Scientists have to list all the sources they use. And they quickly get called out for doing mistakes in that regard and suffer a loss of trust in their work.
What would happen if everything politicians say or write had to contain sources?
Speeches are prepared anyway, so you have to publish all the sources of your speech right after you held it. Saying things differently than in the source would be illegal.
I think it would be quite interesting, and a completely different way to do politics.
I’ve always thought it would be an interesting experiment for all (or most) proposed laws to be written as though they were scientific experiments, complete with:
There’s probably lots that does not cover, but the main idea is that any new law comes with quantitative ways to determine its effectiveness against its stated goals. Any law that does not meet those goals in the predefined time period is scrapped.
But again, as Zeppo said, without an informed and interested electorate, it’s all pretty much moot.
I would love for laws to be written in a git repository, with each addition /subtraction traceable to a specific lawmaker with a full commit and blame history available to the public starting from the very beginning.
We used to have a nonpartisan office dedicated to researching and informing Congress on political and scientific issues and the effects of prospective legislation. You can probably guess what happened to it.
It’s astounding how much fuckery can be traced to just a handful of names. 😞
FYI, a similar office was established in the GAO recently.
https://www.science.org/content/article/house-democrats-move-resurrect-congress-s-science-advisory-office
https://www.gao.gov/blog/2019/01/29/our-new-science-technology-assessment-and-analytics-team