I personally dream of a technocratic demarchy model of governance where decision makers are chosen randomly from a pool of qualified professionals who opt-in for a given field.
I learned this when I was in the military and going to medical to get a checkup.
I’m a 5’5 male and I weighed about 160 lbs at the time with a pretty strict workout routine which consisted of weight lifting and cardio 4-5 times a week.
The corpsman that was taking my measurements and weight told me I was obese after recording my BMI, and I was shocked, but he told me not to put any thought into it.
It was never meant to be used for individuals. It was designed for populations.
There are some short fat people with 0 muscle mass, and they have “healthy BMI” despite being built like a beach ball and there are tall muscular people who will never get a “healthy” BMI due to muscle and bone density from all that exercise.
For a population they cancel out and still give an accurate enough reading for the population.
But for individuals it gives false results.
That’s why the military will check BMI first, then if you fail they use a (relatively) more accurate method and use those results instead.
I read about this before. I do believe there is some merit in it. I work for a company that has traditionally moved engineers into management and I can say it has worked very well. That said, a government is not a corporation and there are human aspects that may be overlooked by some engineers. Or that would at least be some people’s concern.
The worst bosses I've ever had were highly technical people put into those roles because they were perceived to be the best with those skills. There was repeatedly little-to-no regard for their soft skills and working for those people was miserable.
I’m sorry to hear that. The way we have managed it has worked but some of that could be that the engineers that were promoted have always or mostly been able to empathize.
The thing about technocracy is that there need to be human concerns and philosophies driving whatever scientifically-driven policy-making it's being done.
Do it wrong and that's how we end up with eugenics. It's incredibly easy to justify horrible stuff using metrics, the essential questions that cannot be overlooked is what metrics ought to be valued and why, and science is not the right method to make the ultimate judgement of what the values of a society ought to be.
Please for the love of the gods don’t put engineers in charge of anything but engineering projects. You want someone to decide about bridges, dams, power, etc?We’re your people. You want someone do decide what rights people should have or economic policy? Keep us the fuck away we’re basically mad scientists.
I think there’s a balancing point where people in positions to exercise political will would use data to inform their decisions… I feel like that was probably the objective.
The point is not putting engineers in charge of everything. Engineers can make policy on infrastructure. Economists can make policy on the economy and sociologists can make policy on social issues. The point is to stop putting people in charge because they belong to party X or are really good friends with person Y.
Ok cool, I’ve seen plenty of people make the argument that stem people should be in charge instead of that we should be in charge of policy we’re experts of
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