[mudil]

What humanity needs is to put politics (and political science, for that matter) on scientific foundation.

No other area of human activity is so unscientific and so replete with falsehoods and lies as politics. We don't tolerate physicists or doctors lying, but lying in politics is a norm. Add to this a mix of dogmas, ideologies (often based on backward religious ideas), wishful thinking, and yes, men's testosterone power plays, and you have a recipe for non-progress, wars, subjugations, geopolitical games, etc etc etc. Even ideas that look like a noble cause often backfire and result in death and destruction.

Scientifically-based politics should be a norm in the 21th century.

[n0us]

> should be a norm

This statement is already a normative one. I don't even know where to start in terms of breaking down this incredibly feeble argument but one place to start would be the fact that a move to "Scientifically-based politics" would be a political move in and of itself. Then you have to consider that you're asking people to get rid of ideologies, "backward religious ideas" and replace them with "science." Science done by whom? A bunch of California tech companies? I wonder what that world would look like.

This comment reads like something from /r/juststemthings or /r/justneckbeardthings and I honestly can't even tell if this is a joke or not.

[kuschku]

You have to do things based on polls, knowledge, and statistics – not based on "what I believe in".

Merkel’s government, despite being criticized for never having their own opinion, did this quite well, and handled most things well.

[RA_Fisher]

Which polls will we administer? The ones we believe in? Which statistics will we construct? The ones we believe in? Which knowledge will we choose to incorporate? The ones we believe in?

[Houshalter]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy

Technocracy was also a theme of many communists. It's also reappeared in the form of the Futurist Party, and some other small movements like the venus project.

For an interesting review of these ideas, seriously read this: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/book-review-red-plenty/

>This book was the first time that I, as a person who considers himself rationally/technically minded, realized that I was super attracted to Communism.

>Here were people who had a clear view of the problems of human civilization – all the greed, all the waste, all the zero-sum games. Who had the entire population united around a vision of a better future, whose backers could direct the entire state to better serve the goal. All they needed was to solve the engineering challenges, to solve the equations, and there they were, at the golden future. And they were smart enough to be worthy of the problem – Glushkov invented cybernetics, Kantorovich won a Nobel Prize in Economics.

Project Cybersyn was a really cool idea that tried to actually implement these ideas in the real world just as computers were becoming advanced enough to do these things. But unfortunately it didn't last very long:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machin...

[mudil]

Technocracy is a terrible name. It doesn't aspire and sounds Orwellian.

[js8]

I don't think technocrats care about the name.

[rebootthesystem]

No, no. We need accountability in politics. Consequences. Real ones.

If my company violates ITAR rules when we do aerospace work we can go to jail. A Secretary of State handles classified email without regard for security and on servers she controls, and she could be the next President. A President lies and manipulates facts and he suffers no consequences. A Senator makes-up shit, lies, cheats and makes promises he will never fulfill and is not held accountable, ever. A Mayor changes a vote and nothing happens to him. A Government organization spends lavishly and goes so far as to use their migt to punish people who do not align with their politics and nobody is fired or goes to jail. Politicians launch us into bullshit wars and they are not held accountable for any of it. They give money lavishly to other countries (and brutal dictators) while our own kids suffer and schools have to lay off teachers.

No, the elephant in the room isn't the lack of science (although some would be good), it's the lack of consequences. It's the lack of honesty. It's the lack of accountability and restraint. It's that and more. And it won't change until people wake up and demand it, which is unlikely until things become FUBAR.

The system is utterly broken and needs to be adjusted if it will be effective in the next 200 years.

[vuldin]

While we're at it, let's go ahead and put religion on top of a solid scientific foundation! I mean politics and religion are so similar, if we figure one out then we're bound to be able to apply what we've learned from the process to the other.

[andrepd]

I don't understand. Isn't religion by definition inaccessible to scientific analysis?

[yorwba]

1. I think the comment was meant to be sarcastic.

2. Analysing religions seems to be within the domain of sociology.

3. Determining the truth of different religions is kind of tricky, because a lot of them are about the afterlife and unless there is a way to return we can't get any information about it. But if the local priests claims that "anyone who desecrates the temple will immediately be smitten by lightning", defecating on the altar seems to be a surefire way to find out. And of course, if a valkyrie hands you a mug of mead after your death, you know you shouldn't have prayed to Cthulhu after all.

[cookiecaper]

Yes. Religious beliefs are fundamentally non-scientific because they stem from a non-falsifiable root truth (e.g., God is only visible when He wants to be, and if you can't see evidence of Him, it's only because He doesn't want you to be able to).

Scientific beliefs are objectively testable and falsifiable. Religious beliefs are neither (though they are often subjectively testable). This doesn't mean religion is bad, but it means that it can't be understood in scientific terms.

[Houshalter]

No: http://lesswrong.com/lw/i8/religions_claim_to_be_nondisprova...

>Back in the old days, there was no concept of religion being a separate magisterium. The Old Testament is a stream-of-consciousness culture dump: history, law, moral parables, and yes, models of how the universe works. In not one single passage of the Old Testament will you find anyone talking about a transcendent wonder at the complexity of the universe. But you will find plenty of scientific claims, like the universe being created in six days (which is a metaphor for the Big Bang), or rabbits chewing their cud. (Which is a metaphor for...)

>Back in the old days, saying the local religion "could not be proven" would have gotten you burned at the stake. One of the core beliefs of Orthodox Judaism is that God appeared at Mount Sinai and said in a thundering voice, "Yeah, it's all true." ... The vast majority of religions in human history - excepting only those invented extremely recently - tell stories of events that would constitute completely unmistakable evidence if they'd actually happened. The orthogonality of religion and factual questions is a recent and strictly Western concept. The people who wrote the original scriptures didn't even know the difference.

[chongli]

The point is that rhetoric (the basis for politics) is inaccessible to empirical analysis too.

[andrepd]

But the policies that politics is concerned about (economy, welfare, etc) are accessible to scientific analysis.

[chongli]

Right, and tons of that scientific analysis goes on. It just doesn't hold much sway over some rather substantial portions of the electorate.

[skywhopper]

Unfortunately politics is the poison element. Politicians lie because it benefits them. If we integrate science with politics, we'll end up with far more incentives for scientists to lie just as much as politicians.

It's no different than what happens when religion gets mixed up in politics. The separation of church and state protects the church as much or more than it does the state. Politics and power corrupt whatever they touch.

There are ways to improve the impact of science (and religion and education, etc) on the political world, but mixing them together too much will just poison the positive traits, rather than lifting up politics.

[jordanbaucke]

Yes, "pure-democracy" and/or "populist" politics has worked out so well in the 20th Century. More than 50% of a group of people doesn't like (or is convinced they don't like) something or someone for whatever reason, hmmm, I think that's how people end up in ovens.

We have a democratic-republic in the United States so popular / populist majorities can't inflict absolute will over unpopular / unpopulist people / regions.

Populists today, at least in the US, aren't as dangerous as they are / were in countries where changing the constitution is much easier for a powerful / popular leader.

[cookiecaper]

Government always derives its powers from the consent of the governed, no matter what system is in place. If the mass of the populace wants to break a group badly enough, they'll do what it takes to see that group broken no matter what the constitutional form of government allows. All you can hope is that you have a system that's good enough at keeping that barrier sufficiently high that you essentially need a supermajority of enemies before that happens to anyone in particular. The American system has done a semi-good job at it even though there have been several major oversights (African slavery, Mormon persecution, Japanese internment, etc).

[LoSboccacc]

computer decision making would be even worse.

what if the computer decides there is no way to feed the population at the current (or a future) growth rate and implements a mandatory two children only policy?

a computer wouldn't understand tact, politics or empathy, or if it would, it wouldn't be a solution much better than what we'd get now.

[codeshaman]

It may also decide that it's necessary to reduce the population by implementing social purging, starting with the people who disagree with this decision.

Purge everyone who doesn't agree with the purge. 150 milliseconds later, law-enforcement drones and robots start executing.

[Moshe_Silnorin]

Conditional on its prediction being accurate, reducing birth rates is a better solution than creating new people to starve.

[jordanlev]

But science doesn't suggest what we (as humans) should do, it just explains how things work. Of course our decisions should be informed by science, but science is a tool of understanding, not a philosophy or a mission or a goal unto itself.

[kuschku]

When we have politicians trying to get "alternative" creation hypothesises into school books (see Texas and creationism), then just limiting politics to scientifically sound ideas would be a good first step.

[krapp]

While I agree with you in theory, in practice it's perfectly legitimate for politicians to be able to "try" something like that, even if it's an attempt to distort or deny scientific truth. Even in Texas, those efforts are controversial, and not guaranteed to succeed without opposition. But it wouldn't be just to simply forbid religious people from the opportunity to influence political debate when their point of view represents that of the majority, or at least a significant minority.

[yongjik]

> We don't tolerate physicists or doctors lying ...

Not really, judging from the size of aisles filled with homeopathic remedies. Some people practically have to be dragged away, kicking and screaming, by government agencies so that they stop harming themselves.

It's always people. Stupid people ruining beautiful ideals. (And that includes me, of course.) Until we can fix people, it's futile to wish for "scientific" politics.

I'm kinda optimist, so I believe better education will improve the situation, but who knows.

[outlace]

I'd shy away from appeals to "scientifically-based politics" but we absolutely need a politics that is honest, sincere, free from religious influence, and accepts science (even when it's contrary to your ideology).

[BurningFrog]

Politics will always be like that. In part because voters will never be informed enough about the issues. Look up "Rational Ignorance" for why.

More realistic is to get politics out of as many areas of life as possible.

[blablabla123]

The documentary "The fog of war" shows actually that the Vietnam war was Conducted on a very rational base. Science cannot deal well with contradictions and human needs I think...

[js8]

> What humanity needs is to put politics (and political science, for that matter) on scientific foundation.

There is a big problem, how do you do that? I thought about it recently on another forum - every scientific statement has a form of implication: If you do A, you will get B. So there is no beginning of it. You may say, I start from some axiom system, but then you have to agree on that. Even in classical propositional logic, even if you consider the same resulting formal system, you can get large (infinite?) variety of axiomatic systems that can lead to it.

So, what I would like to see, would be - equip everybody with Watson and let them vote, direct democracy style.

[oblio]

At this point you might as well try to regulate emotions :)