On a wooden ship, lost at sea, which way do you sail, to go home? A ship’s navigator is trained and knowledgeable, and their determination of which direction to sail is based upon measurement of the sun and stars, then orientation on various maps. The navigator knows how to let data make the decision. You wouldn’t put the power of decision in the hands of all the sailors.
That’s a bit of a silly argument. The navigator may very well be the expert in telling you how to get home. But they don’t decide if you should go home or not.
CEOs’ paychecks are now regularly in the tens of millions of dollars — and their decisions make or break entire companies worth billions. Yet, can we really say that the quality of CEO decision making is worth tens of millions? Might people with expertise within the company have a better grasp of their product, their market, their strategy? Selection of better decision-makers, at a lower cost to the organization, could be achieved by following the advice of the experts within each branch, with some prize for good decisions.
Any CEO that gets to that level does so by hiring and listening to those experts. Do you really think there are CEOs that decide the content to their advertising and what the R&D teams do on a daily basis? A competent CEO hires a qualified team of experts and tells them the overall direction they want the company to head towards. They don’t make all the decisions and even those they do make, they rely on their experts to inform them.
“Experts” can tell you (or “us” in the case of government) what can and can not be done. That doesn’t qualify them to tell you what should or should not be done.
I would live happily in a scientific technocracy.
Perhaps. Unless of course, the technocracy decides that you shouldn’t exist. Remember, you’re just data. The data doesn’t care if you live or die…
