During COVID the UK government has been heavily advised by the SAGE committee (an emergency committee of scientists), including a subcommittee of behavioural scientists who advised on what the reaction to measures like lockdowns might be. I don’t know how reliable behavioural science is at the moment (with the replication crisis) but this seemed like a reasonable move—being guided by them rather than politicians’ own hunches.
Hmm, I do think I honestly believe that behavioral scientists might be worse than the average politician at predicting public response. Like, I am not totally confident, but I think I would take a 50% bet. So this strikes me as overall mildly bad (though not very bad, I don’t expect either of these two groups to be very good at doing this).
Habryka, is the reasoning that politicians have a real incentive to accurately predict public response—because it entirely determines whether they remain in power—whereas behavioral scientists have a much weaker incentive, compared to the dominant incentive of publishing significant results?
During COVID the UK government has been heavily advised by the SAGE committee (an emergency committee of scientists), including a subcommittee of behavioural scientists who advised on what the reaction to measures like lockdowns might be. I don’t know how reliable behavioural science is at the moment (with the replication crisis) but this seemed like a reasonable move—being guided by them rather than politicians’ own hunches.
Hmm, I do think I honestly believe that behavioral scientists might be worse than the average politician at predicting public response. Like, I am not totally confident, but I think I would take a 50% bet. So this strikes me as overall mildly bad (though not very bad, I don’t expect either of these two groups to be very good at doing this).
Habryka, is the reasoning that politicians have a real incentive to accurately predict public response—because it entirely determines whether they remain in power—whereas behavioral scientists have a much weaker incentive, compared to the dominant incentive of publishing significant results?
Why not do polls?
They do, but the committee was trying to predict future reactions.