Mark Henderson
speaker
32 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2012
last heard Aug 2012
Mark Henderson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
In short, there aren't enough geeks in politics.
Science has so much potentially to offer to politics, to public policymaking, both through the scientific advice that experts can give, but also I think the scientific approach to problem solving is the most powerful tool for generating reliable knowledge that humanity has yet developed.
Yeah, so there are 650 MPs.
Of those, there are 158 who have a background in business.
There are 90 who are what you might call professional politicians.
There are 86 lawyers and 38 from the media.
There is only one professional PhD-level scientist in the whole House of Commons.
There are another two who have science PhDs, about 20 or 30 who have a science undergraduate degree.
But really, even once you start to draw in non-scientists who've got some record of engagement with science, it's very difficult to get beyond about 70 names who've shown that.
I certainly wouldn't want everybody to be a scientist.
But what I think you'd get is a situation where ministers realised what they don't know and turned to the tools of science.
Randomised controlled trials for example are tools that could be used much more in for example education policy.
Let's take phonics as an example.
As things stand we don't really know whether phonics is a more effective method of teaching kids to read but it would be very easy to find out by setting up a randomised controlled trial.
That's correct.
I think politicians tend to be worried there about two things.
First of all, they've got this rather strange idea that it's unethical to experiment with something like, say, children's education.
Actually, I would argue that it's unethical not to, and as things stand...
We're absolutely experimenting with the way we teach kids because we don't really know what's effective and what isn't.
The second thing, of course, is that many politicians and the civil servants who help them out are often, I think, rather reluctant to put their ideological policies to the test because you might discover it didn't work.
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