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<p>I agree. The problem with MANY politicians (conservative AND liberal) is that they have reached their conclusions BEFORE getting their facts straight. AND in politics, you don’t want to be seen as “not being firm” - if you are unfirm, you’ll be accused of flip-flopping. Yet you can’t BE FIRM if you’re open to the possibility of changing your views as you adapt to information.</p>
<p>You could say that conclusions ARE a sort of AXIOMS. Of course, SOME axioms are changeable. But many people don’t change their axioms (and never will). They don’t have much of an incentive to change them (especially the vast majority of people who won’t live differently whether they, say, accept the genetic basis of personality or not).</p>
<p>kerry used an argument similar to that but he lost. Nonetheless, while Kerry did adjust his views on some issues, he certainly has already prematurely reached his conclusions on other issues. </p>
<p>On the other hand, if you’re a scientist who is truly using the scientific method, you don’t reach conclusions before getting your facts straight. Of course, a politician can use social policies as hypotheses to investigate (we could say that Communism was an experiment, for example). But you can call anything an experiment. </p>
<p>Of course, now that we’re starting to understand human nature (from the research in biology, social psychology, and genetics), we now are starting to get in a position of finally developing policies that acknowledge human nature (and help utilize human nature to the fullest - for example - free market systems with incentives are far more compatible with human nature than communist regimes - as people are intrinsically selfish and are rarely motivated for the common good). But when people have already reached their conclusions as to which policies will work and which policies won’t work, they aren’t willing to listen to the scientists and policy-makers.</p>
<p>The problem is that science can easily be misinterpreted as well. For example, Herrnstein and Murray’s “Bell Curve” has some very legitimate points. But it is VERY prone to misinterpretation (for example, while it is true that many social programs have failed in part due to their assumptions that all people are capable of doing the same things under the same environments, this cannot be used as a justification that IQ tests are always the BEST way to sort out people, ESPECIALLY when we don’t know how these people would do in a DIFFERENT environment => especially when resources aren’t constrained and when people have the option of self-directed learning that fits their learning styles the most => the problem is that bureaucracies don’t like self-studiers because self-studiers deny them of money, as they tend to receive money proportionate to the number of students in the system). (and since there are no facts in science, mistakes can be made when people adopt policies based on science). The other problem is that a policy that works among ONE group of people may not work for ANOTHER group of people. For example, the social welfare systems in Scandinavia would probably work A LOT better there than they would in the US (since the US is far more heterogeneous, and welfare programs here would ultimately turn out to be more costly).</p>
<p>One LEADING misinterpretation I ALWAYS see among scientists is the misinterpretation of OVERGENERALIZATION. You can ONLY generalize your results to what has been PROVEN in our very little tiny corner of the universe (we can use our results to predict what we don’t know). But our predictions aren’t always right. If we didn’t peek out into the universe, we still wouldn’t know that Newton’s laws are only approximations to more fundamental equations (and thus cannot be generalized to places outside of our little tiny planet). (the same goes for social policies too, as they cannot be overgeneralized to an era of the Internet)</p>
<p>this is why I trust the sciences of human nature (since those are at least fairly universal among humans on earth, which should be good enough for our social policies). </p>
<p>But since science is self-adaptive and adapts itself to NEW INFORMATION, it is better than anything else we can do.</p>
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<p>A VERY interesting book that you should read is Steven Pinker’s “Blank Slate”, which addresses the issues that the biological and cognitive sciences are having on policy-making. Basically, liberals and conservatives are both uncomfortable with genetic influences on human behavior.</p>
<p>==
But another thing is that we must distinguish between NORMATIVE AXIOMS and FACTUAL AXIOMS. If everyone accepted the same fundamental frameworks of what is physically true and what isn’t physically true, they would still differ in position due to normative axioms. If everyone believed in evolution, they’d still differ on their interpretations of whether, for example, animals deserve rights or not (as you cannot deduce normative axioms from any general body of knowledge, but you must assume them).</p>