I'm not sure that negates anything about the actual argument she makes in her piece. If anything, it shows even more why she's right about the importance of persuasion.

Of interest to my fellow BlueSky STS people: @castac.bsky.social @asaskat.bsky.social @labortechresearchnetwork.org @cstms.bsky.social And @asociologist.bsky.social @shobitap.org @lmesseri.bsky.social

My recommendation is that policy advocates should make a case for their policies by emphasizing value-tradeoffs. This is a much more honest way of making their case that also ensures that it does not get delegitimized down the line. It is more, dare I say it, … democratic.

(2) plenty of policy frameworks can be expert-driven but still “democratic,” such Community Notes on Twitter designed entirely by programmers but still much beloved for its underlying values. Or the NHS's NICE committee that @ezrakleinbot.bsky.social wrote about here. www.vox.com/2020/1/28/21...

In this new post, I argue that (1) democracy is not about the public versus the experts; rather, it’s a shared culture of remaining open to different voices and causes (but without any guarantees that any cause will win out)

Rather, we have experts and regular people on ALL sides of an issue.

Advocates for policies and policy frameworks will often argue that their proposal is more “democratic” while the one they oppose is “technocratic.” But conflicts in many industrial societies today are NOT between publics on one side and experts on the other.

I forgot to thank you and Con for being such good stewards and editors! So, thank you to you both!

Would be curious to see other people's thoughts!

But calling everything "power" just confuses all the distinctions we should be making between institutions and different organizing machineries.

What is his contribution? It's that the essence of modernity is that science and scientific experts create what one might call the “organizing machinery” or dispositifs of daily life.

E.g. I wrote a whole piece on *why* we have post-truth and most of its citations just say "we live in a post-truth age (five articles with the word post-truth in title including mine)." It may be the pressure of just having to cite something; it could also be that we produce too many papers.

I feel this is true of most citations; they may not be this egregious but most tend to be broad references to a topic rather than actually engaging with specific arguments of the papers.

I tried it once. I think it worked overall but I didn't do it again even though I love having everyone share one physical text. One thing I would change if I did it again would be to keep the number of pages on the lower side so that it's not too thick (and this also reduces its cost for students).

But hopefully, this also means in the long run the importance of courts will decline and policy negotiations will be resolved through political channels rather than by suing each other.

That's a great point! I think the US is unusual among developed countries in the deference given to the courts and how much of a role courts play in adversarial policy negotiations so of course, strangely enough, here they are now as well.