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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.
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The same skills that get your laid also get you elected...
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.
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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..."
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'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 problem with letting science decide is that science cannot make normative decisions. That is, science cannot tell us whether one outcome is better than another.
Consider water pollution. Science can tell us that if we put *x* mcg of Hg into a stream, *y* number of trout will get contaminated and *z* number of people will get sick, and it will cost the plant *a* number of dollars, which will lead to *b* number of layoffs, and *c* number of people going on food stamps, etc.
What science can't tell us is what value of *x* is the right one.
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
What you're saying is that the claim of immorality is actually a factual claim. If that's the case, we can and should measure those social costs and compare them to the social costs of prohibition. If we did that, we'd find that it's prohibition that is "immoral".
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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.
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.
"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
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.
Uh, yeah. What kind of definition is that? I can take away your life, easily. So you got no right to life? I can take away your freedom, easily. No right to liberty? I can take away your right to speak freely. No right to free speech? What good is a phone call, Mr. Anderson, when you cannot speak?
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.
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.
I wish everyone who says there is no right to healthcare also embrace the repeal of legislation which requires ERs to take care of sick people who walk in - traffic accident, no insurance you are left to die on the side of the road - they should embrace the implications of their stance, just come out and say what kind of country you want to live in, likewise if you don't like taxes, fine don't pay them, but then no government services, rent your own security company, fire protection and drive on toll roads, educate your kids in a private school and eat food from unregulated providers - just do it already
So then life is not a right? Ownership of property is not a right? Free speech is not a right? They can all be taken away.
Ownership of property is based on finite goods.
Every proposition of "should" is moral, and every decision (and certainly every policy) is based on a proposition of "should" (often, but not always, along with empirical considerations.)
Empirical considerations can tell you what outcomes are most likely from a different course of actions, but unless you have a value framework, you have no way of choosing among those actions.
"I want to reduce drug use" is a moral position (or, rather, as part of the justification for a policy proposal, it either expresses the moral position "We should act to reduce drug use", or relies on the implicit moral premise "We should act according to my desires".)
"sending all users to prison is the most cost-effective way to [reduce drug use]" is a fact claim.
While you can in principle prove or disprove the fact claim, that isn't enough to justify the policy decision, you also have to accept or reject the moral position.
If there's no fundamental human right to healthcare, food, and shelter, then there's no fundamental human right to free speech, or association, or any of the those other negative rights
How do you figure that?
I can exercise my free speech without forcing you to do anything. I don't need to take your money (through government as a proxy). I don't need to force you to listen, though I can hope you will choose to. At no point does my free speech require that armed men (police) use threats of violence to force you to do anything.
That is the difference between an inalienable human right and an entitlement. If you believe they are the same, you could not be more misguided. Be careful, because there are a lot of monied interests that view both the Constitution and the entire notion of inalienable human rights as pesky obstacles to their goals. For that reason, these things (rights and entitlements) are often conflated deliberately in order to cause the very confusion you manifest. It is not done to strengthen the perceived value of entitlements, but to weaken the perceived value of rights.
I would go so far as to say it is plain evil.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
*sigh*
Yes, in a perfect world with a healthcare system paid out of taxes, people wouldn't do anything adverse to their health. One current hypothesis is that lowering your calorie intake to 20% below what is considered a "normal" intake is actually the best way to prolong your life ; I can't see that happening on a mass scale either.
I think the main point here is that everyone needs healthcare of some kind, statistically speaking, throughout their life. Some people need more than others, often through no fault of their own. Their right to life is often dependent on them getting this healthcare. But their right to life does not automatically give them the income to pay for it. With the economy the way it is, many people are struggling to eat, let alone pay for healthcare.
What you are essentially saying is "I don't give a shit if you die, I want my [pool | car | foreign holiday]."
On top of this, the way that healthcare is paid for in the USA currently makes it the most expensive in the world. Of the G8 nations, you pay nearly twice the cost per head of the next nation, for pretty similar outcomes. This extra cost is pretty obviously because of the nature of your health insurance industry. It seems insane to leave your health in the hands of a corporation who profit the most from denying you as much healthcare as possible. The extra bureaucracy the insurance industry engages in for their campaign to deny their customers treatment undoubtedly increases costs.
A libertarian will usually step in at this point and say "Well then, do away with the insurance companies, let me pay my doctor out of my own pocket, and the prices will drop!". This, alas, does not work well for everyone, as pointed out, because not everyone can afford healthcare, even healthcare that is now cheaper because of market forces. Healthcare is both labour intensive and employs many expensive, low-volume technologies, and neither of these costs can be depressed by mass production.
If you want a cheaper healthcare system, you only have to look to countries with socialised healthcare. Here in the UK, we have very similar outcomes to the USA (they have slightly better cancer treatment, largely because they have a larger population, and this means that drug trials for rare cancers are more viable, we have better cardiac outcomes). But we pay less than half per head what you do, because our healthcare system is run by the government, and the focus is not on making a profit, but providing the best outcomes. When we cut costs, we aren't trying to prop up the bottom line. We cut reluctantly, because we know that cut is hurting our patients, instead of rubbing our hands expecting a juicy bonus.
Well, I can see your point of view. Everyone has a selfish streak. No-one likes to be told what to do. But I would be interested to see how long your resolve to be a self-reliant individual lasts should you contract a medical condition or suffer an accident that outstrips your ability to pay for the care it requires.
Stating that coercion is immoral would challenge the very foundation of families, wherein for nearly off human history children have been considered effectively the property of adults.
A parent is supposed to be a benevolent dictator. This is not something you could ever realistically expect from the State.
That's why it's so hard to spread political freedom - because people have been conditioned from infancy to obey the arbitrary dictates of someone more powerful. They learned from an early age that the rules they were forced to abide by didn't apply to the people making the rules. The existence of governments is merely a side effect of this early conditioning.
It depends. Truly good parents don't condition; they reason. They convince their children to obey their rules by showing that their own rules are good enough for them as well. In other words, they are not hypocrites. They correct rather than punish because they don't get angry easily. They see a need to earn respect by being respectable and personally upholding every virtue they expect from their children, rather than demanding respect just-because.
It's the difference between authority and dominance. Too many parents have no authority, so all they have left is "I'm bigger than you" and "I can take things away from you" and "I can make you miserable". They actually blame the child for this rather than seeing it as their own failing. They're basically bullies to their children, but they feel justified in their destructive methods because their goals are decent enough. Standard bullies want your lunch money; parent-bullies want you to succeed in life. It's typical consequentialism (ends justify the means) justification.
Yes, some coercion is necessary, just like some government is necessary. The idea is for both to be minimal and appropriate.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Rights are something that we imagine, I have no right to be not eaten by a hungry lion, just as I have no right to healthcare. What we do have is a set of privileges, which are conducive to the society that we live in, and liberties from individuals or groups of individuals and to do certain things.
That being said, the case could be made that universal healthcare is a national security priority. I mean if it only takes a ferret farm and a few flu samples, in order to make a super viral pandemic that could kill 50% of the world, whose to say that universal heathcare isn't a good risk avoiding strategy.
Furthermore the government does have a place paying for and charging for positive and negative externailities, and since no human being is an island and healthcare problems are ones of accruing interest, it seems like something the government ought to pay for.
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
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).
when it come to arguing about healthcare I like to use the following:
You have a right to healthcare but you don't have a right to have me pay for your healthcare.
This at least is logically consistent with the other rights that have been enshrined in our constitution in that it doesn't impose any obligation on any one else. I can stand on the street corner all day long and exercise my first amendment rights but that in no way imposes an obligation on your to listen to my rantings. My right to keep and bear arms does not impose any obligation on you to purchase them for me. I happen to believe that the current healthcare affordability act (aka Obamacare) is probably unconstitutional because of the individual mandate. A single payer system would have at least stood up to that test as congress does have the power to tax and spend.
Time to offend someone
Yes, Socrates was a lot harder on the politicians than on the artisans:
"When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself; and I went and tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me."
That sounds a lot like contemporary politics.
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.