Am I a technocrat?

I recently asked an LLM to infer my ideological leanings purely through my post history on this blog. It pegged me as, among other things, a technocrat.

Okay. I am all for science and expertise. I think public policy should be grounded in evidence. I want a competent administrative state. But I don’t think the label quite fits.

Getting a PhD made me more skeptical of scientific evidence, not less. The process of evidence generation is an endlessly forking path of choices: which question to ask, how to measure and collect the data, what to do with it afterward, and even when to stop fighting reviewer two. Scientific results are rarely clean, at least not the kind that end up informing public policy.

This is also why I am cranky about certain phrases. I prefer the term “evidence-informed” over “evidence-based”, because evidence can be an input into the decision-making process but cannot define the values that guide it.

The same goes for “follow the science”. This slogan annoyed me so much I even wrote a piece about it in The Hub a few years ago. The key passage:

In reality, “science” cannot dictate policy, because science cannot weigh the value of particular freedoms against specific risks, any more than it can tell you how to feel about a sunset. Policy is about making trade-offs, based on a set of values and goals, in the light of evidence.

Again, I am not anti-science, but I am against the idea that science can settle questions that are not, in the end, scientific. Yes, science can help us quantify our uncertainty about the future. But it cannot tell us what goals we want to accomplish or what we are willing to sacrifice to achieve them.

So maybe I am technocratic in a basic sense. I want expertise and scientific evidence to inform decision making. But I am also opposed to technocracy, because expertise is not a shortcut for judgement, evidence does not obviate the need for values, and data do not automatically confer legitimacy. Experts can help us understand the trade-offs, but they cannot wave them away. As the economist Thomas Sowell said, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.”