this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2023
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Have y'll tried letting the smart people make decisions?
This is called "technocracy", and while it's cool on paper, it leads to a disconnect between the people in charge and the actual problems of the people.
The Simpsons showed us the flaws of this idea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technocracy_movement
And GIEC/IPCC is a consensus body that is consistently behind the curve on the science.
Imagine if we’d just listened to scientists directly. We could have gotten started on tackling climate change before the Rio conference in 1992 even took place.
Yup. Look at how the best-and-brightest theory worked out in the mid 20th century--e.g., the Clintons. Technocracy doesn't work.
Uh, the Clintons weren’t the smartest amongst us. Smarter than some sure, and that’s a pretty low bar these days, but I lived through that era. We were not governed by our smartest, by any stretch.
Yup, but it's a question of whom society recognizes as smart. Bill and Hill met at Yale. They sold us a bill of good with free trade. They thought they could get away with Hillary crafting a national healthcare system, almost in secret, and that everyone would accept it b/s she's brilliant. Obama, Columbia/Harvard/Univ of Chicago, bailed out bankers, not home owners. That was a disaster.
The term, best and brightest, came into common use in describing to the Kennedy adminstration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Best_and_the_Brightest They really bungled Vietnam.
I don't know that we've ever been governed by the best and brightest. Sometimes I think we're governed by the most venal and greedy.
It’s objectively not, though?
If it were, well, that’s been explored in Idiocracy.
The point isn’t that we should give the reins to the “smartest”, but the actual smartest, for a change.