This blog post is nonsense. Sure, techies are confused about policy making, but this blog post is even more confused. For one thing, it has an enormous left-wing socialist bent to it.
Schneier is right about techies falsely believing "having the right answer is enough". But he's wrong about there being a right answer that only techies can grasp. Strong encryption is about competing special interests, not whether the answer is right or wrong. 
Your child is kidnapped, but the FBI got the kidnappers phone, only they can't decrypt it, because strong encryption. This is a competing interest to those who want strong encryption. There is no right or wrong answer here, no fundamental technical concept only techies know.
The case for strong encryption is instead political, because crypto backdoors aren't going to be used against child kidnappers, but everybody in society. It's a necessary protection against totalitarian states like China. It's necessary to keep our free state free.
Sure, techies have an important argument that backdoors for law enforcement also weaken crypto against adversaries who aren't law enforcement. But it's a pretense believing that the entire debate rests upon the technical argument, it doesn't.
Schneier's biggest flaw is that he thinks of policy making along the lines of the French dirigiste socialist model. People can't be free to decide for themselves, but must have the state decide things for them. The state must run both the economy and society.
From the dirigiste point of view, the government either has to promote something or ban it -- it can't simply leave something alone without government oversight over it.
IoT security is a good example. Consumers can't be allowed to make their own choices about the security of IoT devices but must instead have choices imposed upon them by government.
The infosec community believes it knows the "right answers" and is trying to impose more security on consumers than they want, killing innovation along the way.
Take, for example, insulin pumps. There is a vibrant community of Type 1 diabetics hacking their own insulin pumps to improve blood sugar control beyond that even of non-diabetics.
Yet, the infosec community wants to stop such innovation and lock down those insulin pumps over hysterical and ungrounded fears of what hackers may do to those devices.
Schneier repeats the nonsense from fellow dirigiste socialist Lawrence Lessig that "code is law". Code is not law, code is freedom. The freedom is code is every much as important as the freedom of speech.
The "code is law" argument is the claim that software code is a set of rules that limit you in much the same way that laws regulate your actions. For example, the code inside your ISPs router limits what sorts of IPv4 packets that it will route.
This is a silly analogy. It's like how your local grocery store charges $4 for a loaf of bread. You might use the analogy that such prices are law within the store. It's nonsense because customers can simply leave the store and go find another one that charges less for bread.
A store can't set arbitrarily high prices. It can only set prices according to what customers are willing to pay. They must keep lowering prices until they find willing buyers.
Dirigiste socialists believe stores have all the power in this relationship and that government policy must rebalance such power, helping buyers. Laissez-faire free-market types believe the opposite, that both buyers and sellers have equal power in the relationship.
That "price is law" is the premise of the rest of their arguments for heavy handed socialist policies regulating prices. The same is true of "code is law".
But price is freedom. If sellers can't find willing buyers, they have to lower prices. If buyers can't find willing sellers, they have to pay more. Government policymakers favoring one or the other removes freedom.
The same is true of code. If your ISP doesn't support IPv6, then change ISPs to one who does. If you don't like Telegram's lack of open-source end-to-end encryption, then switch to Signal.
Or, conversely, if you don't like how Linux still runs on the desktop, then you are free to choose Microsoft's closed-source Windows system. Which most do, because Linux continues sucks on the desktop.
But just like many are unhappy that stores charge too much for bread, many are unhappy that some ISPs don't support IPv6, or that Windows is still closed-source, and want government it stomp on somebody else's freedoms for their own benefit.
Policy making is the dirigiste philosophy of running things. Policy makers don't make decisions based upon what's good or bad. Instead, policy making is about balancing competing special interests. It's a tug of war between multiple interests wanting different things.
I mean, everyone knows policy making is messed up, that the government would being the "right" thing if only it weren't for those "special interests" somehow preventing it. But that's silly. What you think of as the "right" thing is actually just another "special interest".
Infosec is just another special interest. But like most special interests, they reject that label, and instead insist that they are fighting for the "right" thing.
Schneier incorrectly puts the cart before the horse. Solving problems is a necessary feature of technology. Consensus is a necessary feature of government. Policy makers don't want consensus -- consensus is what they need to get what they want.
Redefining π is not really a thing but an analogy. It's an analogy for things like law makers thinking they can redefine the price for bread. Venezuela did that recently, forcing bakeries to lower price. The result wasn't lower prices but mass starvation.
The same is true of things like IoT security. Infosec lobbies hard for this special interest. The result won't be better IoT security but higher prices, less innovation, and greater market concentration of big corporations.
What Schneier is trying to say is that law makers supporting his special interests, like IoT security, are good law makers. Not like those law makers who failed to break up Microsoft, those were bad law makers, somehow deficient compared to the good law makers.
