Comment by DataDaoDe
1 day ago
Knowing nothing about it this particular movement, the main danger I foresee is essentially hubris. That the PHDs will be overly confident in political decisions they make in new domains completely foreign to them, primarily due to their expertise in their own domains and that this will lead to disastrous policy decisions.
I see this often in many areas. Perhaps they'll be lucky and have a few behavioral psychologists among them to maintain intellectual humility.
I’m not sure “brainy” people are that much more likely to think they can make good decisions than any other politician. So why do you feel this would exacerbate the hubris politicians already have?
Many if not most career politicians have education in their domain: law, civics, economics, political science, or similar. On the other hand it’s a common failure mode of STEM people in particular to assume their expertise can be directly applied to more "human" fields and indeed to dismiss those fields as unscientific hand-waving.
> Many if not most career politicians have education in their domain
They don't have "domains", they are career politicians. It is nice when a politician has some experience in the topic they're legislating on but the system works by having generalists who bow in whatever direction winds are blowing the most money from.
It is not possible to be an effective career politician by having firm principles or technical expertise. It requires a near total dedication to politicking. If they happen to have knowledge of a topic it is coincidence because the number of political topics is large and the number of politicians is comparatively small.
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That would be news to me. Which country are you referring to?
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Can you remind me why Yvette Cooper [1], who's been trained as an Economist, is Secretary for Health and Social Care, after being Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary?
Literally the first name I clicked on from the UK government.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yvette_Cooper
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But saying the conclusion seems out of touch, but it's not necessarily limited to STEM formatted people. Everyone and their dogs think they have the most apt representation and whoever disagree ever miss information or the ability to act accordingly.
Have politicians ever been voted en masse for their ability to navigate the domain they will be deployed to work on? It's a combination of popularity and (stated) opinion overlap.
Maybe they are just less experienced in politics. I wonder if their education includes much about the problems they need to solve for society in that country. On the plus side a PhD is good at research and can probably get up to speed damn quick and read a lot. As long as they don't have the hubris!
Honestly, its not the hubris. Politicians are a pretty arrogant group of people. Its the lack of life experience and lessons learned from negative consequences that they lack. The hubris just makes it more galling and thus makes for better sound bites.
Politics also require quite a bit of emotional intelligence and charisma and ability to get diverse people to come to the table for compromises. Academic achievements are orthogonal to all these.
Best case would be multi-talented persons who have both IQ and EQ and good character. Just IQ is not enough.
You think you navigate a career in academia without working through different opinions, collaboration etc.?
Definitely not my experience in academia, mostly small mini czardoms who can't stand and won't speak to their competitors. Often engaged in ancient blood feuds with the person two doors down. Add a dash of corruption in publishing and citing each others works while excluding those they disagree with etc.
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Well, you can have certain differences of opinion as long as they're "acceptable" opinions. Academia ousts those who don't fit into its culture. Tenure is the only way you can express your real opinion without reprisal, though you may still be socially outcast for having the "wrong" opinion - and those who make it this far are predominantly products of that same culture - their opinions align with their peers on what is deemed acceptable. The anointed.
Academia actually involves a lot of politics... just not the kind that says it's all the immigrants' fault.
It's more the kind of deciding how to spend other people's money.
Both government and academia know how to navigate this well - by avoiding accountability.
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It is still quite tribal, with whole mutually hostile clans that stem from a particular professor or workplace. Plus the economy of academy tends to be quite zero-sum.
Also, the US academy specifically cares about your race a lot.
The two are strongly correlated.
Intelligence is a tool - one that can be put to use against any problem. "Get diverse people to come to the table for compromises" is no exception.
Some character traits that are useful to academics are useful to politicians; others are kinda the opposite of what politicians need.
Intelligence? Problem solving? Understanding statistics? Speaking in front of rooms full of people? Communicating complex ideas clearly? Useful for both jobs.
But an academic can be bookish, shy or haughty. Pursuing your own ideas is actively encouraged. There are arguments - but the main audience for the debates are other academics. They needn't collaborate on research with anyone they don't want to, and when they do collaborate everyone has the same destination in mind even if they disagree about the route to get there. When dealing with students, they've all chosen to be there, passed exams and paid money. The work is mostly low-medium stakes, with time to get important things right. And of course they have excellent job security.
Politicians, though? Gotta love campaigning and talking to voters. Gotta all get together behind the party's national platform. Even colleagues in your party are rivals because everyone wants the top job. 'Debates' all about playing to the audience and getting 3-second soundbites for social media, not engaging with the substance of arguments. No choice in who you collaborate with, including people with deep-seated disagreements about things like tax, debt, spending. Gotta represent voters many of whom hate you. Do well at the job and high stakes things you didn't even do get blamed on you, like train crashes and oil markets getting expensive. Oh, and every 4-5 years you're fired and get to re-apply for your job.
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I think we have people who are highly intelligent and still unable to navigate social situations. Neurodivergents are not uncommon in academics.
> Knowing nothing about it this particular movement
It's a pity this disclaimer cannot be made to serve as a header for about 99% of the comments here today, because, holy shit...
You can take what you see here and extrapolate. HN is overwhelmingly "intellectuals" - many academics, though not all. We can see:
* Everyone is quick to make judgement on something they don't know all the details of.
* There's not much agreement - mostly people disagreeing with each other.
* Everyone's opinion is important - they're smart so obviously, they're always right.
* Unrelated politics - my pet issue must be talked about.
* Anything is better - it's impossible for things to get worse.
* I disagree with this opinion so it must be a Russian bot.
Anyway, I wonder what will happen if you get together a bunch of intellectuals in government.
While in absolute terms things can almost always get worse.
Situation has been so bad with Vučić and his political party SNS - systematic corruption, private profiteering with iron grip on media and legislation, security services... etc.
So in that sense - even doing nothing would probably turn out better than continuing with the previous levels of intentional corruption.
And while there might be some things done by previous government that (accidentally) turned out good and are worth keeping.
For a lot of things (e.g. various institutions that lost their independence in the last ~20 years) - the rough WIP roadmap/plan can be as simple as "Undo or do the opposite from what the previous government did".
> * Everyone is quick to make judgement on something they don't know all the details of. > [snip]
I don't know how large the HN reader base is, but at the time of writing there are 309 comments on this story. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the HN reader base is quite likely significantly larger than 309 people, presumably by several orders of magnitude. As such, the vast majority of readers ("overwhelmingly intellectuals") have indeed decided not to make a any judgement on this thing they don't know all the details of.
> That the PHDs will be overly confident
Definitely a risk, but politicians are professionals at being overly confident. With this selection (there are not only PhDs, and not only academics), there is actually a chance of... actually trying to understand the problems?
Looking back my guess would be that infiltration is an even bigger danger. The opportunity of visibility and power, without the hassle of climbing the ranks for decades inside an established party, attracts a certain type of human.
As opposed to say, that career politicians will be overly confident in scientific decisions they make in new domains completely foreign to them, primarily due to their expertise in their own domains and that this will lead to disastrous policy decisions.
I also want to see them succeed. After sitting in meetings with some of the world's brightest software engineers over the last 20 years and observing progress come to a stand-still because of their (in)decisions, I am very skeptical. It beats a corrupt government any day though.
> Knowing nothing about it this particular movement, the main danger I foresee is essentially hubris.
One of them selfawarewolves.
That is not exactly unique to PHDs. For reference, see all other politicians everywhere
That directly contradicts the Dunning-Kruger effect. In my own experience, academics are much less likely to be overconfident and are actually quite happy to admit they don't know something. The overconfident STEM people that you are talking about are in my experience engineers with bachelor's or masters degrees. Maybe biased by the online communities I frequent, but computer engineers are typically the worst IMO.
I bet we wouldn't hear about it when it fails. At least not from science.com
Epistemic trespassing
Humble politicians loose elections and negotiations.
Better than the absolute idiots who are running the US into the ground now
if you know human history you already know how it will end up
Comparing this parliament with a vipers den of the lying career politicians we have in the UK (exposed again during the last budget announcement) I'd say Serbia is unlikely to have it worse.
Being ruled by the career politicians is NOT an advantage, and the innumerable examples from all around the world will prove that.
There's a bittersweet naiveté to those thinking PhD government will do a better job. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_and_the_Brightest
> fight corruption and establish meritocracy, accountability, and the rule of law
Keep into account that the baseline for governing Serbia is low. As long as they can lower the corruption, they can do a lot wrong and still come out ahead.
We should only let the dumbest and least capable of deception or hubris run our governments, then.
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