Post #4492872

There's an idea that's missing from a lot of public conversations, which I wish I could call "political science", but something less useful to society is squatting the name. We'll make do. The thing that makes science worth our time isn't that it allows us to make trebuchets and work our way up the tech tree to CRISPR. That's good stuff, but it's positive side effects. The sales pitch of science is epistemological: it can be wrong, but it can't be wrong *forever.* It's an error correction algorithm for human understanding of the natural world. "Social good" is something that could use a similar framework. It's hard to know what's going to make life better sometimes, or how to take the things we know are good and make them happen. So what that requires are a set of axioms we can measure outcomes against. Values, basically. 1/3