Dear gods, no! Setting aside the history of the pseudoscience of psychology in diagnosing homosexuality as a pathological personality disorder and people on the functional end of the autistic spectrum as “retarded”, I don’t think we should be handing the keys to the kingdom over to psychologists and sociologists to “engineer” as they see fit to conform to “stated goals” because I have no desire to live in a Aldous Huxley novel or be forced to conform to someone’s arbitrary notion of what a utopia should look like, much less someone who reads the DSM-V and starts diagnosing everyone who disagree with them as having mental illness.
If I grasp your fundamental point accurately, you seem to be suggesting that the subjectivity and bias of human perception interferes with objective interpretation and analysis of information (“Human observers distort reality in predictable ways,”) and thus we should use some kind of external system to manage society based upon evidential data and objective analysis to optimize outcomes, e.g. “engineer a society to reach its stated goals.” That is a fine idea in the abstract but begs the question of who is setting the goals and controlling the system. We’ve seen various attempts throughout the last century to impose order and purpose on societies via a centralized autocracy or oligarchy, and without exception all efforts produced worse results than egalitarian societies managed by ad hoc processes as defined by more-or-less democratic principles. In fact, many of these efforts to politically manage societies along purported scientific principles have produced the worst massacres and genocides in history.
Thank you, but no; I’ll take a liberal social democracy with a well-educated populace managed by the balance of competing ideas and political philosophies negotiating to pragmatic solutions rather than some arbitarily enforced societal good. Human societies are all flawed in a multitude of ways because humans are rationalizing creatures with biased perceptions, and democracy in particular is a potpourri of flaws and misperceptions in the aggregate, but the effort to remove humanity from managing societies amplifies those flaws rather than mitigating them.
Stranger