This is depressingly common. Politicians are so aware of Overton window issues and the "physics of voting" they keep sacrificing technical plausibility in order to preserve political possibility. Another example of incoherence is demanding that algorithms explain themselves.
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I think we're going to see this increasing divergence between science/engineering ideas of good attacks on complex problems and political ideas of good attacks. There's a reason politicians keep going back to Apollo as a charismatic megafauna reference point for science/tech...
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Rocketry was the last popularly legible sector where you could pose politically feasible goals while conveying a cartoon technical vision that did not create implausible design spaces for the tech community. Everything since: computing, genetics, neuroscience, AI, is illegible.
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It seems weird, but Kennedy's "Moon in a decade" was fundamentally more coherent a technical proposal than something like "decarbonize without nuclear energy to hit 50% emissions target by 2030."
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So what we're seeing here is a 3-stage process: a) ignore the science/tech that's too hard to explain to voters b) promise them impossible things c) attach unrelated side goals that are possible to achieve but don't actually hit the main goals.
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You know what this feels like? It's a "Wall" except with "Science Scare" rather than "Brown Immigrants" as the rallying flag. To the extent the "Science Scare" is real, it's not meaningfully acted upon. To the extent it's an expedient scare, it's a means to other ends :(
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If this is the best democracy can do in a world based on really complex technologies and global intertwingling, then I see why many see democracy (and more broadly, the nation state as a problem solving unit) as the problem. Still there's a bit of hope.
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First there is hope that it is possible to make the *processes* of democracy more scientifically literate somehow, in ways that are not quite as anemic as having toothless scientific committees "advising" politicians. Can we add more teeth to scientific influence over policy?
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Replying to @vgr
I made a proposal for this a couple years ago. It was mostly a joke at the time, but it’s starting to seem more like the right way forward. Although I’ve no idea how to get from here to there. https://meaningness.com/metablog/virtue-court …pic.twitter.com/cjsc62Ly1s
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Replying to @Meaningness
This is Parkison's law in action btw, almost literally. One example he used was a committee spending more time discussing the soda machine proposal than the nuclear reactor proposal.
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