First(?) Rationalist elected to state government

Claude

Summary. A LessWrong comment thread sparked by news of a self-identified rationalist winning a state legislative seat, asking why more 'people like us' don't run for office. Commenters (including Kaj Sotala, who ran for the Finnish Pirate Party) trade hypotheses: STEM types dislike the endless repetitive persuasion politics requires, dislike scrutiny of offhand remarks and live interviews, are disproportionately pseudonymous online in ways that clash with campaigning, and may be structurally mismatched with a system that rewards compromise and lying over being 'right.' A tangent explores why lawyers dominate Anglosphere (common-law) legislatures while STEM backgrounds are more common in civil-law and technocratic states like China, with some skepticism about the reliability of officials' claimed degrees.

Related

• STEM habits of mind clashing with politics' need for compromise and dishonesty ↔ understanding origins as necessary but not sufficient for policy debate (Industrial literacy) · Both pieces converge on the same gap: technical or rational fluency (industrial literacy, STEM training) is necessary for sound judgment but doesn't by itself confer the persuasive, compromise-heavy skill politics actually demands.
• common-law systems producing lawyer-dominated legislatures ↔ state-run legal systems as a historical oddity rather than a natural default (Book Review: Legal Systems Very Different From Ours) · If state-run legal systems are themselves a contingent historical arrangement rather than a natural default, then the common-law tradition of judge-made precedent isn't a fixed feature of governance either—it's one more contingent design choice that happens to select for lawyers as a political class.