14 ms·

A science committee that doesn’t get science

184 points by chinmoy 14y ago

fusiongyro 14y ago
This is basically a Daily Show segment from last week with some additional details thrown in.
prawks 14y ago
Articles like this always renew my distaste for discussing politics. There are clear problems with the US's legislative process and elected officials, but there seems to be no way to effectively induce change in them, especially as an individual. Not just riding the science bandwagon here either; partisanship in general, etc. are all incredibly frustrating to discuss, and I'll almost always just stay out of discussions on politics as a result. I'd love to help change these kinds of things, but I don't feel I could give up my job to start some sort of organization against it, nor do I feel such an organization would gain much traction anyhow. Maybe I'm just an a-typical slacktivist. Any suggestions on stifling my feelings of futility? It seems the only way to affect change in this country is to get enough upvotes on reddit (see: SOPA). So I'm upvoting this.
- goostavos 14y ago
  I'm right with you on your slactivism. I like the idea of being very involved in politics, but I just cannot stand (a) listening to politicians, or (b) talking about politics. I just don't have the heart for the current discourse in the country. Every once in awhile, I'll try to go the good citizen route, look into the current issues, and then draw my own conclusion.. but what was all that effort for? I've tried my best to present logical rebuttals to people's points. I try to source only relevant, publicly available government data when possible, but it means nothing. The response I usually get? "Yeah, but.. still.." and then they go back to making their talking point. "But still.." is not a rebuttal, people. I spent several hours investigating the energy policy of the candidates. I pulled a bunch of charts from the EPA, compiled them all into an email, and then gave my armchair analysis of the policy given the available data. I was told that "I'm missing the important issue." So... fuck it. I'll just go back to studying.
  - jessedhillon 14y ago
    IME the role of logic in decision-making has been greatly overemphasized. People need to first be convinced in an emotional/intuitive way, then given logical arguments to support what they are experiencing. The idea that a person -- anyone, not just "dumb people" -- think first about a matter rationally and then act in a matter consistent with logic, is failing to address a huge component of human behavior: people only behave in their rational best interests if/when they are not emotionally invested in the outcome.
    - gmaslov 14y ago
      Well, an obvious way to address this would be to become emotionally invested in acting rationally. It's a pity that so many people aren't.
      - jessedhillon 14y ago
        I'd be writing from the Moon right now if obvious-to-state were the same thing as obvious-to-achieve. Even if we accept your unwarranted assumption that strict rationality is unilaterally superior to experiential and intuitive modes of being, which is not at all a given: how do you propose we induce a widespread emotional investment in living life like a Vulcan, something that runs counter to the instincts of many/most people? Edit: sorry that came out quite jerk-like. Point is, why is rational always better than intuitive, and how could anyone hope to create such a massive emotional investment in an intellectual concept.
  - mikeash 14y ago
    The current US government is mostly atrocious, but I'm convinced that the American people have the government they, or we, collectively deserve. Congress hasn't become horribly dysfunctional and stupid because they've somehow become disconnected from the people. Rather, the electorate has become horribly dysfunctional and stupid, and Congress simply follows along. I think the main problem is that our system is set up so that fringe elements have much more power. Voting happens in the middle of the week and is not an official holiday. Who turns out to vote, then? The people who care most passionately will inevitably show up in much greater numbers than people who are less enthusiastic. Passion is great, all else being equal, but I believe that passion correlates strongly with craziness in the political arena. Primary elections are even worse in this respect, since most people don't care about them, and the result is that you end up with two major ballot choices, both of whom are nuts, because the primaries got decided by the fringes. A lack of term limits means that members of Congress get deeply entrenched, with a result that turnover is not all that high. Why bother voting when the winner is a given anyway? Why bother voting even when the winner isn't a given if it's pretty much a given that the overall structure of power at the national level won't change? And even if that might happen, why bother voting when the other party will just filibuster the shit out of everything anyway? Finally, the Electoral College means that the decision for the top man in government gets decided by, what, maybe 10% of the total population of the country? Presidential candidates concentrate on swing states because they're the only ones that actually count, and that makes the whole business even more fringe. In short, it seems like the whole system is rigged to discourage moderate, sane people from wanting to participate in any meaningful way. I know it works on me. I vote in Presidential elections and midterms, but not enthusiastically. I would never dream of joining a political party, let alone volunteering for one. I hang up on surveys, ignore campaign flyers, and never, ever donate. I haven't even written a letter to my representative in years, after realizing that all it does is generate a mail-merged form response.
- wmeredith 14y ago
  Hands down the best way to affect change in politics is to get involved locally. (e.g. School board, voluntary emergency response services, local PACs etc...) The only thing more powerful than the lobby is true grass roots (not astroturf). And I don't mean voting in gerrymandered districts, I mean true political activism.
- jordanb 14y ago
  I think it's easy to miss the forest for the trees. There are billions of problems with the American system, but if you take a step back you see that, as a whole, it works pretty well -- especially in comparison to the rest of the world. Consider science funding, for instance. Despite the neanderthals on the house committee, US funding is still comparatively extremely generous on a per-capita basis: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0012203?imageURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0012203.g008 http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...
- saraid216 14y ago
  This is Hacker News. Most of us are either entrepreneurs or understand the fundamental thinking behind being entrepreneurial. Surely we can do better than upvoting. If you can't do anything effective as an individual, stop being just an individual. My path has been to develop an idea of what I want government to look like, and then start convincing other people, getting feedback to tweak my vision, and convincing more people. I won't recommend my path, since it's slow and probably will take longer than my lifetime; I have friends who are bootstrapping legislative bodies and know other people who are working on creating better cross-partisan dialogue and so on and so on. Figure out what you want, figure out what it would take, and start climbing. This is a lot like entrepreneurship. Don't sit in your cube and imagine how much better it'd be to be your own boss; get an idea, get a prototype, get a notion of the market, get going.
  - javajosh 14y ago
    Well Jesus, you can't say something like this and then not share your vision! Not an effective strategy.
    - saraid216 14y ago
      /me snickers. I have my whole lifetime to finish writing it out and you want it now? Geez. Such a hurry. Here's what I can give you. You'll see no lasting systemic change until people start growing up understanding the ins and outs of democracy by the age of 15. This does not even happen in the most affluent neighborhoods today. Education focuses on producing workers for the job market, rather than producing citizens for a democratic society. That's what needs to change. An adult graduating from high school needs to be capable of the highest offices of government immediately, even if they don't meet the age qualification. That capability gives them the tools to intelligently engage with their representatives and public servants as equals: as co-governors. Lobbying cannot be the job of an elite minority; it has to be that thing we all do from 4-6pm, after working from 8-4 and before enjoying dinner and leisure from 6-10. Because the capacity to govern is properly distributed, you should see the end of the career politician. Instead, occupying offices should have a higher churn rate as more people run and more people qualify and more people have jobs to return to after their stint in office; the actual electoral result approaches random, negating any effective campaign strategy and thus any influence of money. Instead of campaigning for office, office-holders become facilitators for citizen discussion of policy. Their job is primarily to gather and synthesize, to properly weight authority, and to transparently explain how they determined which policy to adopt. The vote becomes a formality, rather than a nail-biting contest aired on national television. That's what I have right now. It's not much, and it's pretty flimsy, but it's a skeleton to hang my coat on. Enjoy.
- woodchuck64 14y ago
  Partisanship is not the problem, anti-science is the problem. A major political party should not be anti-science and until people who respect science stop voting GOP, this won't get solved.
- eru 14y ago
  Have you considered voting with your feet?
- rayiner 14y ago
  I think the best thing is to cultivate some perspective, and not hold the political system to unrealistically high standards. We live in a 236 year old democracy of 310 million people. Let that sink in. We have more people than there are lines of code in an entire Linux distribution. Think of the complexity of a human being, over a human being's lifetime, versus a line of code. We're an incredibly heterogeneous, diverse country that has never agreed on anything, not even on our founding documents.* We are, by virtue of our post-WWII status, the de-facto political and military leader of the world. We're the world's largest economy. We're the world's reserve currency. We have all of the responsibility that comes with that status. We do not blink twice when we hear of a company like Yahoo (14,000 employees) or Nortel (86,000 employees at peak) becoming unmanageable basket cases. Yet we rail on the President for not getting more done than he does! We forgive Windows for being layers upon tangled layers of bug-for-bug compatible code, but complain endlessly about the complexity of a tax code designed to regulate 300m people acting together in a $15 trillion economy. I am of the opinion that too many people, especially engineers who maybe have a particular love of simplicity, simply expect too much of the country they live in, and as a result become disillusioned with the whole system. It is my opinion that these expectations are unreasonable and counter productive. The fact of the matter is that the US government is a paragon of virtue and efficiency compared to most others. Some of the western European countries may have better governments, but they also have far simpler and more homogenous societies to govern. We certainly have a better government than most any country in Asia. China, which has no particular love of anything American, has spent the last couple of decades trying to model their legal system after America's. Think about that: something that most Americans consider to be a broken part of our society, is a model for a country looking to cement it's place among the world's great societies. So if you're frustrated by the system, take a step back and appreciate the fact that it probably doesn't get any better than it is now. As I've gotten older and this realization has sunk in, I have found politics far more enjoyable. *) The more you learn about the Constitution, the more you realize it's ridiculous to ask "what does the Constitution mean?" The 40 signatories to the Constitution had 40 different opinions about the meaning of the document they were signing!
  - maratd 14y ago
    The more you learn about the Constitution, the more you realize it's ridiculous to ask "what does the Constitution mean?" The 40 signatories to the Constitution had 40 different opinions about the meaning of the document they were signing! And yet, it is the oldest working constitution that still grants rights to its citizens rarely found elsewhere. It has provided for our prosperity for over two centuries. Whatever it means, it means well.
noobplusplus 14y ago
doesn't instead of dosen't
sageikosa 14y ago
What would we do without government committees, and how did we ever survive without them?
- zb 14y ago
  We had kings to make our laws unilaterally without parliamentary scrutiny.
  - sageikosa 14y ago
    Not in the US of A. About 1.75 centuries elapsed between 1776 (when the US said a farewell to kings) and 1958 (when the predecessor committee was established). I guess science in the United States just progressed without non-scientific scrutiny during that time. At least for the topic at hand.
newbie12 14y ago
This post is partisan and too short on supporting facts. The author claims that a couple of goofy public statements by 3 lawmakers mean they don't "get science". That's 3 members on a committee of 40. Also, the scientific debate over climate change is far from settled.
- CountHackulus 14y ago
  How is this partisan? He explicitly calls out both parties.
  - Ntrails 14y ago
    I assume partisan is being used in place of 'heavily biased'. I can see it is a reasonable substitution in most cases. The 'Pure Science' people (similar grouping to the militant atheists) are, like it or not, pretty dismissive of any non scientific opinions and beliefs. This makes many religious people take a very defensive (aggressively so) position on many matters. This is simply a different version of the "two parties facing each other and calling each other dumb" political system. Edit: I could be misreading though
    - tensor 14y ago
      You are correct only in the sense that atheists and science committees are completely dismissive of non scientific opinions. But I take great issue with the rest of your post. This is not a case of two parties calling each other dumb, nor is it the case that positions of science and positions of opinion are equal. Science does not deal in opinions. There are very specific requirements that need to be met for an idea to be considered a scientific theory. Religious ideas by and large do not meet these criteria. There is no such thing as "non-pure science." This is by definition of the term and process. Further, your use of the term "militant atheist" is offensive. You call an atheist "militant" merely because she dares to voice her thoughts? This is what religious individuals due daily in church and other places, yet never are they called militant for it. Worse, religious advertising routinely gets away with suggestions that non-believers will suffer eternally or are otherwise evil or immoral. Such rhetoric is a far cry from a logical discussion of what we actually know that you might find from a typical vocal atheist. Slurs like "militant atheist" are so common you no longer ever recognize them for what they are: insults and a labels intended to marginalize.
tptacek 14y ago
Assignment to the House Science Committee correlates with a -$46,000 drop in fundraising relative to all other committees in the House. Though Science has oversight over important agencies, like NOAA and NASA, they aren't a lobbying target. The result is that the best & brightest in Congress avoid Science, and adverse selection produces the worst possible Committee. What's particularly aggravating about this is that there are agencies properly in the purview of Science & Technology that are lobbyist targets, but that aren't managed by House Science. FCC, for instance, is overseen by House Commerce; DARPA, obviously, is House Defense. The fact of Congress is that if you don't play the game, and get the best committee assignments you can, you lose your seat. Each Congressperson can only have 2 committee assignments. Principled pursuit of the right assignments is thus a bit of a stag hunt.
- fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
  Call me a pessimist. When I see guys like Akin and Broun on a science committee, I assume that it didn't happen by accident, and that they probably have an axe to grind. At best, they may be looking to have their ethics represented on subjects like the ethics or morality of subjects like stem-cell research.
  - protomyth 14y ago
    Some committees collect members that senior leadership do not want on other, more important, committees. You can pretty much tell how low that committee is by the amount of vacant seats. It sounds important to us, but as tptacek points out, much business in this area is handled elsewhere.
  - fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
    It's not an accident. It is exactly what tptacek described. Every other smarter/better representative wanted, and got committees which pay them more. And that forced these losers to end up on the science committee. No accident, but also no "axe grinding" conspiracy. Just simply money.
    - 14y ago
joshuahedlund 14y ago
> They've been put in place when the US is arguably more dependent upon science and technology than at any time since World War II. I could say the US is arguably less dependent upon the government's role in science and technology than at any time since World War II. I honestly don't know if that's true, but it would at least be an interesting discussion (I'm thinking of the transitioning privatization of space exploration, for starters); I don't see that it's clearly obvious either way.
- _delirium 14y ago
  I think operationally this is getting more true, but not as much funding-wise, so intelligent control over appropriations is still important. For example, SpaceX is a private company, but largely publicly financed: government contracts provide the majority of their revenue, since they don't yet have significant private-sector clients. If their NASA contract were cancelled (e.g. because a committee cut that program), they wouldn't be solvent as a company. Also common in the private-sector research world, outside a few big places like MSR that are mainly privately funded. A lot of biotech companies depend on public/private NIH research grants, and the SBIR/STTR programs are also a big source of funds for riskier research in small companies (http://www.sbir.gov/ http://www.sbir.gov/).
- cheeseprocedure 14y ago
  It would be very interesting to see some data on the impact of government-funded blue-sky research (in other words, science that didn't have an obvious short-term commercial application). Intuitively, it seems like such spending would open up new commercial frontiers for the private sector, but I'm not personally aware of specific examples of net payoff.
777466 14y ago
We all know it's an awful situation. But what do you do about it?
- hexagonc 14y ago
  You know, I feel ashamed every time I think this because I know I haven't fully thought it through, but why do we need to share the same country with these bird-brained politicians? I mean, would it really be so bad to let these people secede and have their own country? Yes, there is the argument that we are stronger (in some sense of the word) together than apart, but who really gains from this arrangement? Let them live in their own middle ages like the Taliban and leave everyone else alone.
  - bduerst 14y ago
    Honestly, the solution here would be to give the federal government less control and allow the states to have more control. The states were established so that U.S. citizens could move to the state with the laws that best suited them.
    - bippi 14y ago
      That sounds fantastic, and it's a good thought---but at a certain point we are all interdependent on one-another. Relative to belief in science and global warming, what Arkansas does with its air certainly affects areas outside of Arkansas.
      - cobrausn 14y ago
        That's why we have a federal court system, right? If areas outside of Arkansas have a problem with what Arkansas is doing to their air, they can produce evidence in a court of law and put a stop to it. If the areas outside of Arkansas have a problem with what they teach their students (and it's really that damaging), well, just let a clear winner emerge over time. (Not sure why we're picking on Arkansas)
    - saraid216 14y ago
zerostar07 14y ago
I wonder why people don't see political campaigns as a system ripe for disruption. People are basically voting for their rulers the same way they vote their favorite movie. Kind of scary how anachronistic the election procedures have remained. Certainly a number of actors benefit from it.
- pc86 14y ago
  Because you can't just say "we're going to disrupt the way people campaign/vote/get elected." It is a staggeringly massive government bureaucracy even at the most local levels, and it prevents that kind of change at every point possible. Edit: Not to mention the fact that as much as we like to pretend all politicians and millionaire slime balls, they're working people providing for their families. Very few are going to entertain the idea of running their campaign in an entirely different way because chances are they'll lose their job if they do.
  - zerostar07 14y ago
    I don't see a reason you can't. I believe mass media dominate campaigns because of the sheer amount of money thrown onto them.
    - pc86 14y ago
      > I don't see a reason you can't. I've worked on campaigns professionally from 2002-2010 and I've run local and state races, including my own for borough council and school board. Why can't we change the way campaigns are run? Campaigns would be the easy part to change, but even then it depends what you want to change. Are you talking about new technology? The Romney campaign is doing a decent job of utilizing technology in how they're collecting voter contact results from phones and doors, organizing volunteers and managing fundraisers. Obama did an excellent job as well in 2008, especially compared to the CF that was the McCain campaign. If you want to make changes to the way fundraising works and the influence of money in politics, it will need to be incremental. That isn't something you can just cut off overnight for several reasons, the two biggest being that (A) nothing happens overnight in Congress, and (B) Members of Congress would essentially be shutting down their means of securing re-election. Why can't we change the way people vote? For the same reason a PA court placed an injunction on that state's Voter ID law: you can't deprive an otherwise qualified individual of his or her constitutional right to vote. You want to have internet voting? You better have a plan to give everyone in the country high speed internet access and be prepared for the unrelenting torrent of lawsuits when the server goes down. I'd personally like to see internet voting someday, but you really need to have massive redundancy systems in place and plenty of checks to prevent fraud. What happens if the server is down all day? What about peak traffic? What if the database gets wiped 30 minutes before the end of voting? Anyone who knows about how government contracts are structured knows that would be an IBM and/or Diebold contract in the hundreds of billions. And it still wouldn't work. > I believe mass media dominate campaigns because of the sheer amount of money thrown into them. This statement makes it look like you think one is correlated to the other, which I'm not inclined to agree with. Because there's a lot of money in politics, that somehow means mass media "dominates" campaigns, whatever that means? I'm not sure what your alternative would be aside from information directly from the campaigns themselves (which is almost guaranteed to be skewed, if not incorrect).
Surio 14y ago
Now I've seen everything! !Bang! http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeenItAllSuicide http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeenItAllSuicide
- Surio 14y ago
  Downvotes? I don't believe it. To that title, I now humbly add: A scientific audience that doesn’t get humour!
bicknergseng 14y ago
I just want to point out something I haven't seen anyone else discuss. It's politicians like this who push CISPA or the laws in DC attempting to protect the cab industry from Uber's disruption. While politics seems distant and has totally gone off the deep end these days, this stuff does matter. It helps shape the direction our society decides to take. If everyone in science and tech checks out of politics, politics will move on without and possibly against us. It is unimaginably important for us to continue advocating for science, math, and technology in politics.
Zakharov 14y ago
If you look at this from another angle, it's not so bad. Would anyone be angry if there were three pacifists on the Defence committee? A certain portion of the American population opposes science, and as harmful as that is to the country, a democratic system means they get their say. EDIT: For the record, I wish these people had never been elected, and think the American government should increase science funding significantly. It's not my call, though.
- saraid216 14y ago
  On one hand, you're right. On the other... Well, "representation" is not quite what it sounds like. A representative is, by his office, held to a higher (and different) standard than non-elected non-officials. That's why you can say "I wish these people had never been elected". Effectively, what you're describing here is analogous to a tolerance of intolerance, whereas actual tolerance requires an intolerance of intolerance. The relevant quotation, rather than being "I disagree with what you say, but I would die to defend your right to say it", is instead, "All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others."
tete 14y ago
Officials not grasping reality? As sad as it is, but I think this stops being newsworthy.

184 points by chinmoy 14y ago

This is basically a Daily Show segment from last week with some additional details thrown in.

Articles like this always renew my distaste for discussing politics. There are clear problems with the US's legislative process and elected officials, but there seems to be no way to effectively induce change in them, especially as an individual. Not just riding the science bandwagon here either; partisanship in general, etc. are all incredibly frustrating to discuss, and I'll almost always just stay out of discussions on politics as a result. I'd love to help change these kinds of things, but I don't feel I could give up my job to start some sort of organization against it, nor do I feel such an organization would gain much traction anyhow. Maybe I'm just an a-typical slacktivist. Any suggestions on stifling my feelings of futility? It seems the only way to affect change in this country is to get enough upvotes on reddit (see: SOPA). So I'm upvoting this.

goostavos 14y ago
I'm right with you on your slactivism. I like the idea of being very involved in politics, but I just cannot stand (a) listening to politicians, or (b) talking about politics. I just don't have the heart for the current discourse in the country. Every once in awhile, I'll try to go the good citizen route, look into the current issues, and then draw my own conclusion.. but what was all that effort for? I've tried my best to present logical rebuttals to people's points. I try to source only relevant, publicly available government data when possible, but it means nothing. The response I usually get? "Yeah, but.. still.." and then they go back to making their talking point. "But still.." is not a rebuttal, people. I spent several hours investigating the energy policy of the candidates. I pulled a bunch of charts from the EPA, compiled them all into an email, and then gave my armchair analysis of the policy given the available data. I was told that "I'm missing the important issue." So... fuck it. I'll just go back to studying.
- jessedhillon 14y ago
  IME the role of logic in decision-making has been greatly overemphasized. People need to first be convinced in an emotional/intuitive way, then given logical arguments to support what they are experiencing. The idea that a person -- anyone, not just "dumb people" -- think first about a matter rationally and then act in a matter consistent with logic, is failing to address a huge component of human behavior: people only behave in their rational best interests if/when they are not emotionally invested in the outcome.
  - gmaslov 14y ago
    Well, an obvious way to address this would be to become emotionally invested in acting rationally. It's a pity that so many people aren't.
    - jessedhillon 14y ago
      I'd be writing from the Moon right now if obvious-to-state were the same thing as obvious-to-achieve. Even if we accept your unwarranted assumption that strict rationality is unilaterally superior to experiential and intuitive modes of being, which is not at all a given: how do you propose we induce a widespread emotional investment in living life like a Vulcan, something that runs counter to the instincts of many/most people? Edit: sorry that came out quite jerk-like. Point is, why is rational always better than intuitive, and how could anyone hope to create such a massive emotional investment in an intellectual concept.
- mikeash 14y ago
  The current US government is mostly atrocious, but I'm convinced that the American people have the government they, or we, collectively deserve. Congress hasn't become horribly dysfunctional and stupid because they've somehow become disconnected from the people. Rather, the electorate has become horribly dysfunctional and stupid, and Congress simply follows along. I think the main problem is that our system is set up so that fringe elements have much more power. Voting happens in the middle of the week and is not an official holiday. Who turns out to vote, then? The people who care most passionately will inevitably show up in much greater numbers than people who are less enthusiastic. Passion is great, all else being equal, but I believe that passion correlates strongly with craziness in the political arena. Primary elections are even worse in this respect, since most people don't care about them, and the result is that you end up with two major ballot choices, both of whom are nuts, because the primaries got decided by the fringes. A lack of term limits means that members of Congress get deeply entrenched, with a result that turnover is not all that high. Why bother voting when the winner is a given anyway? Why bother voting even when the winner isn't a given if it's pretty much a given that the overall structure of power at the national level won't change? And even if that might happen, why bother voting when the other party will just filibuster the shit out of everything anyway? Finally, the Electoral College means that the decision for the top man in government gets decided by, what, maybe 10% of the total population of the country? Presidential candidates concentrate on swing states because they're the only ones that actually count, and that makes the whole business even more fringe. In short, it seems like the whole system is rigged to discourage moderate, sane people from wanting to participate in any meaningful way. I know it works on me. I vote in Presidential elections and midterms, but not enthusiastically. I would never dream of joining a political party, let alone volunteering for one. I hang up on surveys, ignore campaign flyers, and never, ever donate. I haven't even written a letter to my representative in years, after realizing that all it does is generate a mail-merged form response.
wmeredith 14y ago
Hands down the best way to affect change in politics is to get involved locally. (e.g. School board, voluntary emergency response services, local PACs etc...) The only thing more powerful than the lobby is true grass roots (not astroturf). And I don't mean voting in gerrymandered districts, I mean true political activism.
jordanb 14y ago
I think it's easy to miss the forest for the trees. There are billions of problems with the American system, but if you take a step back you see that, as a whole, it works pretty well -- especially in comparison to the rest of the world. Consider science funding, for instance. Despite the neanderthals on the house committee, US funding is still comparatively extremely generous on a per-capita basis: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0012203?imageURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0012203.g008 http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...
saraid216 14y ago
This is Hacker News. Most of us are either entrepreneurs or understand the fundamental thinking behind being entrepreneurial. Surely we can do better than upvoting. If you can't do anything effective as an individual, stop being just an individual. My path has been to develop an idea of what I want government to look like, and then start convincing other people, getting feedback to tweak my vision, and convincing more people. I won't recommend my path, since it's slow and probably will take longer than my lifetime; I have friends who are bootstrapping legislative bodies and know other people who are working on creating better cross-partisan dialogue and so on and so on. Figure out what you want, figure out what it would take, and start climbing. This is a lot like entrepreneurship. Don't sit in your cube and imagine how much better it'd be to be your own boss; get an idea, get a prototype, get a notion of the market, get going.
- javajosh 14y ago
  Well Jesus, you can't say something like this and then not share your vision! Not an effective strategy.
  - saraid216 14y ago
    /me snickers. I have my whole lifetime to finish writing it out and you want it now? Geez. Such a hurry. Here's what I can give you. You'll see no lasting systemic change until people start growing up understanding the ins and outs of democracy by the age of 15. This does not even happen in the most affluent neighborhoods today. Education focuses on producing workers for the job market, rather than producing citizens for a democratic society. That's what needs to change. An adult graduating from high school needs to be capable of the highest offices of government immediately, even if they don't meet the age qualification. That capability gives them the tools to intelligently engage with their representatives and public servants as equals: as co-governors. Lobbying cannot be the job of an elite minority; it has to be that thing we all do from 4-6pm, after working from 8-4 and before enjoying dinner and leisure from 6-10. Because the capacity to govern is properly distributed, you should see the end of the career politician. Instead, occupying offices should have a higher churn rate as more people run and more people qualify and more people have jobs to return to after their stint in office; the actual electoral result approaches random, negating any effective campaign strategy and thus any influence of money. Instead of campaigning for office, office-holders become facilitators for citizen discussion of policy. Their job is primarily to gather and synthesize, to properly weight authority, and to transparently explain how they determined which policy to adopt. The vote becomes a formality, rather than a nail-biting contest aired on national television. That's what I have right now. It's not much, and it's pretty flimsy, but it's a skeleton to hang my coat on. Enjoy.
woodchuck64 14y ago
Partisanship is not the problem, anti-science is the problem. A major political party should not be anti-science and until people who respect science stop voting GOP, this won't get solved.
eru 14y ago
Have you considered voting with your feet?
rayiner 14y ago
I think the best thing is to cultivate some perspective, and not hold the political system to unrealistically high standards. We live in a 236 year old democracy of 310 million people. Let that sink in. We have more people than there are lines of code in an entire Linux distribution. Think of the complexity of a human being, over a human being's lifetime, versus a line of code. We're an incredibly heterogeneous, diverse country that has never agreed on anything, not even on our founding documents.* We are, by virtue of our post-WWII status, the de-facto political and military leader of the world. We're the world's largest economy. We're the world's reserve currency. We have all of the responsibility that comes with that status. We do not blink twice when we hear of a company like Yahoo (14,000 employees) or Nortel (86,000 employees at peak) becoming unmanageable basket cases. Yet we rail on the President for not getting more done than he does! We forgive Windows for being layers upon tangled layers of bug-for-bug compatible code, but complain endlessly about the complexity of a tax code designed to regulate 300m people acting together in a $15 trillion economy. I am of the opinion that too many people, especially engineers who maybe have a particular love of simplicity, simply expect too much of the country they live in, and as a result become disillusioned with the whole system. It is my opinion that these expectations are unreasonable and counter productive. The fact of the matter is that the US government is a paragon of virtue and efficiency compared to most others. Some of the western European countries may have better governments, but they also have far simpler and more homogenous societies to govern. We certainly have a better government than most any country in Asia. China, which has no particular love of anything American, has spent the last couple of decades trying to model their legal system after America's. Think about that: something that most Americans consider to be a broken part of our society, is a model for a country looking to cement it's place among the world's great societies. So if you're frustrated by the system, take a step back and appreciate the fact that it probably doesn't get any better than it is now. As I've gotten older and this realization has sunk in, I have found politics far more enjoyable. *) The more you learn about the Constitution, the more you realize it's ridiculous to ask "what does the Constitution mean?" The 40 signatories to the Constitution had 40 different opinions about the meaning of the document they were signing!
- maratd 14y ago
  The more you learn about the Constitution, the more you realize it's ridiculous to ask "what does the Constitution mean?" The 40 signatories to the Constitution had 40 different opinions about the meaning of the document they were signing! And yet, it is the oldest working constitution that still grants rights to its citizens rarely found elsewhere. It has provided for our prosperity for over two centuries. Whatever it means, it means well.

noobplusplus 14y ago

doesn't instead of dosen't

sageikosa 14y ago

What would we do without government committees, and how did we ever survive without them?

zb 14y ago
We had kings to make our laws unilaterally without parliamentary scrutiny.
- sageikosa 14y ago
  Not in the US of A. About 1.75 centuries elapsed between 1776 (when the US said a farewell to kings) and 1958 (when the predecessor committee was established). I guess science in the United States just progressed without non-scientific scrutiny during that time. At least for the topic at hand.

newbie12 14y ago

This post is partisan and too short on supporting facts. The author claims that a couple of goofy public statements by 3 lawmakers mean they don't "get science". That's 3 members on a committee of 40. Also, the scientific debate over climate change is far from settled.

CountHackulus 14y ago
How is this partisan? He explicitly calls out both parties.
- Ntrails 14y ago
  I assume partisan is being used in place of 'heavily biased'. I can see it is a reasonable substitution in most cases. The 'Pure Science' people (similar grouping to the militant atheists) are, like it or not, pretty dismissive of any non scientific opinions and beliefs. This makes many religious people take a very defensive (aggressively so) position on many matters. This is simply a different version of the "two parties facing each other and calling each other dumb" political system. Edit: I could be misreading though
  - tensor 14y ago
    You are correct only in the sense that atheists and science committees are completely dismissive of non scientific opinions. But I take great issue with the rest of your post. This is not a case of two parties calling each other dumb, nor is it the case that positions of science and positions of opinion are equal. Science does not deal in opinions. There are very specific requirements that need to be met for an idea to be considered a scientific theory. Religious ideas by and large do not meet these criteria. There is no such thing as "non-pure science." This is by definition of the term and process. Further, your use of the term "militant atheist" is offensive. You call an atheist "militant" merely because she dares to voice her thoughts? This is what religious individuals due daily in church and other places, yet never are they called militant for it. Worse, religious advertising routinely gets away with suggestions that non-believers will suffer eternally or are otherwise evil or immoral. Such rhetoric is a far cry from a logical discussion of what we actually know that you might find from a typical vocal atheist. Slurs like "militant atheist" are so common you no longer ever recognize them for what they are: insults and a labels intended to marginalize.

tptacek 14y ago

Assignment to the House Science Committee correlates with a -$46,000 drop in fundraising relative to all other committees in the House. Though Science has oversight over important agencies, like NOAA and NASA, they aren't a lobbying target. The result is that the best & brightest in Congress avoid Science, and adverse selection produces the worst possible Committee. What's particularly aggravating about this is that there are agencies properly in the purview of Science & Technology that are lobbyist targets, but that aren't managed by House Science. FCC, for instance, is overseen by House Commerce; DARPA, obviously, is House Defense. The fact of Congress is that if you don't play the game, and get the best committee assignments you can, you lose your seat. Each Congressperson can only have 2 committee assignments. Principled pursuit of the right assignments is thus a bit of a stag hunt.

fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
Call me a pessimist. When I see guys like Akin and Broun on a science committee, I assume that it didn't happen by accident, and that they probably have an axe to grind. At best, they may be looking to have their ethics represented on subjects like the ethics or morality of subjects like stem-cell research.
- protomyth 14y ago
  Some committees collect members that senior leadership do not want on other, more important, committees. You can pretty much tell how low that committee is by the amount of vacant seats. It sounds important to us, but as tptacek points out, much business in this area is handled elsewhere.
- fghh45sdfhr3 14y ago
  It's not an accident. It is exactly what tptacek described. Every other smarter/better representative wanted, and got committees which pay them more. And that forced these losers to end up on the science committee. No accident, but also no "axe grinding" conspiracy. Just simply money.
  - 14y ago

joshuahedlund 14y ago

> They've been put in place when the US is arguably more dependent upon science and technology than at any time since World War II. I could say the US is arguably less dependent upon the government's role in science and technology than at any time since World War II. I honestly don't know if that's true, but it would at least be an interesting discussion (I'm thinking of the transitioning privatization of space exploration, for starters); I don't see that it's clearly obvious either way.

_delirium 14y ago
I think operationally this is getting more true, but not as much funding-wise, so intelligent control over appropriations is still important. For example, SpaceX is a private company, but largely publicly financed: government contracts provide the majority of their revenue, since they don't yet have significant private-sector clients. If their NASA contract were cancelled (e.g. because a committee cut that program), they wouldn't be solvent as a company. Also common in the private-sector research world, outside a few big places like MSR that are mainly privately funded. A lot of biotech companies depend on public/private NIH research grants, and the SBIR/STTR programs are also a big source of funds for riskier research in small companies (http://www.sbir.gov/ http://www.sbir.gov/).
cheeseprocedure 14y ago
It would be very interesting to see some data on the impact of government-funded blue-sky research (in other words, science that didn't have an obvious short-term commercial application). Intuitively, it seems like such spending would open up new commercial frontiers for the private sector, but I'm not personally aware of specific examples of net payoff.

777466 14y ago

We all know it's an awful situation. But what do you do about it?

hexagonc 14y ago
You know, I feel ashamed every time I think this because I know I haven't fully thought it through, but why do we need to share the same country with these bird-brained politicians? I mean, would it really be so bad to let these people secede and have their own country? Yes, there is the argument that we are stronger (in some sense of the word) together than apart, but who really gains from this arrangement? Let them live in their own middle ages like the Taliban and leave everyone else alone.
- bduerst 14y ago
  Honestly, the solution here would be to give the federal government less control and allow the states to have more control. The states were established so that U.S. citizens could move to the state with the laws that best suited them.
  - bippi 14y ago
    That sounds fantastic, and it's a good thought---but at a certain point we are all interdependent on one-another. Relative to belief in science and global warming, what Arkansas does with its air certainly affects areas outside of Arkansas.
    - cobrausn 14y ago
      That's why we have a federal court system, right? If areas outside of Arkansas have a problem with what Arkansas is doing to their air, they can produce evidence in a court of law and put a stop to it. If the areas outside of Arkansas have a problem with what they teach their students (and it's really that damaging), well, just let a clear winner emerge over time. (Not sure why we're picking on Arkansas)
  - saraid216 14y ago

zerostar07 14y ago

I wonder why people don't see political campaigns as a system ripe for disruption. People are basically voting for their rulers the same way they vote their favorite movie. Kind of scary how anachronistic the election procedures have remained. Certainly a number of actors benefit from it.

pc86 14y ago
Because you can't just say "we're going to disrupt the way people campaign/vote/get elected." It is a staggeringly massive government bureaucracy even at the most local levels, and it prevents that kind of change at every point possible. Edit: Not to mention the fact that as much as we like to pretend all politicians and millionaire slime balls, they're working people providing for their families. Very few are going to entertain the idea of running their campaign in an entirely different way because chances are they'll lose their job if they do.
- zerostar07 14y ago
  I don't see a reason you can't. I believe mass media dominate campaigns because of the sheer amount of money thrown onto them.
  - pc86 14y ago
    > I don't see a reason you can't. I've worked on campaigns professionally from 2002-2010 and I've run local and state races, including my own for borough council and school board. Why can't we change the way campaigns are run? Campaigns would be the easy part to change, but even then it depends what you want to change. Are you talking about new technology? The Romney campaign is doing a decent job of utilizing technology in how they're collecting voter contact results from phones and doors, organizing volunteers and managing fundraisers. Obama did an excellent job as well in 2008, especially compared to the CF that was the McCain campaign. If you want to make changes to the way fundraising works and the influence of money in politics, it will need to be incremental. That isn't something you can just cut off overnight for several reasons, the two biggest being that (A) nothing happens overnight in Congress, and (B) Members of Congress would essentially be shutting down their means of securing re-election. Why can't we change the way people vote? For the same reason a PA court placed an injunction on that state's Voter ID law: you can't deprive an otherwise qualified individual of his or her constitutional right to vote. You want to have internet voting? You better have a plan to give everyone in the country high speed internet access and be prepared for the unrelenting torrent of lawsuits when the server goes down. I'd personally like to see internet voting someday, but you really need to have massive redundancy systems in place and plenty of checks to prevent fraud. What happens if the server is down all day? What about peak traffic? What if the database gets wiped 30 minutes before the end of voting? Anyone who knows about how government contracts are structured knows that would be an IBM and/or Diebold contract in the hundreds of billions. And it still wouldn't work. > I believe mass media dominate campaigns because of the sheer amount of money thrown into them. This statement makes it look like you think one is correlated to the other, which I'm not inclined to agree with. Because there's a lot of money in politics, that somehow means mass media "dominates" campaigns, whatever that means? I'm not sure what your alternative would be aside from information directly from the campaigns themselves (which is almost guaranteed to be skewed, if not incorrect).

Surio 14y ago

Now I've seen everything! !Bang! http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeenItAllSuicide http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeenItAllSuicide

Surio 14y ago
Downvotes? I don't believe it. To that title, I now humbly add: A scientific audience that doesn’t get humour!

bicknergseng 14y ago

I just want to point out something I haven't seen anyone else discuss. It's politicians like this who push CISPA or the laws in DC attempting to protect the cab industry from Uber's disruption. While politics seems distant and has totally gone off the deep end these days, this stuff does matter. It helps shape the direction our society decides to take. If everyone in science and tech checks out of politics, politics will move on without and possibly against us. It is unimaginably important for us to continue advocating for science, math, and technology in politics.

Zakharov 14y ago

If you look at this from another angle, it's not so bad. Would anyone be angry if there were three pacifists on the Defence committee? A certain portion of the American population opposes science, and as harmful as that is to the country, a democratic system means they get their say. EDIT: For the record, I wish these people had never been elected, and think the American government should increase science funding significantly. It's not my call, though.

saraid216 14y ago
On one hand, you're right. On the other... Well, "representation" is not quite what it sounds like. A representative is, by his office, held to a higher (and different) standard than non-elected non-officials. That's why you can say "I wish these people had never been elected". Effectively, what you're describing here is analogous to a tolerance of intolerance, whereas actual tolerance requires an intolerance of intolerance. The relevant quotation, rather than being "I disagree with what you say, but I would die to defend your right to say it", is instead, "All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated and well supported in logic and argument than others."

tete 14y ago

Officials not grasping reality? As sad as it is, but I think this stops being newsworthy.