6 ms·

If science is truly what you describe, then it has no place in the making of public policy. Never again.

eli_gottlieb 6y ago
Never again should public policy be made subject to uncertainty? I may have some bad news for you about the human condition.
- pjkundert 6y ago
  Uncertainty is always going to be a problem, and (if history is any guide), allowing free peoples to self-organize and make individual/community decisions about how to live has worked out the best. Having a few elites (or a strident majority) make decisions for everyone else has turned out ... less good. The worst outcomes tend to arrive when these groups shield themselves from evidence-based reality (usually by forcibly stripping liberty and wealth from their unfortunate subjects and inferiors), to temporarily suspend them experiencing the results of their actions. There's alot of that going around, presently. Good luck with all that!
- guscost 6y ago
  Never again should we allow people to pretend that their favorite brand of uncertainty deserves special accommodation.
  - whywhywhynot 6y ago
    What an insane statement. This is literally everything that politicians do: advocate for what they think is best based on our collective lack of understanding of science/economics/relations etc
    - guscost 6y ago
      I don’t think you understand. The “people” in my statement are not politicians, they are charlatans, whining whenever their uncertain theories are not used by politicians to dictate how everyone must behave, which according to some mental gymnastics ought to happen because their theories are dressed up in an outdated notion of “science”. It is pernicious fascist bullshit, but thankfully it will fail.
    - dang 6y ago
      Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here? Note these two: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pacala 6y ago
  We already know quite a bit about the world. Unclear why should we reach out into the fog of unknown for some cutting edge unproven state-of-the-art system, when there are quite a bit of well established and widely agreed upon known ones that can get us 90% of the way there, with much lower risks of catastrophic failure. Case in point: covid19 policies inadvertently triggering the mega-depression of 2020 and beyond, for what appears to be relatively minor medical gains in the big picture. How bad can you botch it if it takes 5 months to come up with 'masks are good, perhaps, more research is needed' from a peer reviewed source, when even a 14 year old could have been told you that's rather a good idea all the way back in January. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext?utm_campaign=tlcoronavirus20&utm_content=130650663&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&hss_channel=tw-27013292 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
dang 6y ago
You may have a good point, but this is a bad HN comment. For it to be a good HN comment you'd have to develop the point (1) in more detail, (2) with more explanation, and (3) without denunciatory rhetoric. If you were to do that, I'd be interested in reading it. To post like this is against your interest because, to the extent that readers can tell what you're saying, they'll just be turned against it by the grandiosity and indignation. Those commodities are much too cheap on the internet. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- guscost 6y ago
  Thank you for the feedback (and for all the moderation work). It can be hard to detach and focus on the “purely informational” substance of an argument, but you are right that that is pretty much always for the best. This is going to sound like such a HN cliche, but if there was a good way to convey emotion as independent metadata instead, I’d try to use that. And to clarify my comment, I’m frustrated to see so much of our public discourse still rely on appeals to authority, even when we’re talking about claims that are fundamentally impossible to validate. Authority figures are proving to be nearly-as-bad at navigating these difficult topics as the rest of us, but it seems that to do any better, the public would need to understand the actual ideas being discussed, which seems a long way off (I don’t even hear this mentioned as a possible goal). So for now we are left with a choice between trusting what is essentially an order of clerics, empowering another authority that won’t do much better (regular old politics), or mob rule. I have to go with the second option, but it is not much better than the others, at best.

Never again should public policy be made subject to uncertainty? I may have some bad news for you about the human condition.

pjkundert 6y ago
Uncertainty is always going to be a problem, and (if history is any guide), allowing free peoples to self-organize and make individual/community decisions about how to live has worked out the best. Having a few elites (or a strident majority) make decisions for everyone else has turned out ... less good. The worst outcomes tend to arrive when these groups shield themselves from evidence-based reality (usually by forcibly stripping liberty and wealth from their unfortunate subjects and inferiors), to temporarily suspend them experiencing the results of their actions. There's alot of that going around, presently. Good luck with all that!
guscost 6y ago
Never again should we allow people to pretend that their favorite brand of uncertainty deserves special accommodation.
- whywhywhynot 6y ago
  What an insane statement. This is literally everything that politicians do: advocate for what they think is best based on our collective lack of understanding of science/economics/relations etc
  - guscost 6y ago
    I don’t think you understand. The “people” in my statement are not politicians, they are charlatans, whining whenever their uncertain theories are not used by politicians to dictate how everyone must behave, which according to some mental gymnastics ought to happen because their theories are dressed up in an outdated notion of “science”. It is pernicious fascist bullshit, but thankfully it will fail.
  - dang 6y ago
    Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules when posting here? Note these two: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
pacala 6y ago
We already know quite a bit about the world. Unclear why should we reach out into the fog of unknown for some cutting edge unproven state-of-the-art system, when there are quite a bit of well established and widely agreed upon known ones that can get us 90% of the way there, with much lower risks of catastrophic failure. Case in point: covid19 policies inadvertently triggering the mega-depression of 2020 and beyond, for what appears to be relatively minor medical gains in the big picture. How bad can you botch it if it takes 5 months to come up with 'masks are good, perhaps, more research is needed' from a peer reviewed source, when even a 14 year old could have been told you that's rather a good idea all the way back in January. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31142-9/fulltext?utm_campaign=tlcoronavirus20&utm_content=130650663&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&hss_channel=tw-27013292 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

dang 6y ago

You may have a good point, but this is a bad HN comment. For it to be a good HN comment you'd have to develop the point (1) in more detail, (2) with more explanation, and (3) without denunciatory rhetoric. If you were to do that, I'd be interested in reading it. To post like this is against your interest because, to the extent that readers can tell what you're saying, they'll just be turned against it by the grandiosity and indignation. Those commodities are much too cheap on the internet. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

guscost 6y ago
Thank you for the feedback (and for all the moderation work). It can be hard to detach and focus on the “purely informational” substance of an argument, but you are right that that is pretty much always for the best. This is going to sound like such a HN cliche, but if there was a good way to convey emotion as independent metadata instead, I’d try to use that. And to clarify my comment, I’m frustrated to see so much of our public discourse still rely on appeals to authority, even when we’re talking about claims that are fundamentally impossible to validate. Authority figures are proving to be nearly-as-bad at navigating these difficult topics as the rest of us, but it seems that to do any better, the public would need to understand the actual ideas being discussed, which seems a long way off (I don’t even hear this mentioned as a possible goal). So for now we are left with a choice between trusting what is essentially an order of clerics, empowering another authority that won’t do much better (regular old politics), or mob rule. I have to go with the second option, but it is not much better than the others, at best.