stuck with some pretty depressingly stupid laws.
Yes, because things like "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not steal" are just horrible public policy. Damned zealots.
Some people seem to think that taking religion away will lead to a utopia for humanity. I think it'll just be replaced with something else... communism, fascism, some new-ism. And it would be hellish.
The main reason why hardcore Communists and National Socialists have tried to stamp out religion and kill religious people is easy to understand. A religious person recognizes a higher authority than the State. That's perceived as a threat to totalitarian types.
I have always considered Statism itself to be a type of religion. It's a secular religion, but it has its articles of faith, its priesthood, and its zealots all the same.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Removing the religion doesn't suddenly render you an immoral beast. I think the biggest problem with religion is that it provides an arbitrary justification for any stupid law you like, with a vast sourcebook of quotes that you can bend to support it. Without this, you have to justify your laws solely on their merits.
"Thou shalt not kill" is pretty obvious - everyone has an interest in this one being enforced. If you permit arbitrary killing, you might be next.
Despite "Thou shalt not kill" being quite early in the Bible, the rest of the Old Testament is packed with killing, genocide, etc, all approved of by Jehovah ; it translates more closely to "Thou shalt not murder". Wars of conquest, apparently, don't count as murder when God Says So. Without the religion, it becomes a whole lot more impartial - you don't have any particular groups of people who you can dismiss as being unimportant by dint of their religious beliefs or geographic location. So, remove the God, and now you have fewer justifications for killing, and you only have evidence and logic to fall back on - which really only leaves you with self-defence as a viable justification. If people only killed people in self defence, no-one would kill anyone, because there wouldn't be any people killing anyone except in self defence...
"Thou shalt not steal" is also pretty damn obvious. If you ask a 5 year old "How would you like it if I took your sweeties?", they'll say that's not fair. So if a 5 year old can grasp it, I'm sure it's not really a very challenging leap to ask atheists to support this remaining on the law books.
I think the kind of depressingly stupid laws being referred to are things like :
Tax exemption for religion : even Jesus said "Pay unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" ; ie, pay your damn taxes. Religion is all about the next world, right? So you can chip in your fair share to maintain the mundane and worldly matters we have in this one.
Laws that require Women to be subjugated and marginalized.
Laws that target homosexuals for different treatment, despite the evidence being very clear that homosexuality is a natural variation in not just humans but many other species, and thus presumably part of God's design (if you believe in that sort of thing).
> What they shouldn't do is say: 'I want to reduce drug use, and sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to achieve that.' That's not at moral call, it's a factual statement; as such it should be evidence-based, or else the person making it should shut the hell up."
That is opinion, which can be driven by facts, but the two are never the same.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
Yup. If anything, the geeks of China, Iran, and friends are being used like a rag to censor, track, and capture any fellow citizen who does not follow the vile decrees of the government.
The ones on top there are politically-inclined, power-hungry jerks and sociopaths, not geeks.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
One only needs to look to the actions of the Soviet Communists and the National Socialist German Workers Party to see what happens when "conventional morality" is shunted aside for in favor of what was considered "evidence based or technocratic" decision making.
Right and wrong aren't readily quantifiable.
I think he might take a more practical viewpoint, given that roughly 9% of the UK population use marijuana.
It's self-evident that sending all drug users to prison would reduce drug use, just by denying them access to supply. But it's simply not practical to do so. Our prisons are already overcrowded, so you'd have to divert quite a portion of the national economy into building, maintaining, and staffing prisons, and also suffer the removal of 9% of the population from the economy - currently, we have 0.001% incarceration rates.
So, given that incarcerating all drug offenders will essentially destroy the economy of the UK and turn us into an Island Stalag Luft, we have to ask the question, is there a less harmful way of dealing with the problems involved with drugs? Is it cheaper for the state to safely feed the habits of drug users, given the cost in social disruption and healthcare costs they cause through theft and the use of poor quality, unregulated product? Which solution causes the least amount of harm?
Whereas a politician stating that "Drug use is immoral and you should be locked up!" isn't providing any kind of justification. Pick one, he :
i) Hasn't thought it through. Should people who don't actually think about what they are saying actually be in charge of anything? Note that in this one I am including all the subspecies of not thinking things through, including religion, moral outrage, fear of a different culture, etc.
ii) HAS thought it through. Has a financial interest in the prison-industrial complex. Since 9% of the UK population is a drug offender, there is an effectively endless supply of "product" for the commercial prison system, since as we have already postulated, incarcerating all drugs users isn't actually possible given that it would probably plunge the country into revolution.
It makes far more sense to insist on locking up people who commit actual offences (other than just possessing drugs) to feed their drug habit. It makes even more sense to try and work out what causes drug habits and how to fix THAT.
what is wrong with "moral calls" well other than politicians just "use" them as a bait to get themselves elected? that doesn't make "morals" a "bad" thing !! instead he can just educate people enough so they won't elect liars and make bad choices when elections comes !
Awesome, +4 insightful to 0 Flamebait. Oh how I love to see those religious ones show they know how to live their lives the way Jesus asked them to. Or not.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
It's not going to happen with adults. A good educational system (I did NOT say "school system"!) would try to develop the skills to analyze an argument. It may not succeed, not with human beings.
If a technocrat really was operating on evidence, then they'd have to eliminate OSHA for not moving the needle on workplace safety.
Evidence: http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb105-36.html
So it's ok for religious people who think like you do to vote
Yes, it is.
but we should disallow any religious people who DON'T think like you do?
No, we should not. We should promote reason. We should not persecute narrowmindedness. I honestly believe in the superiority of Reason over narrow-mindedness, which is why I feel no need to make laws against the latter. It's called being a secure person.
I know that's not what you're meaning (believe me, this reply is not aimed solely at your comment), but it is what you're implying. You place your trust in what you consider to be "reason", and they place their trust in what they consider to be "truth".
I trust what is trustworthy. That's why you are incorrect about the implications of my prior post.
Why? That's easy. If I reason incorrectly, you could come along and point out exactly where I made a mistake, what kind of error I made, and how it may be corrected. If I said "all cats are mammals, therefore all mammals are cats" you could correct me and it would be more than just your opinion. If we disagreed about that, my position would not merely be "different" from yours; it would be wrong. All you would have to do is find a single mammal that is not a cat and my statement would be objectively falsified and anyone could confirm that to their own satisfaction.
Religion doesn't work this way. That's why reason is better than religion when it comes to making decisions that can affect millions of people. That's when the ability to objectively confirm the correctness of a position is obviously desirable. In this context, which is public policy, reason and religion are not merely "different". One is clearly superior.
In almost any worldview (religious, scientific, philosophic), you are nothing but a mound of sand telling yourself that you know better than another mound of sand, and the other mound of sand strongly believes that they know better than you.
Actually I am both Reasonable and Spiritual. For me those two are not in conflict, not even slightly, but then I never did like organized religion and have always viewed spirituality as a personal thing. Even if I am certain that the way I live is better than the way you live, it would be wrong to force you to conform to my ways. Perhaps I would try to persuade you, but we're talking about government here. Laws are not intended to persuade. They are enforced by the threat of violence.
The only legitimate reason to outlaw something you want to do would be if that activity infringed on the rights of other people to make their own decisions about how they wish to live. For example, murder is illegal and should be illegal because if you murder someone, you're definitely interfering with the way they wish to live.
To borrow your terms, I am more like a mound of sand that isn't worried about how the other mounds of sand live their lives. I do not wish to place restrictions on them or to shove an agenda down their throats (supposing sand dunes have throats...). Consenting adults should be able to do whatever they like. What other people want to read, watch, think, say, and practice is none of my damned business unless they choose to share. What's that saying, that those who need the force of law to support their religion must not believe in the power of its message? It's true.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
It didn't gain support back then; it won't gain support now.
The bottom line is that people have an inherent distrust of those who are smarter than them, worrying that the other person might use superior intelligence to take advantage of them. They'd much rather have someone who might be less smart, but that they can understand, in charge than someone who might do a better job, but whose actions are incomprehensible (and, thus, unpredictable) to them. Welcome to our politics.
That is all.
Jacque Freso has been preaching this for at least 50 years now.
His thoughts and ideas are very interesting, if you like futurists he's one to read up on. He also has a documentary called Future By Design which is available streaming on Netflix if you've got that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacque_Fresco
INTRODUCTION
Secession is necessary to free society. Free society starts with mutual consent. Mutual consent implies the option not to consent. "Freedom From" compliments "Freedom To".
Secession is necessary to true social science: We can best discover causal laws by testing theories with controlled experiments. This is true of all science. Controlled experiments require separate experimental groups, treated according to different theories and comparing the measured results with predictions. In practice, human ecologies can form separate experimental groups only by upholding geographic boundaries that prevent cross-contamination between treatments – cross-contamination with its resulting confusion and confounding of results. We can argue how best to achieve this in practice, but the principle of giving experimental evidence priority over any amount of argument, debate, deliberation, peer review or judicial proceeding stands as more self-evident than anything in the Declaration of Independence.
In a free scientific society, an individual is subject to treatment only after giving informed consent.
These two pillars of social good -- truth and freedom -- stand upon the foundation of secession.
Tyranny of the majority, limited only by a vague laundry list of selectively enforced human rights -- the sine qua non of "liberal democracy" -- must submit to the right to secede or it violates truth and freedom, hence all social good.
SLAVERY
Getting right to the point that people need addressed whenever "secession" is uttered:
Abolition of slavery is support of individual secession.
Slaves want to secede from their "owners" just as others want to -- and do -- secede from societies they find objectionable. The difference between slavery and others turns solely on whether the individual's right to secede is realized. All who are denied secession are slaves: their consent is violated.
If men from Maine choose to support the right of secession of slaves by marching on South Carolina to kill unrepentant slave owners -- every last one of them -- those men from Maine in no way lose their own rights. Men retaining their humanity may differ over whether it is wisest to intervene in such a way – or to intervene at all. For example, should a government which is capable of raising taxes do so for the waging of war against slavery or, better for the purchase of slaves to be freed from their dependent owners? Eminent domain “taking” arguments aside, just men may, as well, differ over whether it is wisest to put down a rabid animal, or to treat it. The compromise upon which the United States was founded was flawed, perhaps fatally, by its incorporation of slave states.
Likewise, this in no way supports the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution or The Union. It supports only the 13th Amendment. Despite Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964's pretenses to the contrary, it is still a "badge of slavery" to be forced into association with others. Likewise the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 compounded this badge of slavery born of the so-called “Civil Rights Movement”.
"Freedom From" compliments "Freedom To". Just as a person's right to vote with his feet takes precedence over a State's powers, so a body politic may leave a Federation that has overstepped its bounds.
The Federal government is a creature of its constituent States and the State is a creature of its constituent People.
The Creature is subordinate to the Creator.
Lucifer and his slavery be damned.
FREEDOM
There is no true freedom without a domain upon which men may live as they choose. The key to practical freedom is that men may choose to live among others that share their ecological beliefs. Ecological beliefs include beliefs in cause and effect on human ecologies. Note, this is more profound than merely sharing territory with those “of like mind”. Beliefs about ecological cause and effect are, by definition, at t
Seastead this.
Politicians are free to say: 'I think people on drugs should be punished because drugs are immoral.' That's a moral call, albeit a rather stupid one in my opinion. What they shouldn't do is say: 'I want to reduce drug use, and sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to achieve that.' That's not a moral call, it's a factual statement; as such it should be evidence-based
Our natural rights do not derive from statistics. What a dangerous idea. What if statistics really showed (hypothetically) that sending drug users to prison was effective at engineering some 'greater goal', would that make it morally OK? Precisely not.
I could probably show "evidence" that slavery helped reduce the economic costs of picking cotton. Such "evidence" - even when true - is clearly not what ought to be the foundation of our political and moral reasoning.
Henderson is right that politics should be evidence-based, but he gets it precisely the wrong way round. It should precisely be the moral claims that are evidence-based and reason-based (e.g. whether drug users should be punished).
Politics is basically all about when violence should be applied, and politicians should not be free to claim "violence should be used against drug users" - that notion that such "morality" subjective is very and dangerously wrong - such a claim must in itself be able to be objectively backed by facts and reason. It is objectively wrong (using facts and reason) to initiate violence against (i.e. put in jail) drug users who are harming nobody --- the moral claim is precisely the one that ought to be attacked. And the statistical claims, while peripherally interesting, should be utterly irrelevant to politics --- again, our natural rights do not derive from statistics, any more that hypothetical statistics showing (say) that slavery had economic benefits, would in any way be a valid argument for slavery. Slavery was wrong because it involves the non-consenting initiation of force against the slaves, not because of statistical evidence relating to indirect consequences.
It is correct that scientific thinking should be applied to politics, but it should be applied in the sense of using scientific thinking properly to determine the validity of moral claims, from which law must then be derived.
The Nazi leadership had more in common with renaissance fair nerds than science and engineering geeks. The People's Republic of China and Iran, meanwhile, actually have a lot of engineering-trained leaders. For pete's sake, Hu Jintao, one of the most powerful leaders in the world right now has a degree in hydraulic engineering. The President of Iran is a civil engineer who actually still teaches a class or two on civil engineering at university.
Is that enough for you or do I need to drive a few nails into the clue stick for you?
Political parties* have manifestos. That's presumably the motif he's going for.
* They do in the UK anyway, and the author is a Brit. They're a statement of what a party would do if they won an election. YMMV if you live elsewhere.
So if it turns ou that they do want to resuce drug use and the the most cost effective way to acheive that is indeed to send all users to prison that would be ok?
Maybe if "reducing drug use" in itself would have a proven value of it's own - however putting users in prison is often supported regardless of what it will result in, and often by people who don't count alcohol and tobacco as drugs for no other reasons than them being legal.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.