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[malimbar04]

With the new (and instantly popular) atheist party on facebook, I returned to an old idea of making a political party based on science and evidence. If democrats are all about democracy, and republicans are all about Reagan conservatism, then this party would be all about making ideas based on evidence, and then changing those ideas based on better evidence.

What I've put together in about an hour:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Science Political Party

On Policies
I. We believe that scientific principles, evidence and reason should guide our policies.

II. We believe that all policies are subject to change or clarification with the introduction of better evidence.

III. Those policies that we do not have sufficient evidence to support or deny are left to the individual.

New Laws
IV. New laws should be simple and clear, so that people who read and vote upon them know the consequences of such laws.

V. All laws should be subject to change and removal, particularly if they are no longer legally valid or are useful to the general public.

Current Policies
1. Daylights savings time is at best ineffective and at worst damaging to the very things it's trying to correct for. We should abolish daylights savings time.

So, being how smart Dwarf Fortress players are, I'd like your input. What else do I need to put in here? I'm looking both for basic stuff that every such list needs, and I'm looking for other policies that have a great deal of evidence behind them.

[klingon13524]

Why do you think daylight savings time is bad? We're on it for a reason.

[NobodyPro]

I agree with klingon, in what way is daylight savings damaging to farmers. Seems to work perfectly in Australia.

[Starver]

Doesn't matter to cows and sheep and things.  And doesn't even matter to farmers, who'd probably be getting up at dawn (or a near constant difference from[1]) regardless of what time it is, because of them having to tend to their charges' needs.[2]

Spoiler: Long-winded DST stuff, etc, including footnotes (click to show/hide)

The biggest arguments are more to do with road (and pedestrian) safety, with people and workplaces that obey 'the clock', regardless of what TPTB do with said clock.  But depending on how you look at it you can value either more hours of morning light (at the expense of the evening ones) or more hours of evening light (at the expense of the morning ones).  And in spring/summer (more or less), when the summer-time daylight shift is applied to the clock, there are more hours of light, anyway and so it's really more a matter of pinching 'unused' daylight hours from the morning (dawn is still pre-commute, for most people, just less so) and adding them to the end of the day so that there's a lot more post-commute light hours for kids to play out, BBQs to be started up, etc, etc...  (IMO, that works quite well.)

What might be better argued is to carry DST on, past its usual reversion in the autumn, to make for really dark mornings, but not have darkness fall at (at my latitude, at around this time of year) 3-4PM.  Although I've a feeling that a lot of the people who think this is a good idea (in this country) are coupling it together with getting the UK to match Europe's major time-zone.

Of course, if the plan is to have Winter on GMT+1, come DST time it becomes GMT+2 (double summer-time, something played with last century, for various reasons[3]).


To be honest, I don't see the fuss any-which-way...  I used to receive phone-calls prior to 9AM, from my colleagues in Japan, telling me something that they'd been working almost all of that day on, it being now (for them) very nearly the end of their working time (engrained overtime culture, notwithstanding).  In the other direction, I attended (and chaired) teleconferences in the early afternoon, for which the US west coast offices had had to dial-in at around 7AM.  (With the added complication of their also losing a full weekday, either way, trying to mapping working weeks against each other, San Diego and Kobe probably also had a "your early is my late" relationship, but I'm not going to look up the zone-differences to see how far adrift.  But I've a feeling it's 7 hours difference, give or take.)

Don't work in that job any more, but as you can see (local time, approaching 2AM, Monday morning) I have a really flexible attitude to time anyway.  I suppose it would be different if I was forced to work switching and swapping shifts, but I find I can flex my own schedule around, so long as work and other commitments allow.  I actually did, at one point use what is effectively the 28 Hour Day described there, only with weekends being nearly 'normal' to daylight and weekdays being strange.  I wasn't actually working at that time, though, and it was just an ad-hoc arrangement rather than a plan, and I'd just make sure that I got things in the right direction to be awake around appointments and similar, albeit perhaps in a "my morning, their afternoon" sense... )

[1] Give or take an amount of drift to counter/semi-counter the actual drift of sunrise/set hours.

[2] There was something on the radio about an author/farmer, the other day... Can't remember who he was, but one of the Americon Icons or other.  He actually milked his cows after midnight and at midday, instead of morning and evening, or something, to work around his late hours working on his literary progresses.  And apparently the cattle got used to that.  But that was something fairly constant, and I still say farmers don't need to worry about changing clocks so long as they work with the time that the livestock thinks it is, regardless of what the men behind the clocks say it should be...

[3] Last time I wikied this subject, I came across what they did around the time of the First World War...  Look up the history of BST and (if it's still there, and was accurate in the first place) it might surprise you.

Anyway, um... what I was going to say is that I feel that scientifically-derived laws is going to be difficult.  In too many circumstances to really allow you to skim over them, it gets rather Newtonian.  i.e.: For every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert.

[Cthulhu]

Yeah, if you could run the country on pure empiricism it would've been done by now.  There's too much gray in politics, too many choices where all the options are equally shitty.

[LordBucket]

this party would be all about making ideas based on evidence, and
then changing those ideas based on better evidence.

I'm uncertain what you mean by this. How does making ideas relate to governance or law?

[malimbar04]

@Klingon @NobodyPro
The only real rational I've ever seen for it (and the driving force behind it's adoption) was to save energy by using less artificial light. It doesn't do that, and if anything it does the exact opposite.

@Starver @Cthulhu The goal isn't to have a PURE empiricism in a country, only to use science when it's relevant. If experiment has not proven one thing or another, then it's still flexible - just like many of the positions of our political parties today.

But it's kind've silly that we still have laws (and even provisions in state constitutions), that are proven to not do what they were design to do, are overturned by the courts, or are just plain silly to the point that no one recognises them as relevant anymore.

And it's not just about cleaning up, but also about making the idea of science useful to politics. It's easy to say global warming (for example) is a con-job set up by the opposition who hate the wealthy, at least when their only accountability is to other politicians and a few radio hosts. it's much harder when the politician on the other side just hands out experiment after experiment showing "yeah, it's real, it's caused by us, and here are things we can do about it. I'm open to other suggestions though." - and then suddenly one politician looks like a complete ass, and our side wins.

@LordBucket
I'll attack this with hypotheticals.
Imagine a consumption tax designed to replace the income and property tax entirely. Lets say that we get a bunch of economists together and they say "yeah, all evidence shows that this is the best way to for a country". We support it.

Now lets say it's enacted, and it utterly fails. Lets say that in the first 5 years, we lose revenue across the board, the poor and middle class become far more poor by standard of living, and corruption or tax dodging increases dramatically. We, thinking "well that's unexpected", change our opinion and reverse the law. Now lets say we're willing to do that with every law. Laws that don't do what they were expected to do are thrown away periodically, and if we learn something interesting, we use that information to create a better law the second time around.