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To be fair I think being a good politician requires a lot of competency. Way more than we have available. Not unlike software, the field is riddled with people

To be fair I think being a good politician requires a lot of competency. Way more than we have available. Not unlike software, the field is riddled with people that do a minimally-OK job, but couldn't actually care less about what they are doing or are so incompetent they cannot even see it. In a soft setting you can get really far like that. Tech usually stops you sooner, because things just don't work if you mess up. Social settings don't share that property. I don't disagree with your general point that technical competency is a really, really good idea, but I don't share the I guess cynism. Lots of people don't have the capabilities of their subordinates and that doesn't stop them from being effective leaders. The leaders we look at are just incompetent. It's the job. It sucks. Nobody that is actually good would want to do it. It ends your life. Edit: it also doesn't help that these leaders are chosen either directly or indirectly by people - the general public - that have no idea what the job actually entails. To become a politician you have to endure the political equivalent of a modern code interview - being "popular" - without actually testing if you can do the actual job and have the required levels of competency for it.

Aromasin 4y ago
I don't think "leaders" need to be SME's by any stretch of the imagination. If anything, I think it would hold them back because it's easy to lose yourself in the details. I do think that they should have a basic grasp of the fundamentals of their field though, and most politicians honestly don't even have that. I don't want to put up walls to being a back-bencher MP, but there should be a bare-minimum barrier for entry for certain Ministerial positions, especially one like Technology minister. You can't have someone leading a team who needs every-single-concept dumbed down for them so they can only make decisions from basic abstractions.
iso1631 4y ago
> The leaders we look at are just incompetent. I think the problem with democracy is we ultimately interview and select leaders whos skills are in persuading a population, but we don't generally need those leaders to actually take the job, we need people who are good at distilling information and making appropriate judgements for the benefit of the population

Aromasin 4y ago

I don't think "leaders" need to be SME's by any stretch of the imagination. If anything, I think it would hold them back because it's easy to lose yourself in the details. I do think that they should have a basic grasp of the fundamentals of their field though, and most politicians honestly don't even have that. I don't want to put up walls to being a back-bencher MP, but there should be a bare-minimum barrier for entry for certain Ministerial positions, especially one like Technology minister. You can't have someone leading a team who needs every-single-concept dumbed down for them so they can only make decisions from basic abstractions.

iso1631 4y ago

> The leaders we look at are just incompetent. I think the problem with democracy is we ultimately interview and select leaders whos skills are in persuading a population, but we don't generally need those leaders to actually take the job, we need people who are good at distilling information and making appropriate judgements for the benefit of the population