In Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy the job of the galactic president, Zaphod Beeblebrox, is described as being "not to wield power but to draw attention away from it". Trudeau really reminds me of this quote quite a bit.
In terms of traditional metrics of performance, Trudeau was heavily outclassed in leader debates during the last election. He demonstrated almost no ability to address questions directly and instead resorted to pre-rehearsed sound-bytes for nearly everything, often on topics not even tangentially related to what was being discussed. His inability to stay on topic actually let the encumbent PM off of particularly vicious hooks on more than one occasion. However, those sound-bytes sounded great when taken out of context and chopped up into bits for news broadcasts, even if they were somewhat baffling to the very few people who apparently tuned into the full debates and paid attention to how well answers addressed questions. That election probably lowered the bar for quality discourse in Canadian politics by quite a bit. Next election, everyone is going to be talking in sound-bytes. We might as well just have debates on twitter, you know, "because it's 2019" or whatever the year will be.
Ever since the election, Trudeau hasn't stopped campaigning. Vogue photo spreads. Dining at the white-house. Touring the country. While the previous PM was almost a shut-in, Trudeau is tireless in his press appearances. It's almost as if somebody else is actually running the country and he's, well, distracting the public's eye.
When pressed, Trudeau does have a tendency to promise the moon to just about anyone though. He's been racking up unfulfillable promises left, right, and center. No doubt he left Obama with some pretty wild promises too. This could eventually come crashing down on him but, for now, the honeymoon is still going pretty strong. Most Canadians love having a glamorous PM and the international attention that brings. Would HN be upvoting this story if it was Stephan Dion or Stephen Harper trying to teach QM?
While I agree with your points about him debating more in sound bytes than in real answers...
In fairness he's actually been doing reasonably well on his promises, as tracked by the TrudeauMetre[1]. Off the top of my head, unmuzzling scientists, restoring the long form census, and legalizing marijuana are all big contentious points that are either done or seriously underway. Given the abysmal promise-to-result ratio of typical politicians he's earned a passing grade in my books.
Same here. Another big one is the stimulus he's released with the new budget. I'm not sure how he's doing on the Syrian refugee count, but just his attitude to the problem is such a relief compared to Harper.
What was Harper's attitude on Syrian refugees? I seem to recall he said Trudeau's goal of 10000 before the end of 2015 was unrealistic, and that's exactly what it turned out to be. He was going to bring in about the same number Trudeau actually managed to bring in.
Harper promised to bring in 10k over 4 years. Trudeau promised more than double that.
And as I said, the Harper government's attitude to refugee claimants was just disgusting. This is what Harper's Minister of Immigration had to say when the Ontario govt defied the federal government's decision to reduce health care for refugee claimants:
"I've expressed our government's disappointment with the Ontario government's recent decision to reinstate health-care benefits to all asylum seekers and even rejected refugee claimants," Alexander said.
"Simply arriving on our shores and claiming hardships isn't good enough. This isn't a self-selection bonanza, or a social program buffet."
It's embarrassing that our government would demean and deny refugees their human dignity while they are asking for help.
219 promises tracked:
29 achieved
15 broken
63 in progress
112 not started
So he's already broken 6.8% of his total promises just 1/8th of the way through his term. That's not good. He's also broken just over half as many promises as he's kept, which I'd say is pretty darned typical of politicians.
Legalizing marijuana is in progress, but I've heard nothing concrete. Unmuzzling scientists and restoring the long form census were both good. Reversing the transparency act was bad. I was most interested in his promises to increase government transparency, but some are reporting it's actually worse [1]. He also promised in an interview with Peter Mansbridge to reduce the concentration of power in the PMO, but he's done nothing about that so far.
We're just an eigth of the way through his term, so the jury is still out in my opinion. He's done some good, some bad, but at this point he's still mostly just a bundle of promises.
>So he's already broken 6.8% of his total promises just 1/8th of the way through his term. That's not good. He's also broken just over half as many promises as he's kept, which I'd say is pretty darned typical of politicians.
Sadly that's not that bad. For example you can check Ukraines MP's promises[1]. It's in Ukrainian, so yellow is WIP, green/red are self-explanatory and black is total.
Some promises, ex "Bring in 25K Syrian refugees by end of 2015" is considered "Broken" for the purposes of the "Promise Tracker" but the government actually did bring in 25K refugees and counting, they didnt hit the 25K mark until sometime in 2016-02.
So, keep in mind that while that promise may be 'technically broken', they pretty much did what they said they were going to do.
this sounds like the conservative attack ads against Trudeau that lead up to the election... that definately lowered the bar for Canadian politics by attacking his background and taking comments out of context to "shame" him and his party.
it didnt work.
i would expect a Canadian leader to be visiting the white house for dinner, as do many political/country leaders.
i would expect him to be going cross country trips as thats what every PM has done.
"Would HN be upvoting this story if it was Stephan Dion or Stephen Harper trying to teach QM?"
no, as i expect the press to never ask them that type of question and never being in a situatiton to be asked that type of question.
i personally dont care for trudeau and what mostly the press brings up about him, i do however support some of his policies more so than any other candidate.
most people voted liberal in their riding as Justin Trudeau was not Stephen Harper and the Conservative party, and was more of a free thinker compared to the other options.
everyone was tired of Stephen Harper and his policies that i would say set canada back on the world stage... canada was just a lacky in the shadow behind the USA, following along most actions.
every political leader makes promises and dont fulfill, that IS politics... but as some has pointed out Trudeau has a decent track record so far.
The "We're back" schtick is pure BS. Canada never left, and it remains to be seen if we do more or less internationally under the Liberals. I'd be pretty insulted by Trudeau if I was in the diplomatic service though. Trudeau does seem to be striking a much more conciliatory tone with the U.N., which could be good or bad in the long run, depending on whether the current problems within the U.N. improve or worsen. Trudeau is certainly drawing more international press, but that's not the same as increasing foreign aid, involvement in peace-keeping missions, etc..
As for the conservative attack ads, they're no different than the attack ads any of the other parties typically run. Do you remember the "We can't trust Harper, he's from neocon Calgary and has a hidden agenda!" smear campaign from the election before last? It was so effective they didn't even need to run it during the last election. People wonder why Alberta typically doesn't support the Liberal party, but demonizing the province as a means of vilifying a leader is one big reason why that's the case.
Trudeau did rely relatively less on attack ads than his opponents in the last election, which I approve of. However, the rise of PAC's with funding from god knows where does make it suspiciously easy for parties to run attack ads on the sly without fear of blowback. Whether the Liberals funded them or not, there were plenty of attack ads against harper during the last election. I'd like to see PAC's regulated much more strenuously in the future. In particular, their donors need to be a matter of public record.
> Would HN be upvoting this story if it was Stephan Dion or Stephen Harper trying to teach QM?
We upvoted Singapore PM Lee Hsien Loong's sudoku solver[0], and he can hardly be described as being from the left.
Similarly, Rand Paul gets a lot of love on HN for his anti-surveillance and drug law reform stances, while Democrats like Clinton and Feinstein are criticized on crypto, and Obama on drones, prosecuting whistleblowers & crypto again.
I'd like to think that a large part of the HN community place issues and evidence above politics.
Even if Trudeau learned the definition the morning of, it speaks well of his background in engineering and math that he was able to assimilate such information and reformulate it coherently.
Presenting a technical subject at just the right level of sophistication for a given audience is an invigorating intellectual exercise.
> Presenting a technical subject at just the right level of sophistication for a given audience
I don't think the limiting factor here was the intelligence of the audience, given that he was presenting at the Perimeter Institute.
That being said, I agree completely on your first point, and it's incredibly refreshing to see a politician make an effort to learn about a technical subject.
> I don't think the limiting factor here was the intelligence of the audience, given that he was presenting at the Perimeter Institute.
As the PM, his audience is always far larger than those in the immediate vicinity. Not to mention the gaggle of non-technical journalists who were there.
I think the take-away here is not what so much what PM Trudeau knows or doesn't know about quantum computing. It reveals how low our expectations are of our leaders.
Imagine for a second that your roles were reversed and you were the politician who knew a lot about science, engineering and technology. Now it's your job to lead a nation, one of the worlds leading armed forces (yes Canada knows how to fight) and are responsible for trade policies that Impact all your constituents. Suddenly a terror group in <<insert war torn African country>> bombs a mall. How much do you know about the ethnic groups in <<insert war torn African country>> and what would your response be? Should you invade? What would happen if that government failed? Can you do startegic strikes? Hell, what do you do to prevent another bombing?
I mean, it'd be great if our leaders all had a better understanding of STEM but Herbert Hoover was an engineer and it's wife's accepted that his economic policies deepened the Great Depression.
Sounds like a non-issue. How many of today's "policy heads" would know anything about the situation on the ground of that hypothetical nation? I personally think anybody with sufficient STEM background has a higher chance of assimilating and interpreting policy knowledge than pure policy-heads.
You'll find plenty of Physics students with whom you can have an advanced policy or philosophy discussion, but I've never met a Policy or Philosophy student with any Physics knowledge.
Well sure, plenty of physics students are willing to engage in an advanced policy discussion, but once you tell them that you will not assume the country is a sphere they have a lot less to offer.
Agreed. But... Honestly I love Justin but I couldn't care less if he understood quantum computing. As long as he has the sense to surround himself with the right people . JFK probably didn't know a single thing about the science of getting to the moon, if you catch my drift. i.e., I don't think our expectations ought to be much different, and not expecting a politician to understand quantum computing isn't a 'low expectation' to me.
"Kennedy was fascinated by the Zeus debate, especially the way that scientists were lined up on diametrically opposed positions for or against the system. He commented to Wiesner, 'I don’t understand. Scientists are supposed to be rational people. How can there be such differences on a technical issue?' His fascination grew and he eventually compiled a mass of material on Zeus which took up one corner of a room where he spent hundreds of hours becoming an expert on the topic. In one meeting with Edward Teller, Kennedy demonstrated that he knew more about the Zeus and ABMs than Teller. Teller then expended considerable effort to bring himself up to the same level of knowledge. Wiesner would later note that the pressure to make a decision built up until 'Kennedy came to feel that the only thing anybody in the country was concerned about was Nike-Zeus.''
Why would Carter know about QM? As far as I know, little in a nuclear reactor can be usefully analyzed at the quantum level even today. (And FWIW, even if some things in flight can be usefully analyzed in terms of simple limiting cases of the Navier-Stokes equations, I'd be surprised to hear someone assuming that a Republican president "knows a fair bit about fluid mechanics" just because he was an officer and pilot.)
Most of the nuclear fission stuff that is simple enough that you might hope to analyze with back-of-the-envelope QM has so much energy that it tends to act like a classical particle of negligibly short wavelength (but not enough energy to bring QM back into the picture by QED creating new particles upon collision). And while there is probably various quantum mechanical stuff deeply involved in a power reactor in one way or another --- e.g., electrical conductivity tends to involve band theory, and water is often used as a working fluid and at a fundamental level its thermal properties depend on stuff like hydrogen bonds --- I doubt it was helpful for a naval nuclear reactors guy to try to analyze things at that level in the middle of the last century.
The US Naval Academy has a pretty good science program, and (IIRC) during Carter's era, all midshipmen were trained as engineers first, with the requisite science background, including (presumably) what QM was known in 1946. Moreover, as a nuke officer during that era he was personally vetted by Adm. Hyman Rickover, who had placed legendarily[0] high demands on the intellect, technical skill, moral integrity, and ingenuity of the Nuclear corps.
Rickover was promoted to the rank of vice admiral in 1958, the same year that he was awarded the first of two Congressional Gold Medals. Rickover exercised tight control for the next three decades over the ships, technology, and personnel of the nuclear Navy, interviewing and approving or denying every prospective officer being considered for a nuclear ship.
Adm. Rickover [0] certainly set the standard with personal vetting of nuclear offices, but with the stakes of a reactor mishap being so high, who can really blame him?
Contrast Adm. Rickover's tough stance with the managers in charge of the shuttle program [1] that led to STS-51L Challenger disaster.
The Admiral in charge of the US Navy nuclear propulsion program still personally interviews and has final say on any individual applying for surface or subsurface nuke programs. From what I hear, it's a fairly nerve-wracking experience!
Carter isn't generally reviled for being too smart. The number one thing that he's reviled for (maybe unfairly) is planning and botching a hostage rescue attempt that turned out to be pointless later when the hostages were freed by their captors.
> The number one thing that he's reviled for (maybe unfairly) is planning and botching a hostage rescue attempt that turned out to be pointless later when the hostages were freed by their captors.
Strictly speaking, I think he was reviled because the rescue attempt came late and didn't work. He made a joke within the last year - when announcing his cancer diagnosis, I think - about how he'd have been reelected if he had sent a few more helicopters on that mission, and that that would have been a mixed blessing for him personally. Both points were true, I think.
I think I'm politically on pretty much the opposite side of Carter's "official position", but I would squarely put Carter in the top quarter of American Presidents (for reference, he beats out Polk, whom I appreciate quite a bit, I put Obama hovering about 50% and FDR and Wilson competing for the very bottom). Obviously, the whole affair was botched on many levels, but in the grand scheme of the Carter presidency it wasn't that big of a deal, I don't think the authority to take action was misplaced, and much of the grousing about it is monday-morning quarterbacking.
FDR was a tyrant. He jailed thousands of american citizens for no reason other than their ethnic heritage (over the objecting counsel of his wife) , tried to swing his dick and pack the supreme Court, and at one point, closed the banks for several days and at the end of it, everyone came out poorer (screwing over the poor the hardest even though ostensibly it was for their sake). In all his actions Roosevelt was the epitome of hubris, never stopping to think as president, "should I really be doing this?". Don't worry, gwb is not that much higher than FDR - FDR is the worst because of the magnitude and unprecedented nature of his executive overreach and the fact that it served as inspiration to future presidents.
One of the better presidents was William Henry Harrison; didn't last long enough to mess things up.
The fact that Reagan (or his election people) negotiated with the enemy to keep the American hostages until literally the second he was president, I don't know how that's not treason. At least Carter tried.
We have low expectations, and politicians know it, so they don't try to elevate debate. That's how the Donald Trump's of the world gain power - through apathy.
Trudeau did complete two years of engineering at a decent school and worked as a math teacher.
While we don't know if he was prepped or regurgitated a paragraph, he probably has the faculties and interest to have a general understanding of what he was talking about. Oftentimes it's easier to actually learn something than to cheat convincingly.
I can't seem to find much information with regards to his time studying engineering at Montreal. One article (albeit, the Toronto Sun so take it with a grain of salt) claims he dropped out. And I can't find anything that mentions what type of engineering he studied. It does seem a bit strange to go from studying English Literature, to becoming a teacher, to suddenly studying engineering before switching to environmental geography.
He studied mechanical engineering at Polytechnique Montréal, which is on the same campus as Université de Montréal. He did not complete his degree and left to pursue a master in geography at McGill. [1]
Given his direct political predecessor's attitude toward things like funding experimental reactors, or funding NSERC, or funding basic research, any message that validates science is a good and probably necessary one.
Jonathan Blow tweeted about this last night - I particularly agree with him about how everyone ridiculed the old politician who said the Internet was a "series of pipes", but here everyone is praising the young, hot Trudeau for his knowledge of quantum computing when really the two display a similar level of basic understanding about that subject.
In any case, it's not about the politicians' knowledge - it's not Trudeau's job to know about QC - but how the public's .
He was mocked more at the time for the email bit, namely the idea that the reason why he didn't get his email for 4 days was because of people streaming videos on the internet.
However, it's not clear that he had a good understanding of the analogy himself (I'm sure that revisionists like Mr. Blow, who do understand how the internet work, can justify it, but it's not Mr. Blow's understanding that we're interested in here, as Mr. Blow is not proposing legislation to block Net Neutrality). In addition to the email bit, he seems to believe that the internet used to be a point to point communication network, whereas now the "industry wisely provided streaming, in effect, a kind of long distance, which is what we've got now". Given this, it's really not clear at all what "it's not a truck, it's a series of tubes" is supposed to clarify.
Now, if Mr. Trudeau was using his understanding of Quantum Computing to justify a large government subsidy of DWave, there would be good cause to look at this throwaway quote in more detail.
>Given this, it's really not clear at all what "it's not a truck, it's a series of tubes" is supposed to clarify.
I always assumed that was distinguishing between "quantized" and continuous network systems. That is, adding one more load to a truck ("just dump"ing something on it), one more person to a bus, doesn't make the roads any more congested, but trying to send one more gallon of water through a pipe system will slow it down or add to the queue length.
The internet, then, is more like the latter, in that every piece of information carries some opportunity cost to sending, rather than being a bunch of trucks with spare, underutilized capacity.
>I'm sure that revisionists like Mr. Blow, who do understand how the internet work, can justify it, but it's not Mr. Blow's understanding that we're interested in here, as Mr. Blow is not proposing legislation to block Net Neutrality.
For me the most interesting bit was Scott's "10 second" hypothetical reply to the reporter/general audience on what quantum computing is (found in one of his comments):
"I say something about how a QC is a proposed device that
would solve certain specific problems much faster than we
know how to solve them today, by taking advantage of
quantum mechanics, which generalizes the laws of classical
probability.
Then I talk about how you’d never talk about a -20% chance of rain tomorrow, but quantum mechanics is based on numbers called amplitudes, which can be positive or negative or even complex numbers.
And how, if an event can happen one way with a positive amplitude and another way with a negative amplitude, the two possibilities can “interfere destructively” and cancel each other out, so that the event never happens at all. And how the state of a QC with (say) 1000 bits would have one amplitude for each of 21000 possible settings of the bits—an astronomical amount of information, if one wanted to write it down classically, for example in order to simulate what the QC was doing classically.
But about how, when you measure the QC’s state, you just see a single random output (with its probability determined by its amplitude), not the gargantuan list of possibilities. And about how the goal, in QC, is always to choreograph things so that the possible paths leading to each wrong answer interfere destructively and cancel each other out, (say) some having positive amplitudes and others negative, whereas the paths leading to right answer reinforce.
And how this is a very weird and specialized capability—it’s not nearly as simple as “trying all the answers in parallel” (if you did that, you’d simply observe a random answer), nor is it just a smaller or faster version of ordinary computing (a QC might even be “bigger” or “slower” than an ordinary one; all the hoped-for advantage comes from the QC’s ability to create interference patterns).
Finally I talk about how a QC is known to give huge advantages over any known classical algorithm for a few tasks of practical importance (quantum simulation, breaking almost all the crypto used today…), and it might also give some advantages for broader goals like optimization and machine learning, but that’s an active research topic, and if the advantages exist they’ll probably be more modest and/or specialized."
How dare he educate himself on the subject of his government's funding?! /s
P.S: I didn't mean to be snarky. Any politician that educates himself to even appear smart , instead of trying come off as anti-intellectual "joe six-pack" or simply a spin master (see: Trudeau's predecessor) is progress to me.
You don't think him reciting a canned script made to give the impression of expertise and closing with "I could talk about this for ages..." is deceptive?
He was talking like he was well-versed in the subject, when he had really just read some cliff notes.
Nobody could watch the clip and thing Trudeau is actually an expert in quantum computing. He was clearly joking about being able to talk about it for ages.
He came across as an intelligent and funny politician who had made the effort to at least develop a modicum of understanding for something he's funding. Nothing more and nothing less.
I didn't take the "I could talk about this for ages..." to mean he knew everything about it, merely that this is something he found interesting enough to talk (to people) about for ages.
> Someone on FB speculated that it was a trick just for this video:
> > the person asking the question probably works for Trudeau and Trudeau had previously memorized the whole quantum explanation just for this video.
The question was asked by a pool reporter from The Canadian Press (that's not a generic description, it's the name of a private news organization).
> and after reading an article about this claimed that:
> > Trudeau had actually learned the definition of quantum computing that very morning before this conference and admitted to the fact.
He said he was excited he had had a chance to learn more about quantum computing that morning while touring a quantum computing research institute to announce $50 million in funding for quantum computing.
How dare he display a modicum of intellectual curiosity and learn enough about the topic to explain it to a fellow layman along the way /s
The problem is that he didn't learn enough to explain it to a fellow layman. He gave the impression that quantum computing is about storing more complicated bits so you can make a smaller computer.
The conspiracy theory angle is immediately stupid if you bother to listen to the actual exchange, in which the reporter asks his real question (a fairly uncomfortable one for the PM) right after his joke. If it's a setup, you'd stop and let Trudeau respond to the joke.
I think what happened here was that he asked the press to ask him about quantum computing, then when this guy tried to jab him for that tactic, he spun it around and turned it back into something that worked out even better for him.
Clearly it was rehearsed and staged, but like others said, I'm just impressed he made an effort to and was able to learn and regurgitate this information.
I thought it's pretty apparent he felt relatively confident going into the explanation, then got flustered and sped up as he got further into the explanation as he realised he didn't understand/couldn't explain it as well as he thought he could
To play devil's advocate, pretending to know about Quantum Computing, or any highly technical subject, when applying for a job is extremely misleading. This isn't too different.
This is politics. The point here is that Trudeau can't pretend to know about QC and then make huge cuts to science without it being terrible optics. It's easier to go with a Palin/Trump stance of "science is sometimes right, but often wrong, especially when it's inconveniently opposed to my policy" when you plan to defund science.
After the last Canadian PM took a hatchet to non-energy sector science funding, this and other recent trips to science centres like the McGill Neurological Institute, is about bridge building with the Canadian public.
As an American, where most of our politicians eagerly jostle for the title of Stupidest Human, the fact that the PM was trying to appear smart raises him up several notches. He considers intelligence to be something worthy. That's refreshing and admirable.
As an American I would be far more concerned about a leader who knows little and makes airs of knowing more than an intelligent leader who dumbs themself down... The latter has an outside shot at being wise; the former has an outside shot at being dangerous.
I 've read this story in so many places. It's "good comedy", and I like the guy, but he used it to gain some popularity points (he seems to be good at that in general). I bet Angela Merkel could easily beat him in anything quantum, but what is the point? We should expect world leaders to have these abilities.
No, the amazing thing in the article you linked is that bacteria colonies can solve complex mathematical problems at all. No one said they will be faster than other classical computers.
If you like to read about this kind of problems:
Many of Scott Aaronson's other post are about the limits of efficient computation. If you are interested especially in the limits of alternative approaches like protein folding, analog computing and anthropic computing I can recommend "NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality"[1].
Well, thanks for the link, but I meant "faster" in the sense of being the first to provide a practical solution. By the way, I'm assuming that with bacterial computing, it (somehow) becomes simple to exponentially duplicate your computation building blocks.
Once the bacteria reach some limit of saturation, they can only multiply as fast as they can geographically spread to new area. If they have some maximum speed of physical spread, then that limits them to a maximum speed of n^2 in two dimensions, or n^3 in three dimensions. If you think they're going to keep up exponential growth long enough to make a difference, that implies that you think they'll spread faster and faster across the lab, like a bad movie.
I'm going to assume someone gave him notes prior to the interview and he read them so he would sound like he knew what he was on about. Having said that, I would pay for the comedic value of seeing GW Bush string that sentence together (even if someone else did prepare it for him).
I think that story gets blown way out of proportion. If you picked random people on a street and asked them to integrate 4x³ from 0 to 2, you would maybe get somewhere between 1% and 10% correct answers, probably way closer to 1%. Still this is something that maybe half of the people once learned how to do in school, they just forget it because they don't need it in everyday life. But spend an hour or two and you can certainly teach them once again how to do it. And most of them will of course also forget it again pretty soon. Along the same line it shouldn't be to hard to give someone a rough idea of the difference between classical and quantum mechanics, notwithstanding that most people will pretty soon only have faint memories.
i think "half the people" is an overestimate. i don't think most people learn integration in school. i'd be surprised if half learn differential calculus.
This is probably pretty country specific, I just looked up which proportion of people in Germany reaches the qualification to enter university, about 50%, and calculus is mandatory on that way, differential and integral. But I ignored that this proportion increased over time, it was only 22% in 1980. So let's call it a quarter of the population or make the differentiate or explain something about plate tectonics.
By the way, had we seen https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11312766 at the time we would have banned you for it. That one was worse than this one, because it added a personal attack on top of calling names. To continue commenting on HN you need to drop this approach altogether and make sure your comments are substantive and respectful, even to people and about positions you disagree with.
Yes, this is a great achievement. But there are precedents - the Singapore PM is a Senior Wrangler [1], a former Indian president was a rocket scientist [2] - oh, and some nasty fellow in the middle east was an ophthalmologist in London [3], lest we forget.
I believe technical competence is uncorrelated to adminisitrative effectiveness.
> I believe technical competence is uncorrelated to adminisitrative effectiveness.
I don't. Many Asian nations (including Singapore, China, etc.) are largely governed by engineering majors and I do believe this has been helpful for improving administrative effectiveness. This stands in stark contrast to countries where governance is dominated by either lawyers (the US) or military members (many other developing nations).
I don't think any meaningful correlation can be drawn from what a head-of-state or high ranking politician studied in college or where they went to college to their aptitude/competence for governance.
Our last two presidents have professional degrees from the same institution (Harvard) and they do not govern in the same fashion in most areas other than counter-terrorism. China also doesn't choose it's politicians via elections, thus someone who is highly technical and let me stereotype here for a second... most likely not charismatic and/or having developed a sense of political empathy... facets that a lawyer or career manager (MBA) are more likely to develop, would be able to move up in the ranks (in the CCP in this case).
However, this doesn't really reflect on HOW someone chooses to implement policy or govern, comparing China vs U.S. is apples and oranges because you can't legitimately protest the CCP, this isn't the case of the major parties in the U.S. Thus the policies will be molded to some extent of popular opinion, which is normally not true in a dictatorship.
First of all, in the world scheme President Obama and President Bush are quite close together in their governing strategies and policies. That's the nature of the kind of politician we elect in the United States.
However, it extends far beyond the head of state. All levels of government in Chinese government are dominated by engineers instead of lawyers or career politicians.
> However, this doesn't really reflect on HOW someone chooses to implement policy or govern
Of course it does. We even have a word for it: technocracy. There are dramatic differences and if you don't think that then I'm curious why you delved into perpetrating negative stereotypes about engineers.
I don't agree that Bush and Obama share governing strategies. For example GWB was very comfortable out-sourcing large problems to his lieutenants, whereas Obama seems to do it only if he feels it'd result in a better outcome if he wasn't personally involved. Items such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to the VP/Rumsfeld, Mortgage crisis to Paulson/Bernanke, etc... Contrast this to Obama where he held multiple cabinet meetings with regard troop levels in Afghanistan early in his presidency. On foreign policy they also differ where GWB seemed to be very decisive (or overly depending on who you ask). Whereas Obama to this day exercises extreme caution, at least publicly. I could cite a lot of examples, but of course this is more the realm of opinion.
On my somewhat poorly worded point about engineers on average being less interpersonal than a typical lawyer/mba. I don't view such attributes negatively; my intention was to point out that engineers' day-to-day jobs don't normally involve work oriented social interaction with people they don't know(i.e. someone other than their team). Putting it another way a lawyer/manager without strong interpersonal skills has a lower career ceiling than an engineer with personality trait. Thus it isn't unreasonable to assume said fields attract different types of people. Thus governance being a partial function of what subject someone opted for in school would in my opinion act as a very small variable in contrast to why X person choose said subject.
> Of course it does. We even have a word for it: technocracy.
It's an apples to oranges comparison if it's China(or Singapore) vs. the U.S. The governments of the former don't have anything close to real representation for it's people(More China than Singapore), thus the policy makers don't have to seriously consider popular opinion outside of keeping the populace from revolting, which is a far cry from the American system where an individual politician can be unseated within a short time frame.
Law and politics warp your view of the world because everything becomes a subjective, debatable matter of opinion.
Politics is especially dangerous because the definition of a successful argument is one that increases your power. Facts are tangential at best, distracting and unwelcome at worst.
The corresponding problem for people with STEM backgrounds is a lack of understanding that this is how politics works. If your approach is based on facts, model-building, and reality testing, it's incredibly easy to be blindsided by a career politician - or career manager - who only cares about public opinion, and is perfectly prepared to lie professionally if they make more money and/or gain more power from it.
I agree with the conclusion of the last paragraph. My problem with STEM majors is that the softer virtues, like humanity, mercy and a certain large-heartedness which are needed to govern a large group are missing. ("Govern a large country like you fry small fish" - Lao Tzu, meaning govern with minimal interference)
I have found this disturbing view among many of the bay-area programmer friends I have - that life is a cut-and-dry game in which the losers in life deserve nothing - which I do not agree with. The animosity that the programmers face as a community in SFO may be down precisely to their view of others.
I don't think you should stereotype to all STEM majors (internationally) based on a small collection of your programmer friends.
Plenty of STEM majors appreciate soft virtues and are large-hearted. In fact, I'd argue that lawyers are far more likely to see the evil in everyone (it's practically their job_ and to be oppose to mercy.
Of course in those asian nations you describe there is also a stronger tendency to view society as something to be "engineered". Herbert Hoover was the US's most prominent Engineer-president, and although history has been revised to make him seem like a laissez-faire president, he was (especially compared to his predecessor Coolidge) an economically interventionist president. The Hoover presidency did not turn out so well.
> Of course in those asian nations you describe there is also a stronger tendency to view society as something to be "engineered".
Indeed.
It's important to keep in mind that a technocratic leader will likely not do well or have effective results in a political system dominated by lawyers (as Hoover shows).
In terms of traditional metrics of performance, Trudeau was heavily outclassed in leader debates during the last election. He demonstrated almost no ability to address questions directly and instead resorted to pre-rehearsed sound-bytes for nearly everything, often on topics not even tangentially related to what was being discussed. His inability to stay on topic actually let the encumbent PM off of particularly vicious hooks on more than one occasion. However, those sound-bytes sounded great when taken out of context and chopped up into bits for news broadcasts, even if they were somewhat baffling to the very few people who apparently tuned into the full debates and paid attention to how well answers addressed questions. That election probably lowered the bar for quality discourse in Canadian politics by quite a bit. Next election, everyone is going to be talking in sound-bytes. We might as well just have debates on twitter, you know, "because it's 2019" or whatever the year will be.
Ever since the election, Trudeau hasn't stopped campaigning. Vogue photo spreads. Dining at the white-house. Touring the country. While the previous PM was almost a shut-in, Trudeau is tireless in his press appearances. It's almost as if somebody else is actually running the country and he's, well, distracting the public's eye.
When pressed, Trudeau does have a tendency to promise the moon to just about anyone though. He's been racking up unfulfillable promises left, right, and center. No doubt he left Obama with some pretty wild promises too. This could eventually come crashing down on him but, for now, the honeymoon is still going pretty strong. Most Canadians love having a glamorous PM and the international attention that brings. Would HN be upvoting this story if it was Stephan Dion or Stephen Harper trying to teach QM?