Evidence-based_policy does not spring forth from the void. Jumping directly to Scientific Democracy would likely result in mistakes. This post explores how to evolve towards Scientific Democracy.
- come up with a hypothesis for evidence-based policy
- Randomized Control Trials
- Reproducible Randomized Control Trials
- Do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implementation_research to evaluate scaling hurdles
- Scientific Democracy
Each of these steps has disincentives.
Randomized Control Trials
- are expensive to enact (in terms of people, time, money)
- tricky to get the stats correct
- sample size needs to be sufficient
- sample diversity needs to be representative
Reproducibility can be challenging due to
- relevant steps and factors need to be documented
- populations (and associated cultural factors and conditions) need to be consistent
Scalability challenges include
- were subjects and staff used in previous (smaller) studies representative?
- are there mechanisms for feedback to monitor implementation?
Scientific Democracy is impeded if the process isn't consistent with existing dogma.
Source:
"Policymaking is Not a Science" Freakonomics podcast, 2025.
"The Science of Using Science: Towards an Understanding of the Threats to Scaling Experiments" by O. Al-Ubaydli, J. A. List, D. Suskind 2019. DOI 10.3386/w25848
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