The following is a superb blog (NYT, 13 February)
which all thoughtful Americans ought to pay
attention to. Despite the reference to Thatcher
in the UK and Merkel in Germany, it's still the
case that scientists are hardly represented in
any of the West European governments. And yet
pretty well all activities within a country's GDP
now depend on scientists, engineers and
mathematicians. Will they ever displace the
preponderance of lawyers in our legislatures?
Keith
Why Dont Americans Elect Scientists?
By
<http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/13/why-dont-americans-elect-scientists//author/john-allen-paulos/>JOHN
ALLEN PAULOS
Ive visited Singapore a few times in recent
years and been impressed with its wealth and
modernity. I was also quite aware of its
world-leading programs in mathematics education
and naturally noted that one of the candidates
for president was Tony Tan, who has a Ph.D. in
applied mathematics. Tan won the very close
election and joined the government of Prime
Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who also has a degree in mathematics.
China has even more scientists in key positions
in the government. President Hu Jintao was
trained as a hydraulic engineer and Premier Wen
Jiabao as a geomechanical engineer. In fact,
eight out of the nine top government officials in
China
<http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2011/01/20/danger-america-is-losing-its-edge-in-innovation/>have
scientific backgrounds. There is a scattering of
scientist-politicians in high government
positions in other countries as well. German
Chancellor Angela Merkel has a doctorate in
physical chemistry, and, going back a bit,
Margaret Thatcher earned a degree in chemistry.
One neednt endorse the politics of these people
or countries to feel that given the complexities
of an ever more technologically sophisticated
world, the United States could benefit from the
participation and example of more scientists in
government. This is obviously no panacea
Herbert Hoover was an engineer, after all but
more people with scientific backgrounds would be
a welcome counterweight to the vast majority of
legislators and other officials in this country who are lawyers.
Among the 435 members of the House, for example,
there are
<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/09/science/09emily.html?scp=1&sq=scientists%20in%20cogress&st=cse>one
physicist, one chemist, one microbiologist, six
engineers and nearly two dozen representatives
with medical training. The case of doctors and
the body politic is telling. Everyone knows
roughly what doctors do, and so those with
medical backgrounds escape the anti-intellectual
charge of irrelevance often thrown at those in
the hard sciences. Witness Senator Bill Frist,
Gov. Howard Dean and even Ron Paul.
This showing is sparse even with the inclusion of
the doctors, but it shouldnt be too surprising.
For complex historical reasons, Americans have
long privately dismissed scientists and
mathematicians as impractical and elitist, even
while publicly paying lip service to them.
One reason is that an abstract, scientific
approach to problems and issues often leads to
conclusions that are at odds with religious and
cultural beliefs and scientists are sometimes
tone-deaf to the social environment in which they
state their conclusions. A more politically
sensitive approach to problems and issues, on the
other hand, often leads to positions that simply
dont jibe with the facts, no matter how
delicately phrased. Examples as diverse as stem
cell research and the economic stimulus abound.
Politicians, whose job is in many ways more
difficult than that of scientists, naturally try
to sway their disparate constituencies, but the
prevailing celebrity-infatuated, money-driven
culture and their personal ambitions often lead
them to employ rhetorical tricks rather than
logical arguments. Both Republicans and Democrats
massage statistics, use numbers to provide
decoration rather than information, dismiss, or
at least distort, the opinions of experts,
torture
<http://www.stanford.edu/%7Ebobonich/glances%20ahead/IV.excluded.middle.html>the
law of the excluded middle (i.e., flip-flop),
equivocate, derogate and obfuscate.
Dinosaurs cavorting with humans, climate
scientists cooking up the global warming hoax,
the health establishment using vaccines to bring
about socialism its hard to imagine mainstream
leaders in other advanced economies not laughing at such claims.
Often too interested in politics as
entertainment, the media is complicit in keeping
such controversies running. Doing so isnt hard
since vivid, just-so stories and anecdotes
usually trump (or should that be
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3_Fx8x21kE&sns=em>Trump)
dry, sometimes counterintuitive facts and statistics.
Skepticism enjoins scientists in fact all of us
to suspend belief until strong evidence is
forthcoming, but this tentativeness is no match
for the certainty of ideologues and seems to
suggest to many the absurd idea that all opinions
are equally valid. The chimera of the fiercely
independent everyman reigns. What else explains
the seemingly equal weight accorded to the
statements of entertainers and biological
researchers on childhood vaccines? Or to
pronouncements of industry lobbyists and climate
scientists? Or to economic prescriptions like
9-9-9 and those of Nobel-prize winning economists?
Americans grandiose (to use Newt Gingrichs
malapropism) egalitarianism also helps explain
why the eight or nine original Republican
presidential candidates suffered little for
espousing, or at least not clearly opposing,
scientifically untenable positions. Jon Huntsman,
the only exception, received excessive kudos for
what seems a rather lukewarm acceptance of climate change.
To avoid receiving the candidates canned
responses on these and other issues, I sometimes
wish that a debate moderator would forgo a
standard question about immigration or jobs and
instead ask the candidates to solve a simple
puzzle, make an elementary estimate, perform a basic calculation.
Of course, the other side of the two cultures
chasm should bear some of the onus for this lack
of communication between politicians and
scientists. Too few scientists are willing to
engage in public debates, to explain the
relevance of their fields clearly and without
jargon, and, in the process, to risk some jeering
from a few colleagues. Nevertheless, American
scientists do more on this front than those in most other countries.
Perhaps because the words rhyme, its sometimes
said that attitude is more important than
aptitude in helping to bring about innovation,
economic progress and social change. The dubious
corollary is that freewheeling Americans who
question authority and think outside the box have
an abundance of attitude that helps make up for a
declining performance in science and technology.
Maybe so, but attitude can only go so far. There
is certainly no requirement for a Singaporean
science background, but scientifically literate
government leaders who push for evidence-based
policies and demonstrate a scientific outlook are
needed more than glib panderers with attitude.
<http://www.math.temple.edu/paulos>John Allen
Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple
University, is the author of eight books,
including Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper.
Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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