alt Hacker NewsKnowing nothing about it this particular movement, the main danger I foresee is essentially hubris. That the PHDs will be overly confident in political decisions they make in new domains completely foreign to them, primarily due to their expertise in their own domains and that this will lead to disastrous policy decisions.
I see this often in many areas. Perhaps they'll be lucky and have a few behavioral psychologists among them to maintain intellectual humility.
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I’m not sure “brainy” people are that much more likely to think they can make good decisions than any other politician. So why do you feel this would exacerbate the hubris politicians already have?
Politics also require quite a bit of emotional intelligence and charisma and ability to get diverse people to come to the table for compromises. Academic achievements are orthogonal to all these.
Best case would be multi-talented persons who have both IQ and EQ and good character. Just IQ is not enough.
> Knowing nothing about it this particular movement
It's a pity this disclaimer cannot be made to serve as a header for about 99% of the comments here today, because, holy shit...
Looking back my guess would be that infiltration is an even bigger danger. The opportunity of visibility and power, without the hassle of climbing the ranks for decades inside an established party, attracts a certain type of human.
> That the PHDs will be overly confident
Definitely a risk, but politicians are professionals at being overly confident. With this selection (there are not only PhDs, and not only academics), there is actually a chance of... actually trying to understand the problems?
I bet we wouldn't hear about it when it fails. At least not from science.com
That directly contradicts the Dunning-Kruger effect. In my own experience, academics are much less likely to be overconfident and are actually quite happy to admit they don't know something. The overconfident STEM people that you are talking about are in my experience engineers with bachelor's or masters degrees. Maybe biased by the online communities I frequent, but computer engineers are typically the worst IMO.
Epistemic trespassing
One recurring political function of a technocratic government is for it to make difficult decisions and clean up years of rent extraction, only to step down and let the political incumbents resume extraction unbothered for another decade or so.
Romania [0] and Italy [1]'s political elites have been aptly doing it, it's no new technology. Ironically, the Serb govt that was just replaced came to power on an anti corruption reform wave itself, so this may be even more interesting to follow.
[0] Ciolos govt
[1] Monti, Ciampi
if you know human history you already know how it will end up
Comparing this parliament with a vipers den of the lying career politicians we have in the UK (exposed again during the last budget announcement) I'd say Serbia is unlikely to have it worse.
Being ruled by the career politicians is NOT an advantage, and the innumerable examples from all around the world will prove that.
Humble politicians loose elections and negotiations.
Better than the absolute idiots who are running the US into the ground now
We should only let the dumbest and least capable of deception or hubris run our governments, then.
> fight corruption and establish meritocracy, accountability, and the rule of law
Keep into account that the baseline for governing Serbia is low. As long as they can lower the corruption, they can do a lot wrong and still come out ahead.
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I also want to see them succeed. After sitting in meetings with some of the world's brightest software engineers over the last 20 years and observing progress come to a stand-still because of their (in)decisions, I am very skeptical. It beats a corrupt government any day though.