The law of unintended consequences strikes again.

And the questions posed above are not “American” questions, they are world questions. Furthermore, in a globalized society the whole idea of leading may well be outmoded. That does not mean that the US cannot/should not display leadership. Leading and winning are not the same things.

Q1 is very typical: the ONE thing the U.S. is most concerned about when it comes to science is how it can “remain a world leader in…”.

It is never about the quality of research or scientific ethos. It is always about who has the highest number of patents, the highest number of publications, oh my god, China is catching up, and so on. The most annoying part is when U.S. government science advisers go abroad and tell people outside the U.S. how terrible it is that other countries are catching up and might overtake the U.S. in scientific output.

get real! nobody except the U.S. cares about scientific leadership and more science worldwide is beneficial to all of us.

The president of the United states should be interested in improving this country and making the best that he can. It is in their job description. I don’t understand how you can be mad at the candidates or the questioners for asking the candidates how they plan to accomplish something that is obviously something they should be trying to do as president.

They aren’t trying to be the president of the Politically Correct states, they are trying to be the president of the united states. It is in the interest of the United States to be the most innovative, and thus the leader of the United States should be trying to make it as innovative as possible.

Unfortunately.

But attacking the questions as merely agenda-setting is foolish. Virtually every issue, in one way or another, is an exercise in agenda setting. The absence of this kind of questioning of candidates (and not only for president, but Senate and House as well) in favor of frames about gay marriage, God or no God, etc., blind voters to real national needs.

And, as usual, in regard to science or almost any issue, the candidates do not clearly and precisely answer two questions:

How much will it cost?
Who’s gonna pay for it?

Perhaps a discussion about restricter plates on carburetors in NASCAR…that’s “science”, right?

I think that the questions are pertinent, Brian, but they are also difficult questions that leave little room bullshit politicking; consequently, both candidates will avoid them like the plague.

Jiff
http://www.privacy-center.ru.tc

It is never about the quality of research or scientific ethos. It is always about who has the highest number of patents, the highest number of publications, oh my god, China is catching up, and so on. The most annoying part is when U.S. government science advisers go abroad and tell people outside the U.S. how terrible it is that other countries are catching up and might overtake the U.S. in scientific output.

get real! nobody except the U.S. cares about scientific leadership and more science worldwide is beneficial to all of us.

I, for one, think that these 14 questions meet your own criteria about telling us something about how the two candidates think. And most of the questions that Jim Lehrer asked of the candidates on Friday’s debate were just as open ended as you’re claiming these 14 were.

For starters, your “questions,” which are really thinly-disguised lobbying manifestos, are so open-ended that they lend themselves to little more than endless boilerplate pablum. More importantly, they ignore what debates actually do, which is to use issues as the backdrop to illustrate candidates’ thinking styles.

No one who listens to a debate EVER cares, mucn less remembers, the specific policy prescriptions than emanate from them. What they’re looking for is a series of clues about how candidates think. If you actually care about how the candidates approach science and technology, you’d boil it down to one or two narrowly focused questions that would elicit a sense of where they’d want to go in this area.

Fourteen questions, and it’s “tragic” that you don’t get them answers? Oh, please.

Multiple science organizations collaborated in the hopes of getting the presidential candidates to debate science and technology in a televised public debate. What the groups got instead was a list of responses to 14 science and technology questions, a…