Reply #21: You completely ignore that government is politics, not science. [View All]

[Igel]

If science dictated the laws then it would be an interesting world. First, only a small subset of people would dictate the laws overall--and any one law would be dictated by an exceedingly small number of people. Seldom are the people that do research into smoking, estrogen-mimics, climate change, particulate emissions (etc., etc.) the same.

I'm not talking about public health officials who read others' work and try to formulate policy. I'm talking about the science itself. As soon as you involve the officials you're looking at personal biases, political calculations, what's easily possible given the enforcement budget or the set of laws on the books.

It's very much an undemocratic point of view. But since "Democrat" is something that you can be by just completing a form without any kind of test or examination, it's sometimes the point of view of Democrats (and so, in some sense, a very undemocratic yet Democratic point of view).

Democracy involves trade-offs. We sometimes like majoritarianism, in some ways the purest form of democracy, when we're in that 50% + 1 majority and somebody's in our way. Then the people are always right. We also love having a small set of people run roughshod over the will of the demos when we're in agreement with that small set. Then we're all for a representational, non-majoritarian kind of democracy. However, since we have one or the other and we've gone for representational democracy--where the elected leaders in some way act on behalf of the people--it means that the scientists don't get to dictate policy. Some like the idea of a technocracy; some hate it. It doesn't matter: We don't have it and people aren't generally about to say, "You know, I'm really incompetent at managing things--I'll leave everything to the experts. They're so much smarter than me, and look--they run their lives perfectly, so they must be able to get my life right."