I happened to come across this comment from our blog in 2015, responding to a post remarking on how our national legislature is full of lawyers:
Conversely, the entire US Congress is <1% engineers and scientists combined (3+2). Peter Thiel argues that this is one of the main reasons why government sponsored innovation petered out in the US after the seventies (NASA, Bell Labs) and the country is in a science/technology stagnation.
I was curious about this quote so I did some googling. There was lots by Thiel from 2010 onward about a decline of innovation. The only thing I found regarding Congress was this news article from 2014, “Thiel: When It Comes to Tech, U.S. Government Is in the ‘Middle Ages.’ According to Peter Thiel, fewer than 35 of 535 members of Congress have backgrounds in science or technology, where he was quoted as saying, “It’s very hard to get reasonable science, reasonable technology policy. The rest don’t understand that windmills don’t work when the wind isn’t blowing or that solar panels don’t work at night—they’re sort of in the Middle Ages.”
This all surprised me, given that Thiel has been very visible in recent years supporting political candidates—and I don’t think any of them are scientists or engineers! Take a look:
In April 2021, Thiel donated $10 million to Saving Arizona PAC, which was formed to support Blake Masters (R) in his potential campaign for U.S. Senate in Arizona. . . . Thiel also donated another $10 million to Protect Ohio Values, a super PAC formed to back J.D. Vance’s (R) potential U.S. Senate bid in Ohio. As of June 2021, these were the largest contributions ever made to PACs supporting individual candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
In the 2020 election cycle, Thiel donated more than $2 million to Free Forever PAC. The organization primarily focused on spending to support Kris Kobach’s (R) Senate campaign. . . . In 2012, Thiel was a major donor to Ron Paul’s (R) presidential campaign. He also supported Ted Cruz’s (R) U.S. Senate bid in 2012. In 2015, he gave $2 million to Conservative, Authentic, Responsive Leadership for You and for America, a super PAC supporting former 2016 Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina.
Who were these candidates? From Ballotpedia and wikipedia:
Blake Masters received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Stanford University in 2008 and a J.D. from Stanford University Law School in 2012. In 2012, Masters co-founded Judicata, a software startup focused on legal research . . .
J. D. Vance earned a B.A. in political science and philosophy from Ohio State University in 2009 and a J.D. from Yale University Law School in 2013. His career experience includes co-founding Narya, founding Our Ohio Renewal, and working as an intern for Republican state senator Bob Schuler, a law clerk for U.S. Senator John Cornyn and U.S. District Court for Kentucky’s Eastern District Judge David Bunning, a litigation associate with the Sidley Austin law firm, the director of operations at Circuit Therapeutics, a principal at Mithril Capital Management, a venture capitalist with Revolution, LLC, and an author.
Kris Kobach earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard University, a doctorate in politics from Oxford University, and a juris doctor from Yale University. His career experience includes working as a clerk with the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, a professor of constitutional law with the University of Missouri at Kansas City School of Law, and a counsel to former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Ron Paul went to Gettysburg College . . . He graduated with a B.S. degree in Biology in 1957 . . . earned a Doctor of Medicine degree from Duke University’s School of Medicine in 1961 . . . served as a flight surgeon in the United States Air Force from 1963 to 1965 and then in the United States Air National Guard from 1965 to 1968. . . . [and then] began a private practice in obstetrics and gynecology.
Ted Cruz earned his B.A. in Public Policy from Princeton University in 1992. He went on to receive his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1995. Cruz then worked in the following positions in the law field . . .
Cara Carleton Sneed was born on September 6, 1954, in Austin, Texas, the daughter of Madelon Montross (née Juergens) and Joseph Tyree Sneed III. The name “Carleton”, from which “Carly” is derived, has been used in every generation of the Sneed family since the Civil War. . . . She received a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy and medieval history at Stanford University, in 1976. . . . She attended the UCLA School of Law in 1976, but dropped out after one semester. . . . In 1980, Fiorina received a Master of Business Administration, in marketing, from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1989 she obtained a Master of Science degree in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management, under the Sloan Fellows program.
OK, so, of Thiel’s six candidates, we’ve got a bunch of degrees in political science and philosophy, a doctor, an MBA, and four law degrees. No scientists or engineers at all! What happened?
My guess is that “backgrounds in science or technology” kinda sounds good, but:
– When looking for political candidates, it’s natural to start with people who are politically connected. The kind of people who want to go into politics in the first place are likely to study political science and get law degrees, so that’s the pool you’re drawing from. Even the first candidate above, who was most recently a tech executive, had a legal background. And that makes sense: the tech industry is full of scientists and engineers, but I’d guess that the vast majority of them would have zero interest in running for office. If they’d had that interest, maybe they’d have gone to law school at some point.
– Thiel is looking for conservative hard-right candidates, but most scientists and engineers are politically liberal, and even the ones who are conservative aren’t typically on the right wing of the Republican party.
– Maybe scientists and engineers wouldn’t be such great legislators anyway. It’s possible that Thiel considered dishing out his millions to potential candidates with technical backgrounds but decided that they would not be effective in Congress.
Perhaps this is what they call a “pipeline problem,” that there is no pool of right-wing scientists and engineers with political talent for Thiel and other funders to draw from. And, at the same time, there is an ever-increasing supply of well-connected conservative law graduates.
This gives us some sense of how the law community’s domination of our government continues: even the funders who think we don’t have enough scientists and engineers in the legislature still end up throwing most of their money at lawyers.
The job seems to require law knowledge. For an extreme example, Trump got a lot of criticism for not knowing the procedures of his office – things like what’s he allowed to do, how can he get it done etc. How do you learn what levers are available to you as a senator, and how to pull them without getting into legal trouble? You get a law degree.
Thiel can rail against the capture of politics by lawyers while still recognizing that if he funds an engineer, the best case is that his candidate wins and is then promptly outmaneuvered by colleagues with more legal savvy. An engineer won’t be “effective” in Congress, because efficiency in Congress is not about having expertise related to the real world, but about knowing the right shibboleths so a judge in Hawaii can’t strike your work down.
So I don’t think it’s necessarily a pipeline problem. Yes, we can observe that the path to public office has no scientists walking it. But the problem is still that at the end of the path you have a bunch of vipers and that’s not gonna change no matter how much you work on the path itself.
Anon:
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but . . . everything you write is stuff that Thiel could already have realized back in 2014 when he was saying there weren’t enough scientists and engineers in Congress. So something seems to have changed since then, at least from his perspective.
I mean that it’s not inconsistent to believe that a) there are too many lawyers and b) there’s no point getting a non-lawyer elected given the current system (because they will write regulation that can be struck down on a technicality, or be mired in legal action, or get prosecuted for misremembering something while talking to the FBI, or or or). Thiel can reasonably believe both that we need a system that doesn’t require all this legal knowledge while also believing that any engineers he funds will be powerless in the current system.
My knowledge of Thiel’s opinions on the topic is limited to what you quoted in the post, so this is highly speculative. It has more to do with the reflection that I see in the screen ;)
Chair of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee:
Congressman Frank Lucas is a fifth generation Oklahoman whose family has lived and farmed in Oklahoma for over 120 years. Born on January 6, 1960 in Cheyenne, Oklahoma, Lucas graduated from Oklahoma State University in 1982 with a degree in Agricultural Economics.
And btw, Santos was on that committee until he stepped down.
Oh, and remember when Lamar Smith headed that committee with much support from the rightwing climate “skeptic” community?
Smith attended a private high school, then called Texas Military Institute, now known as TMI — The Episcopal School of Texas, and graduated in 1965.[13] He then earned a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University (1969)[14] and a J.D. from Southern Methodist University (1975).[15]
In 1969, Smith was hired as a management intern by the Small Business Administration in Washington, D.C.[16] He was a business and financial writer for the Christian Science Monitor (1970–1972),[16] was admitted to the Texas bar in 1975, and went into private practice in San Antonio with the firm of Maebius and Duncan, Inc.[16]
Not that I think only scientists should be on or even chair such a committee – but I do think it’s reasonable to speculate about whether, when the rubber hits the road, Peter might be more focused on the political views of CongressCritters than he is on the level of technical expertise that informs those beliefs.
In my observation – concerns about the “politicization of science” tend to be highly selective.
Joshua:
That’s funny—a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University who later was a management intern, a business writer, and a lawyer! What could possibly go wrong??
For a topic like this, the most famous quote comes from Shakespeare; according to Olivia Rutigliano, https://lithub.com/what-did-shakespeare-mean-when-he-wrote-lets-kill-all-the-lawyers/
“The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.” It’s said by a character called Dick the Butcher in Act IV, Scene II of William Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II, which was (we think) written between 1596 and 1599.
Rutigliano further indicates that things, as you might imagine, are more complicated than first thought:
“One reading of this strange quote suggests, therefore, that society could not exist in a state of fairness and peace without the protectiveness of both the law and its staunch guardians. Dick is suggesting that, in order for their coup to prevail, they must eradicate society of the very defenders of justice who could both stop the revolt he intends to help spur and then remove the power he hopes to grab for Cade.”
“In other words, this suggests that Shakespeare represented lawyers as the most fundamental defense against the grossest manifestations of power-hungry antics wrought by the scum of humanity.”
Rutigliano ends with “Whether lawyers symbolize evil or good is almost irrelevant; the most important thing about this quote is the upholding of a fair and just law system, itself.”
Rutigliano makes no mention of how often Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc., pop up in today’s discussion.
Isn’t this interesting?
Other unmentioned issues driving this insight concern the fundamentalist’s opposition to science and scientific explanations, post-WWII trends which coincide with the rise of rabid anti-communism (and its centralized rational planning), televangelism, neoliberalism and the increasing difficulties across the twentieth c. associated with understanding the complexities of hard sciences like math and physics.
Thiel, however, is a total ass.
It’s not just a right-wing problem. How many Dem congresspeople have science backgrounds?
> It’s not just a right-wing problem. How many Dem congresspeople have science backgrounds?
Perhaps what’s more interesting is how the issue of science backgrounds, or lack thereof, is being gamed for political purposes.
Peter’s call for more representatives with scientific backgrounds contrasts with the narratives that our institutions of science and our scientific “elites” are corrupted by “regulatory capture” and librul bias. Not to say that regulatory capture, or even librul bias aren’t real to some extent. But the bigger problem is the incoherent logic. Thiel wants more representatives to have a scientific background so they’ll better agree with him that fossil fuels are superior to renewables – but there’s no reason to believe that more representatives with scientific backgrounds would net that result. He’s using “scientific background” as a cynical cover for this ideological agenda.
The bigger issue here, IMO, is that these issues are being gamed. The real issues underlying regulatory capture are being gamed. The real issue of the politicization of science is being gamed. This kind of populism won’t effectively address the underling problems and, IMO, in the end will leave us in a pretty precarious situation. Consider where we’re going to be with the next pandemic. Consider this article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/03/opinion/bird-flu-h5n1-pandemic.html
Regardless of whether that article over-estimates the potential danger we’re facing, where are we going to be if MRNA vaccines or other therapeutics as promoted by scientific establishments like the CDC or the NIH or the FDA are necessary to address large-scale public health problems and the people supported by Theil are in the presidency and both Houses of Congress?
We’re heading towards a cliff.
The CDC and FDA (and to a large extent NIH) do not use science. It is “evidence based medicine”, a philosophy based on NHST that explicitly rejects using prior information.
Ie, there is a policy of *ignoring* science. Instead you draw conclusions from testing strawman models and indirectly use a wealth/influence weighted collective prior to decide what is correct.
The sooner people accept this uncomfortable truth, the sooner we can return to discovering actual miracle cures/drugs once per decade (anesthetics, insulin, penicillin, vitamins A/B/C/D, etc).
That a worldwide vaccination program was followed by even more cases and all cause mortality is just sad. The expectations/standards are practically non-existent at this point.
Actually a similar thing just happened in finance.
LIBOR (subjective predicted interest rates for unsecured loans), was replaced by SOFR (objective past interest rates for secured loans).
Which is better? A subjective estimation of the correct value, or objective measurement of the wrong value?
There seens to be something about getting politics involved that makes people choose the latter.
> The expectations/standards are practically non-existent at this point.
Exactly what I was talking about.
What verification do you have that we as a country, or the world, are in balance worse off because of the output of institutions like the CDC, NIH, etc.?
Here’s the answer. You have none.
I get that you think that NHST is the spawn of the devil, but maybe you need to put this all into context.
Once again, you display binary thinking; because something is suboptimal doesn’t mean that it’s in balance negative.
This, also….
> That a worldwide vaccination program was followed by even more cases and all cause mortality is just sad.
You have zero evidence of a causal relationship between increases in all cause mortality and vaccination. The available evidence indicates that the vaccines prevented millions of deaths.
The bigger problem we’re facing, IMO, is this kind of nutty speculation based on unfounded assumptions about counterfactuals, being passed off as meaningful analysis.
You have, once again, immediately created a strawman and started arguing with yourself.
I have no verification that engineers in a lab are more likely to build a smartphone than monks praying in a church. Whether the smartphones are a net good is a separate question.
I mean, there is no RCT comparing engineers from samsung vs praying monks. There is “no evidence” one group will build a snartphone faster than the other, so lets switch to monks and assume they are faster until proven otherwise.
So your answer to a putative strawman is reductio absurdism?
I am not a fan of Fiorina. But, most of her career was spent in high-tech industries. AT&T/Lucent/…/HP (CEO job but her performance got mixed reviews) Was on the board of TSMC. Arguably she has some sort of background in technology.
Ron Paul majored in biology and got an MD. That probably means that he passed organic chemistry.
I do feel that there is an issue with respect to knowledge and understanding of science and technology in the legislative process. I am out of touch now, but, long ago, I had some exposure to congress. The science committees had staff with science and technology backgrounds. But, in some areas where technology was important, there were many able staff but few or none with technical backgrounds.
There was an agency, the Office of Technology Assessment, that purported to offer congress advice on technical issues. It seemed to me that its studies arrived long after issues had been resolved. But, others think it was valuable. See https://www.brookings.edu/research/it-is-time-to-restore-the-us-office-of-technology-assessment/.
The Congressional Research Service provides good background material on technology issues. See https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R47373 for an example of their current work.
The GAO has a Science and Technology group. See https://www.gao.gov/science-technology and https://www.gao.gov/about/contact-us/find-an-expert?f%5B0%5D=topic%3A276. I don’t know how this group interacts with hill staff.
Of course, industry is often willing to explain technical issues to members and staff. But this information suffers from at least two weaknesses. First, it reflects the point of view of the firm or industry that is supplying it. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it reflects the current concerns of the entity supplying it. In my experience, it was rarely wrong but often incomplete. Information from industry often lacks a long-run overview of the likely evolution of the relevant technology or the possible problems it will bring. It’s too much six-o’clock news and not enough Cory Doctorow or Neal Stephenson.
When James Garfield was a member of congress, he developed a new proof of the Pythagorean theorem. See https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-james-a-garfields-proof-of-the-pythagorean-theorem. One source states that “he had hit upon [it] in some mathematical amusements and discussions with other M. C.’s [members of Congress].”
If you want to support scientists or engineers with political aspirations, you can find suggestions at 314 Action (https://314action.org/), but Thiel wouldn’t like them.
Supposedly, Adam Schiff applied to both Harvard Medical School and Harvard Law School from Stanford and was admitted to both, choosing to attend HLS. If so, he must have taken a lot of science, and math as an undergraduate.
I will see if I can verify this.
And, if I get the opportunity, I will try to ask him about the “science and technology” challenge.
— Mark (Data Scientist)
Further research on this: I asked an attorney, who worked for Congress for a while, from my long-ago commune (if you can believe a coed commune that included three military veterans) …
“In general, it’s a good idea to have people in Congress from a lot of different backgrounds, so they can provide expertise and experience in developing legislation in those areas (military, big business, small business, science, medicine, engineering, civil rights, public housing, etc.).
Legal training is helpful because most law schools teach you to anticipate the possible consequences of the legislation you are trying to draft. The tax laws are the best example of the need for this kind of analysis.”
Also, I re-verified the Adam Schiff – dual major (pre-med + pre-law) – story.
“… but most scientists and engineers are politically liberal…”
That’s not my experience! Socially liberal more likely but even at that the “most” claim is borderline.
My experience is that in most industries, scientists and engineers lean right, and in oil, mining, agriculture and other resource industries they’re heavily right. That’s why Democrats hate resource industries so much: they fund the right. In places like Boeing where the engineers are unionized, it’s a mix, running to both extremes. But even Boeing has to make and sell stuff, which makes it hard to be too far left without smashing into a wall of blatantly conflicting beliefs.
Of course, across the board, in taxpayer and donation funded “industries,” – NGOs, academia, and government – scientists are liberal – but not universally. You know what Phil likes to say: it’s hard to convince someone to go against the butter on their bread, or something like that. If you survive on donations and tax revenue, you tend to want more of that, which is why Democrats are so keen on throwing money at NGOs, raising taxes and expanding government science agencies.
So, no, in general, I don’t think the world divides “Science = Left”.
I would be surprised if engineers lean further left than lawyers & political scientists. But if Thiel is backing the latter despite the overall political leanings of the group, it tells us something about the association of that background with politics.
It’s strange that the left keeps advancing this claim on science, when in fact as the country has become dramatically more educated since the early Roosevelt years, it has shifted steadily *right*, at least by the measure of congressional representation.
once again I’ll reference my favorite Wikipedia chart:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Congress#/media/File:Combined–Control_of_the_U.S._House_of_Representatives_-_Control_of_the_U.S._Senate.png
You shouldn’t believe what people write. The quote gives it away: “The rest don’t understand that windmills don’t work when the wind isn’t blowing or that solar panels don’t work at night”. He claims he wants “reasonable science, reasonable technology policy”, but his examples make it clear that he doesn’t.
Some other issues, as someone who has hired alpha sci/tech people for history-changing political projects…
1/ People who think dominant left-politics is awful AND are high IQ AND sci/tech qualified have a choice between a/ making loads of $$ with 1000X less disruption to their lives, and building things of value quite quickly OR b/ much less money and death threats / having to hire lawyers for years for political show trials etc and lots of pointless meetings almost definitely building little to nothing of value cos theyre in dysfunctional DC.
Few choose (b).
2/ This is a cycle that has deepened over decades and is ever harder to reverse. In 1950s lots of brightest who won University prizes wd become well known for public service – now most of them become rich instead. In Cicero’s terms, theyre tending to their fish-ponds while the Republic dies.
So another aspect of what youre asking re Thiel is – he knows many sci/tech people who could be very valuable in politics but ~100% of them have an obvious answer to the tradeoff above. I’ve met many of them in Silicon Valley. Individually one can understand their decision but collectively it’s disastrous.
It’s hard to be optimistic about America or the world unless this cycle is broken.
Dominic Cummings
(I hired very technically able people to do Brexit referendum and other things, the NYT et al described this as a Putin-Facebook-Cambridge Analytica conspiracy…)
I wonder if Thiel thinks that a person who studied philosophy in college and went on to get a J.D. at a prestigious law school is qualified to lead?
Oncodoc:
I assume Thiel is aware of variation: credentials, subject-matter expertise, etc. only provide partial information. Also, as an earlier commenter pointed out, he was engaging in hyperbole, as no special scientific training is required to know that solar panels don’t work at night, just as no special scientific training is required to know that it’s ok that solar panels don’t work at night if they’re part of a larger electric power system with storage possibilities, etc. So I guess he was speaking of averages.
To put it another way, I’m guessing that Thiel doesn’t like the idea of having legislators who studied philosophy in college and went on to get a J.D. at a prestigious law school; he prefers the idea of legislators who are scientists and engineers. But, as someone who wants to influence policy, it makes sense that his first priorities in who to fund would be that person’s (a) political ideology, (b) willingness to listen to Thiel n the future, (c) abilities as a political leader, and (d) abilities as a political candidate. Whether the person has technical expertise wold be some kind of distant fifth in the priority list.
That’s kind of the point of my post: Back when Thiel was just giving speeches, he could talk about how important it was to have technical people in Congress. But when it was time for him to spend his money to support candidates, he didn’t have infinite options to choose among, and after satisfying conditions (a), (b), (c), (d) above, there was nobody left who was also a scientist or engineer. I think part of it is just the numbers—at least according to surveys, scientists and engineers are mostly on the left half of the spectrum, and Thiel is looking for candidates on the far right—and also see Dominic’s comment above, that some of the possible far-right technically qualified candidates would rather just make money and build things than go around talking about privatizing Social Security or making abortion illegal or whatever. Holding those views in private is one thing but making public statements is another; it’s a real commitment that lots of people won’t be ready to do.
Not a candidate (currently serves in the House for 4th district of Kentucky), but there is Thomas Massie, M.I.T. alumn (BS electrical engineering, ’93; MS, ’96), who is a known climate change denier, compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust, and voted against making lynching a federal hate crime.
Unanon:
I looked up this guy on Wikipedia, and . . . it says he won the 2.70 competition. That’s pretty cool! Also it says he “called Kerry’s political science degree from Yale University a ‘pseudoscience degree.'” That’s pretty funny. Somebody’s gotta ask him what he thinks of Blake Masters, J. D. Vance, Kris Kobach, and Ted Cruz, with all their political science and policy degrees.
Too bad he spoke at the John Birch Society convention and compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust. I guess nobody’s perfect.
The Wikipedia article about Thomas Massie is knee buckling but the part that makes one despair for America is found in this famous 2021 Xmas photo of Massie and his family asking Santa for ammo:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/05/us/thomas-massie-kentucky-representative-guns-family-photo/index.htmlo
“US Rep. Thomas Massie is drawing criticism after tweeting a photo of him and his family holding guns in front of a Christmas tree, just days after four teenagers were killed in a school shooting in Michigan.”
“Merry Christmas!, ps. Santa, please bring ammo,” read the Saturday tweet by the Republican representative from Kentucky, which showed everyone in the photo holding various types of guns.
> a bunch of degrees in political science and […]. No scientists […] at all!
Interesting.
I wonder why so many have degrees in political science when it seems like political engineering ought to be much more useful.
Shiva Ayyadurai, who holds 4 degrees from MIT, ran as a Republican for a US Senate seat from Massachusetts in 2020. He claimed voter fraud when he lost the primary, and has promoted a great deal of pseudoscience related to vaccines and GMOs.
All 3 Republican politicians from the Sununu family went to MIT. The only one currently in office is Chris, the governor of NH. He majored in civil and environmental engineering, but has flip-flopped on climate change. He’s pretty moderate on other issues, though, so he gets a pass from me.
Only tangentially related, but there are also many right wing politicians with close family members in STEM academia. Netanyahu (who also went to MIT, but majored in architecture) had an uncle, Elisha Netanyahu, who was a mathematician at the Technion. Trump’s uncle, John Trump, was an electrical engineering professor at MIT. Liz Truss’s father, John Truss, is a professor of logic at the University of Leeds. Bill Barr’s brother, Stephen Barr, is a particle physicist at the University of Delaware. And Paul Wolfowitz’s father was the great Cornell statistician Jacob Wolfowitz.
This suggests more than one sorting mechanism is at work. I think the main selection comes from the fact that politicians tend to be power-hungry and suffer from self-aggrandizement (Santos perhaps being the poster-person). Fewer scientists suffer from this than do lawyers, though they are not immune as your examples suggest. These days it is hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to go into politics without having perverse goals that serve their self interests, regardless of the public interest. While scientists certainly have self-interests, perhaps the areas they study force them to be somewhat humble. Social scientists (I’m extending this to include lawyers), on the other hand, have belief in things like nudges that make them feel all-powerful. This screens out relatively more scientists than in the latter group.
Dale:
Interesting thoughts. Of all the people who we’ve talked about in this blog regarding junk science, I can only think of two who have had gone into politics: John Yoo and Dr. Oz. Part of it is that there’s room for a lot more celebrity scientists, social scientists, lawyers, etc., than there is room for celebrity politicians. For example, Marc Hauser could’ve run for local office after getting kicked out of Harvard—but, even if he’d succeeded, it’s not like being a town councilmember or state legislator would’ve given him fame. In science he got fame without having to do the hard work; politics would be the opposite: he’d have to work his ass off to get elected, then keep working every two years to get reelected. Similarly with Ariely or all the rest of them. Yoo had an appointed position so that was different; he didn’t have to work for it. Brian Wansink had a government position too, but it wasn’t political, really, it was more of the usual straight-up government wasting our tax money.
Consider what by all accounts are two extremely normal dudes — Reid Ribble (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_Ribble), and Dan Lapinski (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Lipinski). The former was a successful non-college educated business owner, the latter hadks an engineering background.
They had a great interview on The Dispatch (https://thedispatch.com/podcast/dispatch-podcast/former-congressmen-burn-down-the/). Congress does not function for these people. They describe being unfulfilled, and it’s immediately apparent that people used to _doing stuff_ wash out of Congress because of the dysfunction.
I think there’s very likely some sort of latent “ambition profile” of the people who get law degrees / go into politics. It isn’t just that they’re awful people :P
Great points but I’m not sure I would call the way Congress operates “dysfunction”.
The issue with scientists is that, by the time a scientist reaches full professor, they are used to calling their own shots. They’re not use to having to compromise, and they certainly don’t have to find the middle ground between *four* constituencies: the opposing party, voters, donors and their own views.
If someone wants to pass bills in Congress, the skill is in understanding the relative importance of each of those constituencies for any given bill, the overall importance of the bill, and finally tying the necessary number of strings together to get enough support from each constituency to move forward.
These are not skills possessed by most scientists.
Chipmunk:
Good point on being not used to having to compromise. I find all sorts of academic politics to be difficult, not because I think I’m above such tasks, but just because they require a lot of work and involve a lot of pain. I’d rather do teaching, research, and service: in all these areas I can make useful contributions without the unpleasantness. On the other hand, if I were a lawyer, I guess that this sort of unpleasantness would be unavoidable, in which case why not go into politics?
The reluctance/inability to compromise is something I think generally applies to academics – but I would not distinguish between academic scientists, humanists, lawyers, or any other discipline. Most academics are not suited to politics – unwilling to compromise is only one such characteristic. There is also the need for a politician to (over)simplify and speak in sound bites. None of these traits come easily to academics. But again, I don’t see this as a particular distinction by discipline.
My impression is to be in Congress you must be willing to say things that are just wrong. You have to do it regularly, and you have to act as if they are obvious truths.
This comes a lot easier to psychopaths. I would guess people with abnormally high scores on both psychopathy scales make up most of Congress. At least 40% possibly 75-80%
https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/LSRP.php
People here may be interested to find where they live on these scales.
Andrew: right, why struggle with matching up so many -and difficult, and unpleasant – lose ends when so much can be done without the suffering?
Honestly, I think alot of politicians love what most scientists consider suffering. Politicians can talk all day and not feel pressured to do anything useful! :)
Dale, good point, politicians don’t mind hacking important complex topics into three-word phrases that are ex to remember, whereas scientists are more inclined to expand some seemingly simple idea into an encyclopedia.
The Founding Fathers wanted a nation of laws, not men; what we wound up with is a nation of lawyers.
Thiel’s view is an example of what Bernard Williams called “that strangely tempting fallacy,” the ‘fat oxen’ principle: who drives fat oxen must himself be fat.
It seems that such bipartisan difference on education background has a flip at the presidential level—Ever since Reagan, every democratic potus (Clinton, Obama, Biden) is a JD, while none of the republican counterpart (Reagan, two Bush, and Trump) had exposures to law school training. Maybe it was the Piranha effect of too many GOP lawyers competing for the limited resource in the congress? Or maybe the Thiel army is just arriving to flip this flip?
To be successful in the modern Republican party, you have to be anti-science and anti-reality.
– Climate change is fake
– Vaccines don’t work
– Trump won the 2020 election
– Ignore modern economics
– Religious, often fundamentalist
– Oppose public funding of science
I could list 100 more
Is there a good data source on the backgrounds of Congressional staffers? Since they write most of the legislation, that might be more important than the backgrounds of the elected officials. To be elected requires media attention, money, connections, and the ability to simplify and produce sound bites, so it doesn’t surprise me to see lawyers dominating there. But if the staffers are also predominantly from non-science backgrounds, that presents a different sort of problem and one that I think may be even more serious.