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chaosmage comments on Opinion piece on the Swedish Network for Evidence-Based Policy - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (21)
You make good points as usual.
The politicians I know will certainly prefer to talk about about very specific subjects, but they will also want to choose the experts to talk to about them. Being chosen as a conversation partner for expertise is usually a matter of having been recommended by someone else. The same seems to be true for journalists.
There are a couple of people who know both the evidence-based scientific view of the world and the balancing of interest based political view of the world: economists, CEOs, political scientists. But that's a fairly small overlap between two way larger spheres of people. Getting these two spheres to understand each other better is a project not for years but for decades.
Reaching out to a parliamentarian in Berlin isn't hard even if you don't have connections. Politicians want to talk to constituents while journalists don't have the same goal of talking to readers.
Of course that only get's you the foot in the door. Recommendations certainly have advantages.
In Berlin it also doesn't take more than being a partner member to be able to go to political party meetings. The main factor that holds people out is that they are boring.
Sure, reaching out is easy. All the politicians I know are very friendly people who love conversation.
But this evidence-based policy thing is about not just voicing an individual voter's concern. And it is not even about building pressure to change this policy or that, which the politician in question might actually have a tiny bit of influence over. It is about changing the whole framework in which policies are chosen. A framework that all the politician's friends are comfortable enough with. And this comes with an undertone of "this is so obviously beneficial that you're a fool if you don't do this".
For this you don't need the foot in the door, you need to get through the door and bring lots of friends, a ton of evidence, and a bank. Before you have at least some of that, putting feet into doors and listening to very polite rejections is likely a distraction, and the last thing young movements need are distractions.
In the way the article is formulated it does come with that undertone. But I don't think you have to have that undertone when you communicate about the subject.
If you want to change public policy understanding the way politicians think about the issue is important. Quite many activists make a lot of strategic errors because they haven't invested the effort to understand the positions of various stakeholders.