This is a case of putting political feasibility ahead of technical feasibility. Just because "the people" demand faster horses does not mean you can get to the invention of the car by supplying a series of faster horses.
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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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Can we also somehow separate scientific programs from corporate interests? Because long term plans like this will require science to be put to a purpose other than a financial bottom line, which is sort of unfamiliar territory.
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I think actually you would need to align them more strongly. Global corporations might be the only entities with the incentives to "vote for science" in some sense.
Off the cuff, every American would have to donate about 20 cents/year to out-spend oil lobbies. That's $20/year for a dedicated 1% who donate to environmental lobbies. This seems too good to be true, why hasn't it happened yet?
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