Comment by eximius

Don't make yourself out to be the grandstander here, that's my job. Politics is so hard and so complicated that your expected contribution is almost certainly net negative, so take that time and energy and apply it to things you actually have a hope of reliably improving. The true cowardice is spending 6 hours a day spinning your wheels instead of getting to work on things that actually work.

An example inspired from the paper: I'm sure medieval surgeons felt they were doing God's work, putting in 12 hour days incising people with razors, and yet without a basic understanding of germ theory they almost certainly make many people much worse off. For a more recent example, did you know that less than 50 years ago it was believed infants didn't need to be anesthetized when modern surgeons operated upon them, despite showing extreme pain responses?

Politics is many orders of magnitude more complex than both germ theory and anesthesiology, and yet people somehow feel they need to study it systematically even less. It's not hard to summon a litany of state sponsored actions which would make Genghis Khan blush, and yet, for each one of those actions, some group of people thought it was such an obviously good idea it simply had to be done.