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Comment by luddaite | Hacker News Reader

I don't think replacing politicians with scientists and engineers is really the solution here. We will always need the interpersonal skills that politicians bring to the table. However, these politicians should really employ more scientists and engineers as advisers. Most of the nitty gritty policy is currently handled by aides. These aides should have more training in evidence-based policy.

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I'm not suggesting replacing politicians with scientists. I am trying to motivate that policy making must be approached quantitatively, and that the calculus for doing so must be developed. Definitionally this will be done by scientists.

Design the incentives right for politicians and watch as self-organization works its magic.

They are already defined, we have a lot of economics and politics theory. The problem is, the scientists, the engineers and the technical people in general don't like and don't study this kind of knowledge, because they think the politicians should be switched for technicians.

That's not true. The comparison to biology is very literal here. We simply do not have the tools to really understand complex systems.

This is where our physics fails us. We're great at predicting the behavior of systems with a small number of interacting degrees of freedom. But for systems with a huge number of interacting degrees of freedom (everything around you) we're hooped - the math is intractable to existing techniques. New approaches are required.

There _are_ some overarching principles for complex systems (namely self-organization). But they have not been well-developed.

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