Fishery policy might seem like a fringe issue, but it is another disturbing example of ignorant politicians disrupting science- and evidence-based policies. This is from Pew:

When a fish population falls below a certain level, it is classified as overfished, and the MSA requires regional managers to create a plan to rebuild the species with a date for meeting the recovery goal. That timeline is based on science and accounts for environmental conditions and biological factors that can influence rebuilding, such as how long it takes the fish to reach reproductive age.

Critics of the MSA claim that the law is rigid in requiring a short timeline, but the facts say otherwise: The average timeline for rebuilding plans is close to 20 years, and most plans have recovery timelines longer than 10 years. H.R. 200 would alter the law to allow exceptions to setting science-based rebuilding timelines. It would open the door for political and other considerations to influence a major element of recovery plans, allowing managers to set arbitrary timelines that could postpone the benefits of fully rebuilt stocks indefinitely. That’s why extending rebuilding timelines would be shortsighted and counterproductive…

To prevent overfishing, the MSA requires managers to set science-based annual catch limits. H.R. 200 would exempt more fish populations from the requirement to establish science-based catch limits—which would increase the risk of overfishing.

Fisheries are a poster child for introducing complex systems. They are a straightforward physical system that is just a little complex. And yet, it is easy for a normal intelligent person to have misconceptions about how they will change over time. This is because there are lags and non-linearities in the system. Fish take a while to grow to maturity and reproduce. You can fish a seemingly abundant fish population at a high rate for awhile, but then it will seem to crash without warning and take a long time to recover. This seems unpredictable to people uneducated in systems (who may be perfectly intelligent, literate, and numerate otherwise), but is fairly easy to grasp and predict once you understand the relatively simple theory and dynamics behind it. So the fact that politicians and the population at large aren’t able to grasp this is just a failure of our education system.

Real fisheries are just a bit more complex than what I described above. This podcast from Fresh Air describes how removing the small fish species that form the base of the food chain, rather than just overfishing of larger commercial species, may have led to the Cod collapse off New England in the 1980s.