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Do you believe that there are public policy questions whose answers depend on science AND are very important? If so, then it should matter a very great deal.

Do you believe that there are public policy questions whose answers depend on science AND are very important? If so, then it should matter a very great deal. In other words, if you're the kind of person who believes that either climate change is no big deal or that there is nothing that humans can do about it, then it doesn't matter at all. Alternatively, if you think climate change is a big deal and that humans can do something about it, then public understanding of science matters because altering it might kill/save a few hundred million people. Do you think the lives of a few hundred million human beings matter?

derefr 16y ago
If there's something everyone needs to do, no amount of education will saturate the population to the point that everyone required to do it, does it. Some people just don't care outside of the here and now, unless they're made to care with a carrot or a stick. You need to have a law either punishing them for not doing it, or rewarding them for doing it (i.e. carbon-neutral business tax credits) for them to pay attention. (And even then, some people still won't care, or will willfully skirt the law. Hopefully this number will be negligible enough to allow the law to still have its intended effect.) Don't think of it as a big, scary, nebulous concept like "justice", though. Call it what it is: game design. The body of law is the game that every citizen of a country is always playing, and like any game, you can encourage paths to be followed, and choices to be made, by putting variable-scheduled rewards and increasing "justified" challenges along those paths. The only people who need to understand the "public policy questions", in a world where public policy is set up as law, are the legislators (the "game designers"). This is simply an argument for better-educated legislators, not a better-educated populace.
- anthonyb 16y ago
  Except that we live in a democracy, where people vote for the legislators who they think will do the better job. When the populace believe in stupid things, you'll get legislators who pander to that, while ignoring the important stuff.
  - derefr 16y ago
    Sort of. We don't vote for legislators based on their beliefs or knowledge-bases, we vote for legislators based on a combination of status moves, group affiliations, and physical characteristics that have more in common with mate selection than anything else. What legislators pander to while looking to get elected, has little to do with what laws they end up actually passing. There's no real correlation between what the populace believes, and what its elected representatives believe. (Well, there would be if we were all purely rational beings who hadn't invented lying and adhered to Aumann's agreement theorem...) In algorithmic terms—this isn't a hill-climbing heuristic, where you'll eventually optimize toward politicians that believe something in particular; it's a random search.
    - anthonyb 16y ago
      Not true. Here in Australia, our Prime Minister just got the boot, in part because he backed down over an emissions trading scheme and lost popular support. So it's not entirely random, although there's also internal power-broking and lobbying from third parties like the mining sector to blame.
    - MichaelSalib 16y ago
      There's no real correlation between what the populace believes, and what its elected representatives believe. Maybe, maybe not. But there is a very real correlation between what the populace believes and what laws legislators can vote for without ruining their chances for reelection. Legislators who vote for things that the majority of their constituents find to be completely absurd tend not to be reelected.
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  I don't think this is something that "everyone needs to do"...I mean, there will always be substantial numbers of people who believe the earth is flat, the stars control our destinies, etc. Talk of reaching everyone seems like a distraction. The real issue is that if 30-60% of the population thinks climate change is bunk, there's no way to make them care with carrots and sticks because opposing them becomes politically difficult. The only people who need to understand the "public policy questions", in a world where public policy is set up as law, are the legislators (the "game designers"). This is simply an argument for better-educated legislators, not a better-educated populace. I don't think this is true at all. Legislators do not have absolute freedom to legislate, even on topics for which the public is ignorant. Such topics can be demagogued which means that they're politically toxic to legislators, even for legislators that understand the issues completely. If I'm a legislator who is convinced that climate change is a huge problem but I also know that most of my constituents don't believe that, then I'd better not vote for a carbon tax or else I'll lose the next election. Those incentives remain true no matter how much I understand the public policy. It is true that we don't need everyone to fully understand all public policy, but we do need a decent fraction of the population to understand the big issues well enough to make addressing them politically feasible.

derefr 16y ago

If there's something everyone needs to do, no amount of education will saturate the population to the point that everyone required to do it, does it. Some people just don't care outside of the here and now, unless they're made to care with a carrot or a stick. You need to have a law either punishing them for not doing it, or rewarding them for doing it (i.e. carbon-neutral business tax credits) for them to pay attention. (And even then, some people still won't care, or will willfully skirt the law. Hopefully this number will be negligible enough to allow the law to still have its intended effect.) Don't think of it as a big, scary, nebulous concept like "justice", though. Call it what it is: game design. The body of law is the game that every citizen of a country is always playing, and like any game, you can encourage paths to be followed, and choices to be made, by putting variable-scheduled rewards and increasing "justified" challenges along those paths. The only people who need to understand the "public policy questions", in a world where public policy is set up as law, are the legislators (the "game designers"). This is simply an argument for better-educated legislators, not a better-educated populace.

anthonyb 16y ago
Except that we live in a democracy, where people vote for the legislators who they think will do the better job. When the populace believe in stupid things, you'll get legislators who pander to that, while ignoring the important stuff.
- derefr 16y ago
  Sort of. We don't vote for legislators based on their beliefs or knowledge-bases, we vote for legislators based on a combination of status moves, group affiliations, and physical characteristics that have more in common with mate selection than anything else. What legislators pander to while looking to get elected, has little to do with what laws they end up actually passing. There's no real correlation between what the populace believes, and what its elected representatives believe. (Well, there would be if we were all purely rational beings who hadn't invented lying and adhered to Aumann's agreement theorem...) In algorithmic terms—this isn't a hill-climbing heuristic, where you'll eventually optimize toward politicians that believe something in particular; it's a random search.
  - anthonyb 16y ago
    Not true. Here in Australia, our Prime Minister just got the boot, in part because he backed down over an emissions trading scheme and lost popular support. So it's not entirely random, although there's also internal power-broking and lobbying from third parties like the mining sector to blame.
  - MichaelSalib 16y ago
    There's no real correlation between what the populace believes, and what its elected representatives believe. Maybe, maybe not. But there is a very real correlation between what the populace believes and what laws legislators can vote for without ruining their chances for reelection. Legislators who vote for things that the majority of their constituents find to be completely absurd tend not to be reelected.
MichaelSalib 16y ago
I don't think this is something that "everyone needs to do"...I mean, there will always be substantial numbers of people who believe the earth is flat, the stars control our destinies, etc. Talk of reaching everyone seems like a distraction. The real issue is that if 30-60% of the population thinks climate change is bunk, there's no way to make them care with carrots and sticks because opposing them becomes politically difficult. The only people who need to understand the "public policy questions", in a world where public policy is set up as law, are the legislators (the "game designers"). This is simply an argument for better-educated legislators, not a better-educated populace. I don't think this is true at all. Legislators do not have absolute freedom to legislate, even on topics for which the public is ignorant. Such topics can be demagogued which means that they're politically toxic to legislators, even for legislators that understand the issues completely. If I'm a legislator who is convinced that climate change is a huge problem but I also know that most of my constituents don't believe that, then I'd better not vote for a carbon tax or else I'll lose the next election. Those incentives remain true no matter how much I understand the public policy. It is true that we don't need everyone to fully understand all public policy, but we do need a decent fraction of the population to understand the big issues well enough to make addressing them politically feasible.