Analytics in Government

[Dill]

(06-29-2018, 11:18 AM)WeezyBengal Wrote: With sports and so many other facets of every day life relying on data and analytics to makes key decisions...when will our government and a President get on board with a fully analytical approach to policies? I'm not sure how much and what is being done at this moment with big data in government...but could you imagine if a President ran the country like some of the new age GMs in baseball ran their teams?

It just seems like so many industries nowadays take opinion and bias (pretty much what politics is) out of the equation and rely solely on factual data to make key decisions and to find REAL answers.

If a President ran independently and was committed to finding answers to our problems through analysis, data, and factual information - basically letting the data and analytics decide on which policies are best for the American people - would you vote for them?

No. 

How might some groups react when "analytics" decides they need to pay more taxes to support public education, or that their wages need to be lowered, or that their health care should not cover birth control, or that women should be paid more than men for the same work, or that people over 60 have to retire, or that more women, or less, should have abortions?


This proposal seems to me to confuse judgments of fact with judgments of value, though these are wholly separate orders. And a pluralist society like ours is made up of differing demographics, differently empowered, and embracing sometimes very different values, which means group interests must sometimes (or of continuously) come into conflict.  Machines cannot make value judgments, even if they can sometimes be programmed to approximate them when parameters of judgment are simple and agreed to by all parties, as in Leonard's sports example.