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Jiro comments on First(?) Rationalist elected to state government - Less Wrong Discussion

63 Post author: Eneasz 07 November 2014 02:30AM

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Comment author: Jiro 07 November 2014 04:09:21PM *  8 points [-]
  • The uncharismatic official might have gotten there because of connections or some similar factor that you can't just get yourself, even if you're as charismatic as him.
  • The uncharismatic official might seem more charismatic to typical people than to you.
  • It may be hard for someone else to take his place, because the advantages of incumbency overwhelms the disadvantage he has from not being charismatic.
  • Public officials must lie to get into office. STEM backgrounds are unlikely to be willing and/or able to lie efficiently.
  • Public officials must do other dishonest things to get into office (backroom deals, for instance), which again engineers might not do.
  • Public officials need to compromise between various groups' ideas. STEM people work with things where there is one right answer and the need to compromise is limited, so are not very good at this, especially when one of the sides you're compromising with is outright incorrect.
  • Democracy is about doing what your constituents want. A STEM person who wants something different than his constituents won't get elected. This is still true if the STEM person wants it because he is more educated or more rational--democracy is about doing what the people want, not about trying to be better than them.
Comment author: Punoxysm 07 November 2014 05:08:55PM *  7 points [-]

Public officials must lie to get into office. STEM backgrounds are unlikely to be willing and/or able to lie efficiently.

I'll have bug fixed by Friday

Also, STEM backgrounds are much more common in other countries. It's moderately quirky that so many US lawmakers are lawyers.

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 07 November 2014 05:25:02PM 4 points [-]

It's moderately quirky that so many US lawmakers are lawyers.

This may be a feature of Anglosphere political systems. UK and Australian parliaments are very lawyer-heavy.

Comment author: chaosmage 07 November 2014 07:10:19PM *  9 points [-]

I'd suggest that maybe it is a feature of Common law legal systems, where laws are developed by judges and precedent plays a huge role. The US, UK and Australia are Common Law systems. Civil law, where legal principles are codified into a referable system which serves as the primary source of law, are a lot more easily understood and handled. So maybe the former system makes legal expertise both more challenging and more necessary for lawmaking.

If that hypothesis were true, other common law states (India, Canada, Israel) should tend to have more lawyers in office than civil law states (pretty much all other industrialized nations).

Comment author: polymathwannabe 09 November 2014 05:31:03AM 3 points [-]

Colombia is a civil law state, and our presidents have included poets, journalists, and more recently, economists.

Comment author: fortyeridania 07 November 2014 07:42:43PM 1 point [-]

STEM backgrounds are much more common in other countries.

A good example is the PRC, where a clear majority of top officials have scientific or engineering backgrounds.

Comment author: jkaufman 10 November 2014 02:00:27AM 1 point [-]

I recall reading that this was the result of PRC politicians picking up degrees because this helped them advance up the ladder? And that the degrees were mostly fake?

(Searching now I can't find anything on this, though.)

Comment author: fortyeridania 10 November 2014 06:42:28AM *  1 point [-]

Yes, that is a problem. I believe it applies especially to advanced degrees, as officials are typically well past college age before they have the kind of pull needed to get themselves a fake degree.

As an example of a high official who got a STEM degree while still young and mostly unknown, take former president Hu Jintao, who got an engineering degree in the 1960s. (Source alert: It's the People's Daily. I assume they are trustworthy on this particular issue.)

Comment author: Pfft 08 November 2014 09:24:52PM 1 point [-]

But they are not elected, are they? So I don't think that's a very good example for this discussion.

Comment author: fortyeridania 10 November 2014 06:37:22AM 0 points [-]

Whether they are elected: They are not elected in universal suffrage elections, though they are chosen through a voting mechanism.

Assuming they are not elected, whether it is a good example: The comment to which I was responding used the term "public official" not "elected official." Second, all of the bullet points apply to unelected officials too. In the last bullet point, the constituents would be senior officials.

Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 07 November 2014 04:56:20PM *  5 points [-]

I ask you to take me at my word that the elected official I'm referring to isn't simply less charismatic than me, (which is saying something), but less charismatic than a potato with a smile drawn on it. Also the "tool" characteristic is far more salient. Imagine the least appropriate human being you can think of for public office, who nonetheless owns a suit and talks in complete sentences. Envision that person as receiving a plurality of votes in an electoral district, and ask yourself why someone, anyone, wasn't in a position to stand in their place.

It doesn't seem obvious to me that STEM-folk are fundamentally different types of people to non-STEM folk with regard to things like dishonesty or compromise. It also doesn't seem obvious to me that someone with a chemistry degree would have political goals more out of alignment with a hypothetical constituency than someone with a business or law degree.

Comment author: ChristianKl 07 November 2014 10:16:25PM 5 points [-]

Envision that person as receiving a plurality of votes in an electoral district, and ask yourself why someone, anyone, wasn't in a position to stand in their place.

In that case the first step would be to research what kind of opponent they faced in the primary and general election. That might tell you more. Did they actually win against a good opponent for reasons outside of your knowledge?

Comment author: Jiro 07 November 2014 06:59:44PM 1 point [-]

It also doesn't seem obvious to me that someone with a chemistry degree would have political goals more out of alignment with a hypothetical constituency than someone with a business or law degree.

STEM-folk are less likely to be religious. They are less likely to believe in certain pseudoscientific ideas as well, some of which affect politics (consider the anti-vaccination movements). They are also more likely to be knowledgeable of certain issues related to science and technology (quick, how many STEM people do you know who support TPP?) and therefore to take a different position on them or emphasize them to a different degree.

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