Scientists have to list all the sources they use. And they quickly get called out for doing mistakes in that regard and suffer a loss of trust in their work.
What would happen if everything politicians say or write had to contain sources?
Speeches are prepared anyway, so you have to publish all the sources of your speech right after you held it. Saying things differently than in the source would be illegal.
I think it would be quite interesting, and a completely different way to do politics.
I’ve always thought it would be an interesting experiment for all (or most) proposed laws to be written as though they were scientific experiments, complete with:
- Hypothesis (what is the law intended to accomplish?),
- Metrics (how will effectiveness be measured),
- Effectiveness period (when will these effects be realized?)
- Success cnriteria (what is the minimum effect to consider the law effective?)
- Side effects (what might go wrong, and how will that be evaluated?)
There’s probably lots that does not cover, but the main idea is that any new law comes with quantitative ways to determine its effectiveness against its stated goals. Any law that does not meet those goals in the predefined time period is scrapped.
But again, as Zeppo said, without an informed and interested electorate, it’s all pretty much moot.
I would love for laws to be written in a git repository, with each addition /subtraction traceable to a specific lawmaker with a full commit and blame history available to the public starting from the very beginning.
We used to have a nonpartisan office dedicated to researching and informing Congress on political and scientific issues and the effects of prospective legislation. You can probably guess what happened to it.
It’s astounding how much fuckery can be traced to just a handful of names. 😞
FYI, a similar office was established in the GAO recently.
https://www.gao.gov/blog/2019/01/29/our-new-science-technology-assessment-and-analytics-team
What missing is voters who care about or would pay attention to all of that, and honest news sources.
Look at politicized science for your answer. I know you were asking what would happen to politics and politicians if they followed the scientific process and followed the rules legitimately seeking the most correct answers, but what they’d do in real life is cherry pick data, use poor “n” and minimal data collection to steer the results how they want, then selectively interpret the data to support their narrative with clickbaity titles attached to the results. Just like industry funded science did for cigarettes or leaded gasoline.
But why do that when you can just appeal to emotion 👍
When the ones rule that can instill the most fear, the outlook is grim 🫣
There’s too much emotions in politics.
Politics is not science. A political decision does not rely on facts, it’s a moral decision or a jump into the unknown, or it is a arbitration, a choice to make on allocating resources or choosing a path for society.
Now there is a lot of lies and wrongs they’re saying, and it is a problem. But this is a problem with accountability and information. Media are a big problem. Political accountability and responsability is a big question and a difficult problem to solve. Science methods and knowledge can help, but they are not applicable for most of these problems.
very interesting, that could even help fight corruption. but what politician would ever make that a law? if you have the power to decide if you get to be lazy and tell lies, you will decide to be lazy and tell lies.
They’d change the rules so they don’t have to do that anymore, then make it illegal for anyone else to not do that.
Does anyone know what high level politicians actually do on a day-to day-basis. Like, is there someone who works in the field or has had an internship on Capitol Hill or something that can enlighten me? The pols rarely draft their own bills. It’s either lobbyists or staffers. Ron Desantis has been Iowa about 100x more than he’s been in Florida. Seems like the job is not all that difficult and you can be absent just about all the time unless there’s a vote on the floor. But, maybe my admittedly incomplete knowledge is wrong.
Especially at the national level, most politicians hire staffers they trust to implement their policies in accordance with their principals, and harshly punish those that won’t. The closest advisors tend to be either referred from their state party, or people that have risen through the ranks with them, so they’re often decades old relationships, or at least people that have been in the same circles for years.
The day to day does involve a lot of reading, meeting with lobbyists for specific issues (this includes a lot of non-money players, fwiw), and only rarely in depth policy discussion with advisors/other policy makers. They have to trust their staffers to highlight things they should hammer home/object to in legislation, and, because sometimes bills arrive in Congress already too complicated, they’re sometimes unable to actually read the whole thing before voting (even in a “you take 200 pages, you take 200 pages…” sense), so they’re essentially trusting that other people have reviewed it well enough.
It’s a job with long hours, but a lot of that is essentially socializing, so not “hard” in the same sense as digging holes or whatnot is hard.
I suggest googling reproducibility/replication crisis or Francesca Gino or have a look at RetractionWatch. I wish your portrait of scientists were true but alas.
If it were such a wide spread issue, then science would not achieve the results it does. It lives from people checking other people’s work and arguing about the results.
There is still an issue of human bias, though. A thought is not accepted unless it’s widely accepted. Even much of our established science was once a pipe dream, even with reproducible proof, until it was accepted on a wider scale.
It’s not as simple as just providing proof and letting people accept it, you have to appeal to them. Which is exactly what politicians do.
I don’t think science has been successful in fields like sociology or psychology in the same way that it has been in hard sciences like physics.
It’s pretty incredible what we know about history, just from guessing by what we find and second guessing the first guess with more findings.
Or how we know pretty much all steps how the language evolved from Latin, thousands of years ago, to Italian, which is spoken today.
What I despise is when things are quite clear and politics just act like we would not know. Like how „brain drain“ is still a valid talking point while science already knows it’s false.
I agree. I only wanted to point out that reaching a consensus about the results of an experiment or a study is more difficult in some areas of research.
Yeah, that’s certainly true.
Great, not convince the politicians to make that law
It wouldn’t be much different. Really what politicians need are more staff with science literacy and social literacy.
You see the failure of science in policing frequently where metrics get imposed that end up having bad results (there’s a fantastic reply all about comstat). You need people with social literacy who can make better appointments and navigate these situations.
We could use better science literacy among media: writers, news anchors, etc.
They would dissolve into a puff of smoke.
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I won’t call wearing suits, talking on the phone, and lying work.
What would happen if politicians hat to work?
I would love to see a politician working in a kitchen at rush hour while being yelled for being too slow. Can you imagine Donald Trump laying rebar on a construction site in the winter? These motherfuckers would last 10 minutes. But what if we just treat them like a mix beween celebrity and king, that’s very cool too.
