After attending the Westminster Skeptics ‘Geek Manifesto‘ event the other night, I’m now leafing through my shiny signed copy of Mark Henderson’s new book.
This isn’t a review (I’ve not finished reading it yet!) but the book carries a powerful case for rationalism in politics. The author tends towards a sort of post politics-ism that I’d not go along with, but this is a quibble for another time.
The discussion among the Skeptics was interesting though, and I wanted to capture one issue:
How can Geeks engage in politics? Should they stand for election? Few do. Should they continue sticking up for their own – defending Simon Singh with The Quacklash or fighting cuts to research funding- that they sometimes do so well?
Henderson identifies a new, growing player in political life: The scientific commentator – writers like Ben Goldacre, Tim Harford. He also sees a possibility of science-minded community banding together to become a Mumsnet type of political force – one to be courted by aspiring Prime Minsters.
Personally, I’m not convinced about that last suggestion. It conflates ‘has a science background’ with ‘active rationalist’ a little too much for my liking.
Flicking through it, I can’t see the kind of intervention from Geeks that I think would be the most useful – the clear-thinking candid friends of democracy. So here’s my suggestion.
Henderson makes the point that “what politicians think is less important than how they think.”
I’d suggest that it isn’t necessarily the role of politicians to think, or at least not to concentrate efforts on thinking that could be better used elsewhere. Politicians role is a pragmatic one. Sure, they have to deliberate and to represent and do it in a principled way. But they’ve also got to behave in a strategic way. The toughest task that Burke or Rousseau set politicians was the need to represent the nation as a whole, or The General Will while being able to bring morality and principles to bear. Like it or not, they have to apply their judgement almost entirely to the competing claims made by interest groups rather than sifting through representations from dispassionate rational commentators.
One of the biggest problems that politicians face (and the one they often solve in the way the mediate between demands) is an over exposure to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Politicians meet a lot of people who are certain about a lot of things, and certainty and knowledge are often found in inverse proportions. As Bertrand Russell put it in his article ‘Triumph of Stupidity‘;
“The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
Or as buy cheap cialis Yeates said in his Second Coming;
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity”
Or as Darwin put it;
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
(That’s enough quotes – Ed)
It’s very rare for Politicians to have an interlocutor that can defensibly describe itself as representing the public interest. The best arguments for Parliaments is that they create a kind of distributed moral judgement that helps to mediate between a range of outrageous claims.
There is surely a sub-set of the scientific method that seeks to take competing evidence and provide a summary and commentary upon it – isolating dishonesty, identifying biases or signposting the logical fallacies.
Take the tricky subject that Henderson dwells on at length: The sacking of David Nutt. Sure, politicians need a briefing on the medical issues concerned. They need one on law and order as well. They also need to evaluate the various claims that rest very heavily upon them, for example;
“If you legalise Ganja, the Daily Mail will see to it that you never get elected again.”
This is an important scientific claim that is as pertinent to this issue as any other. It needs to be tested. If it’s true, then legalisation is unthinkable, whatever other issues are on the table. Politicans commit their lives to a wide range of positions. If adopting one policy effectively stops their political party from being re-elected, they’d be fools to run with it.
We’ve spent the last few months listening to Lord Leveson unearth the shocking truth that newspapers exert an unhealty and anti-democratic influence upon public life. That newspaper owners bully politicians into serving the interests of newspaper owners. Who knew?
Politicians need Geeks to anticipate the big issues that are going to come up in future. It has to be one that the participating geeks don’t feel very strongly about. They need to get together to compile an agreed text that politicians and commentators alike can use as a guide to the issue. They need to request from politicians a copy of all representations that are received on that matter and they need to map them – do a bit of wikinomics, perhaps, maybe using debategraph or data-visualisations to add meaning and context to statistics that are used.
This is something that would need political scientists involved as well, because no legislation exists in a policy vacuum.
It should also attempt to understand the political and democratic circumstances in which the issue is being decided. Too often, we castigate politicians for refusing to accept a hospital pass. For a legislative change to happen, any rational bystander has to be able to look at such a piece of compiled evidence and say ‘if I were that politician, I’d vote for that change.’
I think that there’s an exciting project in there somewhere.
But for now, let’s think about Geeks running the world again. Here’s Jarvis:
What’s the point of being rich if you can’t think what to do with it?
‘Cause you’re so very thick.
Oh we weren’t supposed to be, we learnt too much at school now
we can’t help but see.
That the future that you’ve got mapped out is nothing much to shout about.
We’re making a move, we’re making it now,
We’re coming out of the side-lines.
Just put your hands up – it’s a raid.
We want your homes, we want your lives,
we want the things you won’t allow us.
We won’t use guns, we won’t use bombs
We’ll use the one thing we’ve got more of – that’s our minds.
Mis-Shapes by Pulp
