Those are impossible because such questions can't be scientifically asked in the first place.
Like, what does "benefit society" even mean? By what parameter? You can definitely make a scientific conclusion of the order of "religious conservatives really hate it when women work", but... duh? I can agree with that and not care one bit.
Second one, impossible because there's no such thing as race scientifically, in the sense the common person uses that word. You could make such a conclusion about groups with particular genetics, but you can't tell those by eyesight.
Imagine we managed to create a good enough model of the society. Kinda similar to what engineers use to design bridges or combustion chambers.
Then we create a target function - minimize the number people below poverty level, minimize the weighted number of crimes, maximize productive life longevity - and so on. All good things.
We run it and the model tells us: (1) mandate every woman have three kids by age of thirty (2) promote currently elected president to the king and make it a lifetime hereditary post and (3) make sure everyone goes to the church every Sunday (4) sell Alaska to China.
We shrug, check things here and there - and no, there's no mistake, the solution is stable and whatever we thought were unresolvable problems of monarchy actually do have simple solutions which noone thought about before.
Impossible, we'll never agree on the target function.
Eg, "minimize people below poverty level" -- this isn't universally wanted. Some people believe in fact that it's fundamentally impossible and that if anybody is brought up, that can only happen by bringing somebody down, and at best this is achievable by averaging everything to mediocrity, and they hate the idea of that.
Well, at the very minimum the target function can be something like "make sure everyone is not worse than right now and as many people as possible are better".
For the definition of "better off", see [1]
[EDIT]
Here's another option. Imagine, people come to you and say: hey, dale_glass, you're smart we trust you. Please pick the target function. You can put there whatever you want with whatever weight you want.
The caveat: you will have to unconditionally accept the outcome. You cannot keep tweaking and rerunning until the result matches your ideas of perfect society.
> Well, at the very minimum the target function can be something like "make sure everyone is not worse than right now and as many people as possible are better".
Not everyone wants that either. Some enjoy having inferiors.
> Here's another option. Imagine, people come to you and say: hey, dale_glass, you're smart we trust you. Please pick the target function. You can put there whatever you want with whatever weight you want.
What does that have to do with science or what we were talking about? That's extremely subjective.
I think you have picked particularly bad examples for this. Both the model and the target function have real, practical considerations that make them probably impossible. If, however, you did make such a model and such a function then the running that model in every possible configuration space would be a problem of such massive scale that you couldn't ever hope to find the best configuration.
I think if you have some sort of point you are trying to make, you should confine yourself to something more practical and easier to have a definite answer. If you so I think you will find that, eventually, the invalidated belief will be dropped except by a small minority and the consensus will shift to encompass that viewpoint.
Your scenario requires a lot of people to give up their personal freedoms and happiness for the good of whichever individuals' lives would be improved by their sacrifice. Let's add in that all men not married by the age of 21 should be castrated. It's for the good of society right?
What's the point of this? If/when those things would hypothetically be found, we'd have to come to terms with it. However, we found that (1) reproductive freedom (2) constitutionalism and democracy (3) religious freedom, are all conducive to a better society. It's impossible we'll ever find otherwise.
That's completely missing the point. The point is, do you accept that unpleasant Truth, do you reject it, or do you weigh whatever other values you have against that truth and ignore it.
You can't make that question in the general sense and draw useful conclusions.
Eg, it's an "unpleasant Truth" that you're at a risk of dying in a car accident. But yeah, we just decide it's worth going out anyway, and ignore it.
But that isn't applicable to a similar "unpleasant Truth" that welding on a gas tank could get you killed. The task is different, the risks are different, the tradeoffs are different, the ways to compensate for danger are different.
All such things are very contextual. Trying to divine some sort of general rule or philosophy doesn't really work.
Honestly, both of these, the car accident and the gas tank are being treated exactly the same here. You've looked at the given "truth", evaluated it, and then come to a decision on whether it's worth it or not. It's explicitly making that decision and that trade off.
what andrepd said felt far more like a handwave
>However, we found that (1) reproductive freedom (2) constitutionalism and democracy (3) religious freedom, are all conducive to a better society. It's impossible we'll ever find otherwise.
It's a denial of a hypothetical, which is not engaging with the core point, but instead attacking the analogy instead. It's a standard (and often unintentional) logical fallacy.
This is my interpretation of the conversation. Please avoid approaching this from the "perfect hypotheticals" perspective, their perfection is besides the point.
A: We have a perfect target metric, and we've found that C, which we philosophically like, performs far worse than B, which we find abhorrent
B: There's no perfect metric, and if there were, we've already found C is better, and there's no way how C could be worse.
It's deliberately avoiding the point.
To break it down even further:
>However, we found that (1) reproductive freedom (2) constitutionalism and democracy (3) religious freedom, are all conducive to a better society.
Like, what does "benefit society" even mean? By what parameter? You can definitely make a scientific conclusion of the order of "religious conservatives really hate it when women work", but... duh? I can agree with that and not care one bit.
Second one, impossible because there's no such thing as race scientifically, in the sense the common person uses that word. You could make such a conclusion about groups with particular genetics, but you can't tell those by eyesight.