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James_K comments on Open Thread: June 2010 - Less Wrong
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It's nice to know I've had an influence :)
As it happens, I'm pretty sceptical as to how much we can know as well. There's nothing like doing policy to gain an understanding of how messy it can be. While the social sciences have a less than wonderful record in developing knowledge (look at the record of development economics, as one example), and economic forecasting is still not much better than voodoo but it's not like there's another group out there with all the answers. We don't have all of the answers, or even most of them, but we're better than nothing, which is the only alternative.
Nothing is often a pretty good alternative. Government action always comes at a cost, even if only the deadweight loss of taxation (keyphrase "public choice" for reasons you might expect the cost to be higher than that). I'm not trying to turn this into a political debate, but you should consider doing nothing not necessarily a bad thing, and what you do not necessarily better.
When I said "better than nothing" I was referring to advice, not the actual actions taken. My background is in economics so I'm quite familiar with both dead-weight loss of taxation and public choice theory, though these days I lean more toward Bryan Caplan's rational irrationality theory of government failure.
I agree that nothing is often a good thing for governments to do, and in many cases that is the advice that Cabinet receives.
Politicians' logic: “Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do it.”