Re: Confidence: A Basic Politics Puzzle

Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@calweb.com)
Tue, 18 Feb 1997 18:14:29 -0800 (PST)


> Come on, physics is about lots of very useful stuff like momentum, E&M
> radiation, heat diffusion, etc. which touch lots of lives in lots of
> ways, and yet most people will defer to experts on these topics.
> Robin D. Hanson hanson@hss.caltech.edu http://hss.caltech.edu/~hanson/

Those "experts" in physics have proven themselves worthy of my
deference: my microwave heats soup quite well, my car gets me to
work, we even landed on the moon.

The "experts" in politics released 180,000 sex offenders last year
to make room for innocent drug users. The "experts" sent young men
to die on foreign soil, did radiation experiments on citizens, put
Japanese-Americans in internment camps, murdered women and children
at Waco, and did it all by taking half my earnings at gunpoint.

That's three reasons so far for political arguments to be intense:
1. Low testability of hypotheses
2. High stakes
3. Experts' history of failure

-- 
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com>
<http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>