I share this fear as well. I love the raw honesty most technical people have, but this characteristic seems to be correlated with narrowmindedness, stubbornness, and extremism. Think about how many tech folk you know with nuanced political views. Almost every one I know is either a far left socialist or far right libertarian. Given the array of fuzzy issues civilization faces, it would seem that extreme mindsets are not suited to the political arena.
Those individuals are using science to support their pre-existing narrowmindedness, stubbornness, and extremism. Science is not making them those things. On the contrary, the fundamentals of science lie in questioning pre-conceived notions in the face of findings that conflict them. This is how scientific progress is made.
Right. No point of conflict there. All I'm saying is that many technically trained and minded people, in the arena of dealing with human/political issues, seem to rely on idealizations, not unlike mathematical models, when in truth they are too complicated to be represented as such. Maybe the prediliction for mathematics and science betrays a deeper desire for a clean, concise, comprehensible truth, which rarely exists in the social/political realm.
Every physical scientist has learned very early in their career that nature does not care about what it ought to be like or what ought to work out. Hell, every experiment one designs ought to work fine the first time every time, and your pet theory ought to work out. But it isn't like that, in that line of work you have pragmatism beaten into you, and that is what is missing from contemporary American politics.
Maybe it's different with computer scientists, who live up there in the realm of pure thought and can bend reality to their will.
I think the main benefit is that a scientist elected to a political office would make decisions based on real data when possible. Obviously it is often times not possible - for example, you can't use science to determine whether you should take a pro-life stance or a pro-choice stance - but the insistence on using numbers would greatly simplify many decisions.
If a scientist made decisions based on real data, wouldn't they conclude that the approach used by the current politicians is superior for the purposes of politics?
This is particularly true in climate science, where the simple models that cannot possibly be wrong predict anthropogenic global warming, but the complex models that cannot possibly be right are treated as deterministic and used to make detailed political plans for the future.
Science seems to leave the methods of rational thought far behind when it enters American politics.
> questioning pre-conceived notions in the face of findings that conflict them
In science, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. The bigger the claims a hypothesis makes, the more skepticism you should have about that hypothesis.
In political terms, the bigger the policy you're talking about, the more skepticism you should have about that policy.
This mindset leads toward literal conservatism -- always make small steps away from the status quo -- or libertarianism -- we need to be skeptical of government, so let's make it as weak as possible, and move powers as close to the bottom of the pyramid as possible (i.e. get the federal government's fingers out of housing, education and healthcare, and leave them up to state or local governments.)
Why so many scientists are pro-big-government lefties has always completely baffled me.
Because the hypothesis of surplus-value extraction is easy to see and experience: find out how much work it takes to produce your salary and benefits in revenue, and then start refusing to work more than that. You will be fired. Therefore, your boss is extracting surplus value from you.
If you are a right-wing proprietarian, you might not object to that, on grounds you consented. If you're not that, you will feel exploited. The fact that the USA has the OECD's worst governmental working-condition laws that completely fail to make the extraction process feel more like a normal, bearable part of human life doesn't help.
I don't understand how this relates to my previous comment.
As for your rant about surplus-value extraction: Presumably your boss isn't just taking your surplus for free; they're providing things that helps you work more efficiently. For example, if you're a steelworker, your employer provides a very expensive steel mill; without access to that equipment, your steelmaking skills are fairly useless.
In industries that have little capital requirement, like software development or web design, the things an employer might bring to the table to enhance their employees' created value include: A product vision, an already-existing codebase, brand or website, a talented team, support services such as marketing, accounting, legal...
Also, working for an employer lowers risk for employees who work on uncertain ventures. If you spend half a year developing a new product for an employer, you still get paid for those six months even if it's a total flop and nobody ever buys it. But if you'd built it on your own time and bootstrapped it into a startup instead, yes, you'd keep the entire profit if it went well -- but you'd get nothing (financially) from those six months of work if it flopped. This "insurance" against product flops is part of what the employer's portion of your created value pays for.
If you feel you're being exploited -- your employer is taking too much of the value you're creating -- then you're free to negotiate with them, change employers, change industries, or build your own startup.
