Plead the First

Ed Brayton has some thoughts on the recent revelation that many of our policymakers don’t even understand the difference between Sunnis and Shiites:

This is important. If you don’t know such basic things, you can’t possibly have any understanding of the situation over there and be able to evaluate competing policy options. And this is true on every issue, not just this one. All around the country we have legislators voting on issues they have no knowledge of. We’ve got state congressmen voting on science standards in public schools when they couldn’t even pass the mid-term in the classes whose curriculum standards they’re redesigning.

And yet, the public has this anti-intellectual impulse that revolves around having “common sense”, this ridiculous notion that you don’t need expertise you just need “common sense”. But that is, in fact, common nonsense. Having the ability to reach informed conclusions on a subject doesn’t necessarily require a set of credentials, but it does require taking the time to study the issue. And those who do so are in a much better position to make such judgements, and are much more likely to reach a valid conclusion, than those who don’t.

These people should be required to pass some kind of quiz on the issues they are legislating upon before any votes are cast by them.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 19th, 2006 at 10:28 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.