Not, however, in this thread.
Take personal squabbles to The BBQ Pit.
[ /Moderating ]
Sorry.
I do feel they would not be effective rulers for long unless they used oppression to keep their power. People want heart, want compassion in a ruling body. I would also suspect a slowing of technological progress and less creativity and innovation by trying to micromanage.
If all humanity became this way I would expect humanity to die out, I would not expect many infants to make it without receiving love which does not operate logically. For the ones that make it without receiving love as a young child, I would expect them to have major social issues.
Logical reason not to kill someone: It will make others distrust you and think that it might be best to evict you(or maybe even dispose of you) before you decide to murder them. A reputation of overall trustworthiness makes it easier to deal with others in the long run.
It seems a rather unspecific question. What are “rational, science based ideals” exactly? Which ideals are we talking about? While it’s common to claim that all the scientific evidence in a certain debate points to one conclusion, the truth is that in many debates, both sides bring scientific evidence. I personally oppose biofuel mandates on scientific grounds, but I can’t honestly claim that there’s no scientific backing for biofuels.
I don’t think the OP is proposing that love be totally eliminated.
actually I was hoping for a link to 
A Scienceocracy is not mutually exclusive of faith and morality. There would still have to be “faith bases” or subjective values incorporated into the overall goals of the civilization. And some may be mutually exclusive. For example:
- Economic freedom vs economic security
- Security vs privacy and freedom
- Industry vs environment
- Collectivism vs individualism
…so on and so forth
Science, reason and rationality are only useful for creating a clear and efficient path towards some goal. But the goals themselves can be quite subjective.
[QUOTE=kanicbird]
If all humanity became this way I would expect humanity to die out, I would not expect many infants to make it without receiving love which does not operate logically. For the ones that make it without receiving love as a young child, I would expect them to have major social issues.
[/QUOTE]
Love has a biological basis, it’s a material thing, and can’t be turned on or off with reason.
This is true for all moral systems- “murder is bad, because we share certain assumptions about society and what’s good for mankind” is no less valid or less “arbitrary” then “murder is bad because God says so”. All moral systems have a “just because”, even if the “just because” is God.
I suppose it would depend on your definition of what are ‘rational, science based ideals with careful thought towards logical governing’, really. In the cold calculus of science it might be better to accept a certain level of collateral damage, for instance. As an example, perhaps the decision would be made to lower safety standards on personal transport and other things in order to increase fuel efficiency and lower global warming. Looked at rationally, in a pure cost to benefits analysis, many of the things we as a society do are not very efficient, being driven more by emotion.
Basically, I can see how it might be a disaster if you put such people in charge, especially if they were put in charge by fiat (which is the only way they ever WOULD be) without constraint or input from the general public (who ARE all emotional and ‘feelies’). I think a lot of the things that we take for granted that our various governments would have large shifts in priorities that I seriously doubt most of the folks in this thread salivating at the prospect would like very much…and I think the general public would like them even less. Try and think this through…do you REALLY want decisions made by pure logic and cost to benefits analysis by scientists who are going to be looking at the overall picture and not focused on low probability or small numbers of outliers and instead focused on biggest bang for the buck type thinking?
This guy is a cautionary tale in venerating science and rationality too much in arranging human affairs. TL;DR: he developed and implemented a eugenics program in the U.S. based on a shoddy understanding of genetics and IQ tests that led to many people, many of them immigrants entering the U.S. through Ellis Island, suffering compulsary sterilization based on an absurd classification as “feeble minded”.
He wasn’t a whackjob either. He was a scientist who later came to repudiate his own work on scientific grounds. Lot of good that did those sterilized under the auspices of the programs he created.
Things would quickly go very badly wrong. Scientific methodology, reason, and rationality are, by no stretch, a sufficient set of intellectual tools for “ruling the world”, and in many circumstances, trying to get by with them alone would be disastrous. Maybe a bit more reason and rationality than is typically applied at present might be a good a thing, but who can say how much more? Usually, every side of a political disagreement feels that they are being entirely reasonable and rational, but their opponents are not.
Scientific methodology, reason, and rationality are very good tools for doing science. Applying them elsewhere, especially the former, (and even if it were agreed that it would be a good idea) is made difficult by the fact that we really have no clear, generally agreed criteria of what counts as reasonable, rational, or scientific. Most notably, there is no clear account of what scientific methodology is, that is sufficiently well defined such that it could be applied to other domains, that is not hopelessly simplistic and clearly inadequate for accounting for much of what scientists actually do in their work (and no, what your undergraduate textbook told you about hypothetico-deductivism or falsificationism is not up to the job!).
Reason and rationality (really two names for the same thing, surely) have a wider field of appropriate application, but they still will not handle all problems adequately. Anyway, it is also often very difficult to pin down precisely what counts, in particular circumstances, as being reasonable or rational. They are really quite vague notions.
If people suddenly became rational, or at least most of them, we’d see religion fall by the wayside. So that’s kinda cool.
We’d be doing something about AGW, there would be disagreement about what, but the silly conservative denials wouldn’t be there.
We’d have done much better fixing the economy, since no one would cleave to the absurd nonsense about cutting taxes on rich people to help poor people.
We’d have more vaccine usage.
Reiki, astrology and feng shui would be gone.
There would be universal health care, since all the evidence points to it being simply better than our system.
We’d probably have more and safer nuclear reactors.
Technocracy is the answer. i think i still have a flyer from them somewhere.
Compared to the other thread, would superstition of the non-religious type still exist? This topic posits a race of smart, reasonable, rational people. Of course that would be better in every way. But being religion nor atheist is a pre-requsite to being stupid, petty, greedy, cruel, or illogical. People can still do that despite where they go on Sundays
The Science Council did not prevent the Krypton disaster, did they?
Nor the rise of the machines.
Yeah, see, that’s the thing. People always put this in terms of ‘what I want and like would obviously be what these people would do, so it would be paradise!’. We probably would get universal health care, but looked at from a purely scientific and rational perspective that wouldn’t mean ‘everyone gets equal care’, it would mean that those deemed to be worthwhile to save or treat would get the care. It’s a limited resource problem, so without emotion those limited resources would go to those best suited for it that would give the best return to society. Nuclear power plants? Definitely we’d get a boat load of them. But from a probability perspective there is a level of acceptable risk in a cost to benefits ratio, so maybe they would be safer, and maybe the resources would be better spent making a lot more of them for an acceptable risk when looked at from the perspective of global warming. I think you are looking at things from the perspective that what these guys would do would be what you think they should, but I seriously doubt you’ve really thought through all the ramifications here of disconnecting emotions and feelings from the decision loop.
I’ve worked in places that are run by science-based methods. There is no shortage of disagreement, but all parties know they have to produce evidence.
I’d hope that morality would be based around agreed on goals and actions that can be demonstrated to reach them. If our goal is to reduce teenage pregnancies (which I think we can defend rationally) and access to birth control and sex education does this, we might ignore whines about how it is wrong to “enable” kids to have sex - when the goal is pregnancy reduction, not sex reduction.