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PhilGoetz comments on Just a reminder: Scientists are, technically, people. - Less Wrong
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Delegating this power to politicians has a poor track record.
Are you speaking from within a rationalist perspective, or are you defaulting to speaking from within a populist framework?
Your comment assumes that policies should be set by people with values representative of the population.
Representative democracy is not designed to follow values representative of the population. That would be direct democracy. Representative democracy is supposed to be a way of finding representatives who are wiser than the general population. So if we speak from just the slightly-more-elitist framework of representative democracy that the US founders intended, this assumption is wrong.
The US founders intended several different, opposing things. Some were much more elitist than others.
That's an open question. Some prefer representative democracy because it lets ordinary people spend time on things other than politics - in which case one might still prefer to elect people who would most likely have made the same decision as you would, and oust them when they do something you wouldn't have done.
Representative democracy doesn't necessarily diverge from the general populace, but it can.
A strong case can be made that this feature is a large part of why it was chosen by the Founders in the first place. Even if it wasn't, it clearly permits forms of elitism that other systems would rule out immediately. This fact is significant even if it wasn't intended.
"Your comment assumes that policies should be set by people with values representative of the population."
No, it doesn't. One might do best to delegate power to someone pursuing different and partially opposed goals (at least in part because of a different personality rather than expertise) because of outweighing advantages like scientific knowledge, or because the values have special practical use in the case (e.g. a long time horizon in a central banker). But my comment just acknowledged that from the perspective of any particular values, it can be a mistake to delegate power to someone opposed to some of those values for reasons other than knowledge.
It is possible to say that a policy has a drawback relative to a utilitarian, or egalitarian, or tribalist, or U.S. founder perspective without sharing any of them. being any of those things.
"So if we speak from just the slightly-more-elitist framework of representative democracy that the US founders intended, this assumption is wrong."
I mentioned 'comparably informed' expertise, so 'wiser' seems to just mean people with certain basic values and personalities.