8 ms·

The Largest Number of Scientists in Modern U.S. Is Running for Office in 2018

114 points by ericdanielski 9y ago

nonbel 9y ago
Be careful, there are lots of people passing themselves off as scientists who aren't these days. It is all over the place. From medical research where they call people who try to check the data analysis "parasites"[1], to psychology where they call people who do replications "bullies"[2], to physics where they want to get rid of the need for evidence altogether[3]. [1] http://researchparasite.com/ http://researchparasite.com/ [2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/07/replication_controversy_in_psychology_bullying_file_drawer_effect_blog_posts.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201... [3] https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-and-philosophers-debate-the-boundaries-of-science-20151216/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-and-philosophers-d...
- superioritycplx 9y ago
  Bill Nye and Degrasse Tyson come to mind.
  - mc32 9y ago
    Bill Nye is a science "presenter". I think he was a mech eng at Boeing. Degasse Tyson is a trained scientist but has a tendency to espouse opinions on subjects he's not an expert in, but with the authority of his professional background.
    - dmead 9y ago
      They both use the term Carl Sagan used. "Science communicator"
      - noobermin 9y ago
        I'll be frank, if supposed "actual scientists" were better at science communication, may be there wouldn't be a need for "science communicators." I say this as an actual scientist who mostly dislikes communication. I'm happy there are communicators out there that raise our profile a little, I don't feel jealous or spiteful for some reason towards them.
        tincholio 9y ago
        I think you're mistaking "communication" for "vulgarization". Most decent scientists are good at communicating their findings via publications. Making those findings understandable by laypeople, maybe not so much.
    - starik36 9y ago
      Your statement about Tyson implies that he isn't allowed to talk about anything other than the topic of his PhD defense.
      - mc32 9y ago
        No, that's not what I mean. Of course he like everyone else can have an opinion on anything they want to opine on. What I'm saying is because of his background, that offers him imprimatur on things which he's not an expert but people will presume that because he's an expert elsewhere he's opinion in other areas are equally valid.
- jtmarmon 9y ago
  That parasite website is so weird. It sounds so negative, like a piece of satire, but then you read the actual text and it sounds like a serious award whose goal is to encourage rigor in scientific research. Whose stupid idea was it to call it the Parasite Award
  - tw1010 9y ago
    Maybe natural scientists are more accustomed to using the strict, cold, definitions of biological concepts without being emotionally influenced by any cultural value judgement attached to them.
    - Avshalom 9y ago
      Good thing we live in a strict cold culture-less world then.
      - tw1010 9y ago
        I think it's too much to ask to expect every little scientific niche, every subculture, to have to adapt their local personalized context-aware terminology to the global culture, just because a random person coming from outside the niche might be confused by their language. It's like demanding that no part of a public speech should be able to shine a poor light on the speaker when a substring of it is taken out of context. It's an unnecessarily harsh constraint.
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    The name is tongue in cheek. It's taken from a NEJM editorial that attempted to negatively characterize people who just analyze data without doing the grunt work of collecting it as "research parasites". (Obviously the editorial is gesturing at a real problem: that by unbundling data collection and analysis and, as is unfortunately typical, only giving credit to the result of analysis, there could be a dearth of data collection from lack of incentive. But characterizing pure analysis negatively is obviously the wrong response.)
- Quanttek 9y ago
  I would then ask: "what is science?", "who defines it?", "who is science?" Readiing the last article you linked, it seems like a legitimate debate about the scientific method and what constitutes scientific theories. Every scientists (but especially "science fans") need to acknowledge the fact that all science rests on certain axioms (partially laid out in the scientific method) that can't be proven by science. So going with the newest developments in the philosophy of science, the people developing science itself, seems only reasonable. What you call "getting rid of evidence" is only the exploration of other types of evidence aside from classical empirical evidence
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    Up until this weird new thing where people want to dream up models and not worry about empiricism, "science" has always been characterized by the fact that you can strip out all the dependence on philosophy and reduce it to statements about procedures and algorithms. Every metaphysics has to reckon with our ability to act in the world, but they don't all have to include particular statements about the ontology of (say) numbers. As a result, statements about similarities between processes (for example the way counting in your head, a neurochemical process, is similar to putting stones in a bucket, a mechanical process) can be "independent" of the underlying ontological model. After all, whatever "similarity," means on the inside, those processes are "similar." In a sense, it's similar to how mathematicians write proofs in natural-ish language and call them true under the idea that they could convert them to purely formal symbolic manipulations if they wanted to put in the effort. Scientists talk about things as if they had all kinds of ontological statuses that they can't be shown to have - (ever heard a chemist describe electrons as "wanting" to occupy the lowest energy state?) - but that's nothing but language. The only reason any of it works is because you could cut out all of the weird stuff if you really wanted to.
    - roenxi 9y ago
      I can't quite tell if I agree with you; so I shall attach this opinion. Science is characterised by being able to strip everything out of it down to a procedure to gather data and some guesses at how future data will look. Taking gravity as the classic example, in theory any person with any set of biases can put together a table with column A being mass and column B being distance to the ground and column C being time to fall the distance. From that, they could reconstruct Newton's Laws of Gravity if they measure everything carefully enough and are honest. Maybe the theory they come up with is F = g m / r^2 and the mechanism is tiny goblins. Cool. They can call that science as long as the goblins will always follow the rules. But the rules of evidence are very important, we can't claim the goblins are going to do something differently sometimes if we haven't observed it in the data. The data is the science. The formula and mechanisms are useful, but they are inevitably wrong in detail. Gravity isn't ever going to be the only effect measured in a data set, so no data set can ever perfectly confirm a theory correct, and certainly cannot confirm a mechanism. We don't need to rely on the scientists getting the mechanisms right. But we do need science to have a very high standard of measurement. It would help if they hold themselves back from coming up with crazy theories, but I don't know what a crazy theory looks like so I'm not going to try and police that today.
- rsuelzer 9y ago
  " to physics where they want to get rid of the need for evidence altogether[3]." Don't pick on string theorists...
- helthanatos 9y ago
  Is your main argument there Bill Nye. If it isn't, it should be.
- tzs 9y ago
  > to physics where they want to get rid of the need for evidence altogether[3] I don't see how you got that from the article you cited. Take string theory. It was created to unify gravity and quantum mechanics. Afterwards it was found that it also could correctly solve problems from several other areas of physics outside of the unification of gravity and QM. It had not been designed to solve those. That came out of it unexpectedly. If the existence of those problems had happened to have been discovered after string theory instead of before, they would have been testable predictions of string theory that it would pass, and would count as evidence for string theory. It seems ridiculous to disqualify them from being evidence for string theory just because of the historical accident that they happened to have been discovered earlier.
  - nonbel 9y ago
    This is what it says: >"Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them." Your position seems to be different from that described in the article. Anyway, post-dicting is not as impressive as pre-dicting. How much less impressive is determined by the flexibility of the model. My understanding is that the string-theory/multiverse model is extremely flexible.
    - tzs 9y ago
      Your quote is coming from some people quoted early in the article (around paragraph 5). My position is based on quotes quite a ways farther into the article, from people who are disagreeing with the earlier quoted people.
microcolonel 9y ago
> President Donald Trump has yet to name a science adviser, leading some to declare that Fox News is filling the position. This is petty drivel, from the pointless and nonsensical jabs, to the bizarre assumption that PhDs make better politicians.
- tsomctl 9y ago
  I don't think it's bizarre to assume that a PhD is best to be a science adviser.
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    Only in the sense that PhDs are often extremely specialized. They are experts in one field, not general-purpose "science" experts. It may not be immediately clear why someone with the most advanced knowledge in the world on an esoteric organism in Indonesia would be a good advisor to the President. A PhD functioning as an advisor does have valuable experience that would help them understand how some desired research needs to get done, or discern whether a particular study is quality or junk, or be able to communicate effectively in an environment full of technical jargon. Indeed, those are the characteristics that are really needed - but those are merely qualities that are hopefully picked up on the way to a PhD, not the research project which the PhD certifies.
    - soVeryTired 9y ago
      A PhD alone wouldn't necessarily make a good scientific advisor, but someone who came from a high-level position in a university might. Beyond a certain level, scientists become managers rather than practitioners. The successful ones have insight into the process of raising funds, the politics of large-scale research facilities, and sometimes the process of major international collaboration. Discerning whether a given study is junk probably doesn't fall under the remit of Science Advisor. That's more of a tactical issue that would be delegated to a specialist policy wonk.
  - microcolonel 9y ago
    I don't think I said that. The article is about "scientists" running for political office, not applying as advisors.
mc32 9y ago
Many current congress members are lawyers and physicians. I welcome additional people with backgrounds demanding rigor. For example, in SF we have policies to help the homeless, but often fail to live up to their expectations. Politicians push through feel good measures that aren't based on rigorous studies. Npr will often cite some idea based on a small study somewhere which hasn't been replicated elsewhere. Maybe technologists will require more rigor than we now do.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Quanttek 9y ago
  Why would technologists do that? Especially in those circles there's an incredible belief in easy solutions (i.e. technological solutions). For your homeless problem sociologists and anthropologists would probably be most appropriate
starpilot 9y ago
Is this a good thing? Governing is at its essence people management, and the best scientists don't always make the best managers. They may not be persuasive enough to rally others to their cause, or see the importance in doing so, or understand the give-and-take of politics, just the crusade for "truth." A scientist may be better and smarter, but impotent and walked over if he can't actually do politics with other messy humans. > I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.
- radicaldreamer 9y ago
  You're making a lot of assumptions and leveraging old stereotypes. There "seem" to be plenty of great managers, department heads, professors who are in charge of large programs with many stakeholders etc. The stereotype of the aloof scientist who's unable to connect with people really needs to go away imo.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  I think it's a good thing. Just because scientists are running doesn't mean they'll be elected, meaning it will weed out the people who can't manage, especially over time. A larger pool of potential elected officials means that the government is more likely to reflect the people. Plus, having these smart-yet-non-politicians available for election would be very good for times when trust in typical politicians is faded.
- dieterrams 9y ago
  Well, "scientists" isn't a uniform population in terms of people management skills, and scientists who self-select to run for office are already in one important way outside of the norm for that population. So while it makes sense not to assume someone would make a good politician just because they're a scientist, it doesn't make sense to assume a scientist who runs for office will necessarily make for a poor politician.
- cvsh 9y ago
  As we have seen in recent elections, replacing politicians with non-politicians has been a disaster for the country. Why is a scientist running better than a science-aware politician running?
legionof7 9y ago
This could go really well or really badly. Scientists are good for making good scientific decisions, but they might (probably?) not be the best at managing a country. I think the best thing would be more people with political experience to run with the position of having lots of scientists as advisors.
- superquest 9y ago
  They also might be bad at politics.
  - fermienrico 9y ago
    What is the supporting evidence of “scientists are bad politicians?” I am genuinely curious.
    - superquest 9y ago
      Scientists generally pursue truth whereas politicians spend most of their time pursuing power by building a constituency, trying to get and stay elected, raising money, etc. And I'm not saying "scientists are bad politicians". I'm saying what the two groups do don't overlap a ton. For a gross example, most scientists will have to learn to lie to be good politicians, because all good politicians play fast and loose with the truth.
- fermienrico 9y ago
  This is such a cliche criticism of scientists running for public office and frankly I’m tired of it as it detracts from the fundamental truth. There is no reason why scientists cannot run for public office. Reason, logic and strategic thinking is what we need - doesn’t matter if it’s a scientist, engineer or an accountant. Compared to the shit we have today, this would be a huge step forward. Plenty of scientists have leadership and political skills. It’s not like scientists are just completely incapable of dealing with people - that is the cliche and we need to objectively think about this.
  - 9y ago
RickJWag 9y ago
Highly politicized article. If it were balanced, there should be some mention of medical scientists who have concerns for humans in development. Science has made tremendous progress in this area, but they are not covered in the media often.
SapphireSun 9y ago
Scientists are running because they feel their class interests are being threatened. Typically, scientists are apolitical because they feel they get more benefits by maintaining the status quo (e.g. military and civil funding). In the face of a bald attack on the EPA and climate science, scientists are attempting to show class solidarity. Unfortunately, many of the problems we have are not technical problems, but are clashes between left and right. The favored positions of both sides have long been established. Science will help implement an ideological solution, but will not replace ideology. To the extent that the scientists running are leftists compared with centrist democrats, this will be somewhat significant. However, I suspect that many established scientists are ignorant of politics and see the current struggle as some kind of surface level fact vs fiction debate. They will be disappointed.
rhino369 9y ago
Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover were the two engineer POTUS's. Take from that what you may.
- fermienrico 9y ago
  It bothers me so much that 2-4 years of taking classes about how nature works classifies you as this generic category of people as “Engineers” and they’re considered as not capable of running for the office. The emphasis we give to our education background is so very unfair. I am trained as a mechanical engineer but I write low level C++ programs for embedded electronics. In fact I’ve done that for more than 6 years which is longer than what it took to get a ME degree. It is complete and utter bullshit that mere 4 years of your life defines your entire character for 40 years that follow. Let me put it another way: If two people are age 50 have been in public office for 36 years, one with a political science degree and the other with an engineer’s degree - does it really matter?
- moonka 9y ago
  Wasn't Carter a submariner followed by peanut farming?
  - rhino369 9y ago
    Nuclear submariner.
    - Turing_Machine 9y ago
      As one of his duties, he personally entered a melted-down experimental reactor as part of the team that disassembled the damaged core.
adamsvystun 9y ago
Define scientists...
mobilefriendly 9y ago
This is nasty business, the turning of "science" into a partisan wedge issue. After all, no need to debate if you can just call someone "anti-science". There's no significant difference in the number of STEM candidates this cycle, this is fake news stuff generated by a left-of-center advocacy group and HuffPo.
- sergiotapia 9y ago
  "Settled science" has become a curse word to me. "Science" used to be a method, now it's a belief system in the first world. It's disgusting.
  - merpnderp 9y ago
    It used to be fun sport on Facebook to kid those who followed "I fucking love science" for not having the first clue about science. But as science became more and more a partisan word, it just became sad - the birth of a new religion who's adherents didn't even care to learn their new dogma.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - Turing_Machine 9y ago
    It's not even consistent. The people who are convinced that global warming is going to kill us all (because science) are generally the same people who go into hysterics over nuclear power and GMOs, despite the fact that the science tells us that both of those are quite safe.
    - rmrfrmrf 9y ago
      "Science" doesn't say either of those things are safe. Studies (often paid for by the companies trying to sell the technique) say that the core concepts and techniques are safe. The problem is that side-effects are left out of scope of the study. Hence, the environmental impacts of both are swept under the rug.
merpnderp 9y ago
A lot of atrocities of the 20th century were purposefully committed in the name of science and progress, claiming over a hundred million lives. I much prefer candidates who care more about ethics the rights of individuals over those who's primary concern is the scientific method. [EDIT] As a modern example, John Holdren wrote in a 1977 book, Ecoscience, that forced abortions and mass sterilizations were required to save the planet. Being a good enough scientist to become appointed president Obama's scientific advisor, doesn't mean you can't easily rationalize atrocities on a wide scale.
stryk 9y ago
No doubt we need to get rid of the climate change/global warming/call-it-what-u-want deniers, and the outright false information being disseminated without batting an eyelash is pure insanity, but I still have to wonder if folks who have spent their lives in academia are compatible with government? It is possible to swing the needle too far in the opposite direction and end up with just as many problems.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  Ha! The overwhelming majority of congressmen and senators are lawyers or businessmen. The number of scientists, between both chambers, is in the low single digits. https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R44762.html#_Toc498356618 https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R44762.html#_Toc49835... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2013/01/17/an-awesome-diagram-of-the-113th-congress/?utm_term=.9328c871a4d8 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2013/01/17/an... I don't think we're remotely close to "swinging the needle too far in the opposite direction"...
  - stryk 9y ago
    All I'm saying is, academia and government are 2 different ballgames -- I'm sure there are lots of similarities, but the stakes are on 2 vastly different levels. I'm not saying having scientists in the government would be bad, to the contrary -- right now that's what we need. But replace all the lawyers and businessmen in government right now with professors and administrators from academia and we would still have lots of issues.
    - heurist 9y ago
      I doubt the bureaucracies of academia and government are all that different at their cores.
gaius 9y ago
Wasn’t this an episode of The Simpsons?
rsuelzer 9y ago
I worked on the special election campaign for Bill Foster (D-Il). Seeing him win was one of the most memorable moments of the last decade for me.
heisenbit 9y ago
Here in Germany we literally have a nuclear scientist running the government and frankly politics have become a bit boring. Now that may be a good in a way but vision is not really her thing.
- heurist 9y ago
  I'd be happy to loan you the current US president if you'd like to inject some excitement..
  - gremlinsinc 9y ago
    Wait.. is that an option? We can pawn him off on other countries?
    - ocschwar 9y ago
      Worth a try. Please, Frau Merkel, come to America and bore us. Please.
- im_down_w_otp 9y ago
  Doesn't that allow you to treat your government as infrastructure and your culture as your source of vision though? Granted I don't live there, but that sounds appealing to me. A boring, efficient, and well-run government would be like giving your society a great COO. Which then opens up the possibility for the people of the society to be their own visionary CEO.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- gremlinsinc 9y ago
  Here in the USA we have an entire congress, whitehouse staffed by religious fanatics.. Our President is a womanizing fool who treats nobody with respect at all, and is probably going to start world war 3.... I'll take boring any day of the week... Germany also seems to have better quality of life for low to middle class people than USA...
badcede 9y ago
"The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook." http://orwell.ru/library/articles/science/english/e_scien http://orwell.ru/library/articles/science/english/e_scien

114 points by ericdanielski 9y ago

Be careful, there are lots of people passing themselves off as scientists who aren't these days. It is all over the place. From medical research where they call people who try to check the data analysis "parasites"[1], to psychology where they call people who do replications "bullies"[2], to physics where they want to get rid of the need for evidence altogether[3]. [1] http://researchparasite.com/ http://researchparasite.com/ [2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/07/replication_controversy_in_psychology_bullying_file_drawer_effect_blog_posts.html http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201... [3] https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-and-philosophers-debate-the-boundaries-of-science-20151216/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-and-philosophers-d...

superioritycplx 9y ago
Bill Nye and Degrasse Tyson come to mind.
- mc32 9y ago
  Bill Nye is a science "presenter". I think he was a mech eng at Boeing. Degasse Tyson is a trained scientist but has a tendency to espouse opinions on subjects he's not an expert in, but with the authority of his professional background.
  - dmead 9y ago
    They both use the term Carl Sagan used. "Science communicator"
    - noobermin 9y ago
      I'll be frank, if supposed "actual scientists" were better at science communication, may be there wouldn't be a need for "science communicators." I say this as an actual scientist who mostly dislikes communication. I'm happy there are communicators out there that raise our profile a little, I don't feel jealous or spiteful for some reason towards them.
      - tincholio 9y ago
        I think you're mistaking "communication" for "vulgarization". Most decent scientists are good at communicating their findings via publications. Making those findings understandable by laypeople, maybe not so much.
  - starik36 9y ago
    Your statement about Tyson implies that he isn't allowed to talk about anything other than the topic of his PhD defense.
    - mc32 9y ago
      No, that's not what I mean. Of course he like everyone else can have an opinion on anything they want to opine on. What I'm saying is because of his background, that offers him imprimatur on things which he's not an expert but people will presume that because he's an expert elsewhere he's opinion in other areas are equally valid.
jtmarmon 9y ago
That parasite website is so weird. It sounds so negative, like a piece of satire, but then you read the actual text and it sounds like a serious award whose goal is to encourage rigor in scientific research. Whose stupid idea was it to call it the Parasite Award
- tw1010 9y ago
  Maybe natural scientists are more accustomed to using the strict, cold, definitions of biological concepts without being emotionally influenced by any cultural value judgement attached to them.
  - Avshalom 9y ago
    Good thing we live in a strict cold culture-less world then.
    - tw1010 9y ago
      I think it's too much to ask to expect every little scientific niche, every subculture, to have to adapt their local personalized context-aware terminology to the global culture, just because a random person coming from outside the niche might be confused by their language. It's like demanding that no part of a public speech should be able to shine a poor light on the speaker when a substring of it is taken out of context. It's an unnecessarily harsh constraint.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  The name is tongue in cheek. It's taken from a NEJM editorial that attempted to negatively characterize people who just analyze data without doing the grunt work of collecting it as "research parasites". (Obviously the editorial is gesturing at a real problem: that by unbundling data collection and analysis and, as is unfortunately typical, only giving credit to the result of analysis, there could be a dearth of data collection from lack of incentive. But characterizing pure analysis negatively is obviously the wrong response.)
Quanttek 9y ago
I would then ask: "what is science?", "who defines it?", "who is science?" Readiing the last article you linked, it seems like a legitimate debate about the scientific method and what constitutes scientific theories. Every scientists (but especially "science fans") need to acknowledge the fact that all science rests on certain axioms (partially laid out in the scientific method) that can't be proven by science. So going with the newest developments in the philosophy of science, the people developing science itself, seems only reasonable. What you call "getting rid of evidence" is only the exploration of other types of evidence aside from classical empirical evidence
- whatshisface 9y ago
  Up until this weird new thing where people want to dream up models and not worry about empiricism, "science" has always been characterized by the fact that you can strip out all the dependence on philosophy and reduce it to statements about procedures and algorithms. Every metaphysics has to reckon with our ability to act in the world, but they don't all have to include particular statements about the ontology of (say) numbers. As a result, statements about similarities between processes (for example the way counting in your head, a neurochemical process, is similar to putting stones in a bucket, a mechanical process) can be "independent" of the underlying ontological model. After all, whatever "similarity," means on the inside, those processes are "similar." In a sense, it's similar to how mathematicians write proofs in natural-ish language and call them true under the idea that they could convert them to purely formal symbolic manipulations if they wanted to put in the effort. Scientists talk about things as if they had all kinds of ontological statuses that they can't be shown to have - (ever heard a chemist describe electrons as "wanting" to occupy the lowest energy state?) - but that's nothing but language. The only reason any of it works is because you could cut out all of the weird stuff if you really wanted to.
  - roenxi 9y ago
    I can't quite tell if I agree with you; so I shall attach this opinion. Science is characterised by being able to strip everything out of it down to a procedure to gather data and some guesses at how future data will look. Taking gravity as the classic example, in theory any person with any set of biases can put together a table with column A being mass and column B being distance to the ground and column C being time to fall the distance. From that, they could reconstruct Newton's Laws of Gravity if they measure everything carefully enough and are honest. Maybe the theory they come up with is F = g m / r^2 and the mechanism is tiny goblins. Cool. They can call that science as long as the goblins will always follow the rules. But the rules of evidence are very important, we can't claim the goblins are going to do something differently sometimes if we haven't observed it in the data. The data is the science. The formula and mechanisms are useful, but they are inevitably wrong in detail. Gravity isn't ever going to be the only effect measured in a data set, so no data set can ever perfectly confirm a theory correct, and certainly cannot confirm a mechanism. We don't need to rely on the scientists getting the mechanisms right. But we do need science to have a very high standard of measurement. It would help if they hold themselves back from coming up with crazy theories, but I don't know what a crazy theory looks like so I'm not going to try and police that today.
rsuelzer 9y ago
" to physics where they want to get rid of the need for evidence altogether[3]." Don't pick on string theorists...
helthanatos 9y ago
Is your main argument there Bill Nye. If it isn't, it should be.
tzs 9y ago
> to physics where they want to get rid of the need for evidence altogether[3] I don't see how you got that from the article you cited. Take string theory. It was created to unify gravity and quantum mechanics. Afterwards it was found that it also could correctly solve problems from several other areas of physics outside of the unification of gravity and QM. It had not been designed to solve those. That came out of it unexpectedly. If the existence of those problems had happened to have been discovered after string theory instead of before, they would have been testable predictions of string theory that it would pass, and would count as evidence for string theory. It seems ridiculous to disqualify them from being evidence for string theory just because of the historical accident that they happened to have been discovered earlier.
- nonbel 9y ago
  This is what it says: >"Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them." Your position seems to be different from that described in the article. Anyway, post-dicting is not as impressive as pre-dicting. How much less impressive is determined by the flexibility of the model. My understanding is that the string-theory/multiverse model is extremely flexible.
  - tzs 9y ago
    Your quote is coming from some people quoted early in the article (around paragraph 5). My position is based on quotes quite a ways farther into the article, from people who are disagreeing with the earlier quoted people.

microcolonel 9y ago

> President Donald Trump has yet to name a science adviser, leading some to declare that Fox News is filling the position. This is petty drivel, from the pointless and nonsensical jabs, to the bizarre assumption that PhDs make better politicians.

tsomctl 9y ago
I don't think it's bizarre to assume that a PhD is best to be a science adviser.
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  Only in the sense that PhDs are often extremely specialized. They are experts in one field, not general-purpose "science" experts. It may not be immediately clear why someone with the most advanced knowledge in the world on an esoteric organism in Indonesia would be a good advisor to the President. A PhD functioning as an advisor does have valuable experience that would help them understand how some desired research needs to get done, or discern whether a particular study is quality or junk, or be able to communicate effectively in an environment full of technical jargon. Indeed, those are the characteristics that are really needed - but those are merely qualities that are hopefully picked up on the way to a PhD, not the research project which the PhD certifies.
  - soVeryTired 9y ago
    A PhD alone wouldn't necessarily make a good scientific advisor, but someone who came from a high-level position in a university might. Beyond a certain level, scientists become managers rather than practitioners. The successful ones have insight into the process of raising funds, the politics of large-scale research facilities, and sometimes the process of major international collaboration. Discerning whether a given study is junk probably doesn't fall under the remit of Science Advisor. That's more of a tactical issue that would be delegated to a specialist policy wonk.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  I don't think I said that. The article is about "scientists" running for political office, not applying as advisors.

mc32 9y ago

Many current congress members are lawyers and physicians. I welcome additional people with backgrounds demanding rigor. For example, in SF we have policies to help the homeless, but often fail to live up to their expectations. Politicians push through feel good measures that aren't based on rigorous studies. Npr will often cite some idea based on a small study somewhere which hasn't been replicated elsewhere. Maybe technologists will require more rigor than we now do.

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Quanttek 9y ago
Why would technologists do that? Especially in those circles there's an incredible belief in easy solutions (i.e. technological solutions). For your homeless problem sociologists and anthropologists would probably be most appropriate

starpilot 9y ago

Is this a good thing? Governing is at its essence people management, and the best scientists don't always make the best managers. They may not be persuasive enough to rally others to their cause, or see the importance in doing so, or understand the give-and-take of politics, just the crusade for "truth." A scientist may be better and smarter, but impotent and walked over if he can't actually do politics with other messy humans. > I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.

radicaldreamer 9y ago
You're making a lot of assumptions and leveraging old stereotypes. There "seem" to be plenty of great managers, department heads, professors who are in charge of large programs with many stakeholders etc. The stereotype of the aloof scientist who's unable to connect with people really needs to go away imo.
TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
I think it's a good thing. Just because scientists are running doesn't mean they'll be elected, meaning it will weed out the people who can't manage, especially over time. A larger pool of potential elected officials means that the government is more likely to reflect the people. Plus, having these smart-yet-non-politicians available for election would be very good for times when trust in typical politicians is faded.
dieterrams 9y ago
Well, "scientists" isn't a uniform population in terms of people management skills, and scientists who self-select to run for office are already in one important way outside of the norm for that population. So while it makes sense not to assume someone would make a good politician just because they're a scientist, it doesn't make sense to assume a scientist who runs for office will necessarily make for a poor politician.
cvsh 9y ago
As we have seen in recent elections, replacing politicians with non-politicians has been a disaster for the country. Why is a scientist running better than a science-aware politician running?

legionof7 9y ago

This could go really well or really badly. Scientists are good for making good scientific decisions, but they might (probably?) not be the best at managing a country. I think the best thing would be more people with political experience to run with the position of having lots of scientists as advisors.

superquest 9y ago
They also might be bad at politics.
- fermienrico 9y ago
  What is the supporting evidence of “scientists are bad politicians?” I am genuinely curious.
  - superquest 9y ago
    Scientists generally pursue truth whereas politicians spend most of their time pursuing power by building a constituency, trying to get and stay elected, raising money, etc. And I'm not saying "scientists are bad politicians". I'm saying what the two groups do don't overlap a ton. For a gross example, most scientists will have to learn to lie to be good politicians, because all good politicians play fast and loose with the truth.
fermienrico 9y ago
This is such a cliche criticism of scientists running for public office and frankly I’m tired of it as it detracts from the fundamental truth. There is no reason why scientists cannot run for public office. Reason, logic and strategic thinking is what we need - doesn’t matter if it’s a scientist, engineer or an accountant. Compared to the shit we have today, this would be a huge step forward. Plenty of scientists have leadership and political skills. It’s not like scientists are just completely incapable of dealing with people - that is the cliche and we need to objectively think about this.
- 9y ago

RickJWag 9y ago

Highly politicized article. If it were balanced, there should be some mention of medical scientists who have concerns for humans in development. Science has made tremendous progress in this area, but they are not covered in the media often.

SapphireSun 9y ago

Scientists are running because they feel their class interests are being threatened. Typically, scientists are apolitical because they feel they get more benefits by maintaining the status quo (e.g. military and civil funding). In the face of a bald attack on the EPA and climate science, scientists are attempting to show class solidarity. Unfortunately, many of the problems we have are not technical problems, but are clashes between left and right. The favored positions of both sides have long been established. Science will help implement an ideological solution, but will not replace ideology. To the extent that the scientists running are leftists compared with centrist democrats, this will be somewhat significant. However, I suspect that many established scientists are ignorant of politics and see the current struggle as some kind of surface level fact vs fiction debate. They will be disappointed.

rhino369 9y ago

Jimmy Carter and Herbert Hoover were the two engineer POTUS's. Take from that what you may.

fermienrico 9y ago
It bothers me so much that 2-4 years of taking classes about how nature works classifies you as this generic category of people as “Engineers” and they’re considered as not capable of running for the office. The emphasis we give to our education background is so very unfair. I am trained as a mechanical engineer but I write low level C++ programs for embedded electronics. In fact I’ve done that for more than 6 years which is longer than what it took to get a ME degree. It is complete and utter bullshit that mere 4 years of your life defines your entire character for 40 years that follow. Let me put it another way: If two people are age 50 have been in public office for 36 years, one with a political science degree and the other with an engineer’s degree - does it really matter?
moonka 9y ago
Wasn't Carter a submariner followed by peanut farming?
- rhino369 9y ago
  Nuclear submariner.
  - Turing_Machine 9y ago
    As one of his duties, he personally entered a melted-down experimental reactor as part of the team that disassembled the damaged core.

adamsvystun 9y ago

Define scientists...

mobilefriendly 9y ago

This is nasty business, the turning of "science" into a partisan wedge issue. After all, no need to debate if you can just call someone "anti-science". There's no significant difference in the number of STEM candidates this cycle, this is fake news stuff generated by a left-of-center advocacy group and HuffPo.

sergiotapia 9y ago
"Settled science" has become a curse word to me. "Science" used to be a method, now it's a belief system in the first world. It's disgusting.
- merpnderp 9y ago
  It used to be fun sport on Facebook to kid those who followed "I fucking love science" for not having the first clue about science. But as science became more and more a partisan word, it just became sad - the birth of a new religion who's adherents didn't even care to learn their new dogma.
  - deleted 9y ago
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- Turing_Machine 9y ago
  It's not even consistent. The people who are convinced that global warming is going to kill us all (because science) are generally the same people who go into hysterics over nuclear power and GMOs, despite the fact that the science tells us that both of those are quite safe.
  - rmrfrmrf 9y ago
    "Science" doesn't say either of those things are safe. Studies (often paid for by the companies trying to sell the technique) say that the core concepts and techniques are safe. The problem is that side-effects are left out of scope of the study. Hence, the environmental impacts of both are swept under the rug.

merpnderp 9y ago

A lot of atrocities of the 20th century were purposefully committed in the name of science and progress, claiming over a hundred million lives. I much prefer candidates who care more about ethics the rights of individuals over those who's primary concern is the scientific method. [EDIT] As a modern example, John Holdren wrote in a 1977 book, Ecoscience, that forced abortions and mass sterilizations were required to save the planet. Being a good enough scientist to become appointed president Obama's scientific advisor, doesn't mean you can't easily rationalize atrocities on a wide scale.

stryk 9y ago

No doubt we need to get rid of the climate change/global warming/call-it-what-u-want deniers, and the outright false information being disseminated without batting an eyelash is pure insanity, but I still have to wonder if folks who have spent their lives in academia are compatible with government? It is possible to swing the needle too far in the opposite direction and end up with just as many problems.

jessriedel 9y ago
Ha! The overwhelming majority of congressmen and senators are lawyers or businessmen. The number of scientists, between both chambers, is in the low single digits. https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R44762.html#_Toc498356618 https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R44762.html#_Toc49835... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2013/01/17/an-awesome-diagram-of-the-113th-congress/?utm_term=.9328c871a4d8 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2013/01/17/an... I don't think we're remotely close to "swinging the needle too far in the opposite direction"...
- stryk 9y ago
  All I'm saying is, academia and government are 2 different ballgames -- I'm sure there are lots of similarities, but the stakes are on 2 vastly different levels. I'm not saying having scientists in the government would be bad, to the contrary -- right now that's what we need. But replace all the lawyers and businessmen in government right now with professors and administrators from academia and we would still have lots of issues.
  - heurist 9y ago
    I doubt the bureaucracies of academia and government are all that different at their cores.

gaius 9y ago

Wasn’t this an episode of The Simpsons?

rsuelzer 9y ago

I worked on the special election campaign for Bill Foster (D-Il). Seeing him win was one of the most memorable moments of the last decade for me.

heisenbit 9y ago

Here in Germany we literally have a nuclear scientist running the government and frankly politics have become a bit boring. Now that may be a good in a way but vision is not really her thing.

heurist 9y ago
I'd be happy to loan you the current US president if you'd like to inject some excitement..
- gremlinsinc 9y ago
  Wait.. is that an option? We can pawn him off on other countries?
  - ocschwar 9y ago
    Worth a try. Please, Frau Merkel, come to America and bore us. Please.
im_down_w_otp 9y ago
Doesn't that allow you to treat your government as infrastructure and your culture as your source of vision though? Granted I don't live there, but that sounds appealing to me. A boring, efficient, and well-run government would be like giving your society a great COO. Which then opens up the possibility for the people of the society to be their own visionary CEO.
- deleted 9y ago
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gremlinsinc 9y ago
Here in the USA we have an entire congress, whitehouse staffed by religious fanatics.. Our President is a womanizing fool who treats nobody with respect at all, and is probably going to start world war 3.... I'll take boring any day of the week... Germany also seems to have better quality of life for low to middle class people than USA...

badcede 9y ago

"The fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or sceptical outlook." http://orwell.ru/library/articles/science/english/e_scien http://orwell.ru/library/articles/science/english/e_scien