@Sed Contra
Is there is anything modern about science especially if “realistic” is a criterion?
Anyone who isn't an anti-science wingnut need only look back at the history of progress to see that the last few hundred years with scientific advancement have been remarkably better for remarkably more people than the millennia before without it. And that's especially true for the last hundred years.
“Modern” science is only scientific in the restricted sphere of investigation through quantity.
If that's what you think, then your science education has been very soft. Even just limiting myself to the topic of discussion here, good science in cybersecurity and law would involved well-understood mechanisms of action, provable causation, and graceful degradation/exception handling. You worry about quantities only after you get the fundamentals right.
Plato, Aristotle etc. were more truly evidence based, and as far as the subject matter allows scientific, because their approach was to start with and look at real things in terms of their natures.
Utter rubbish. They did a lot more navel-gazing philosophy than objective observations of nature. They championed nonsense like humors for medicine, earth, water, air, and fire for physics and a geocentric Universe. Given the amount of ready evidence against your position, I have to assume you're just trolling at this point.
Ancient "wisdom" is nothing to revere. Even early scientific thinking involved taking a lot of shots in the dark. But that's what's great about science. Notions that are correct gather more evidence and greater support. Notions that are wrong are, and this is a critical component, accepted as wrong. A lot of society's ills continue to be caused by people who are objectively wrong, and yet refuse to accept that simple fact.
The imaginative literary accounts I referred to above speculate on the tendency to tyranny that arises when inappropriate evidentiary methods are enforced.
Again, you'll have to be more explicit on what you mean, because nobody rational is going to be swayed by a literary device adopted by an author simply as a means to tell a scary story. Yes, tyrants will seek to undermine scientific findings that contradict their self-centered agendas. But that's nothing new; it's already happening every day. It's exactly why I'm proposing to strengthen the system to make it less vulnerable to their petty whims.
If somehow a marvelously good political system were to be hit on, copying it and using it as a prescriptive set of rules would become tyranny. The continual active exercise by people of their political virtue and prudence is the only way to maintain freedom.
And I say that, if the only way to water the tree of liberty is with blood (as Jefferson posited), your political system is insufficiently advanced. Just as Einstein built on and corrected Newton, I think it's high time we took a thoughtful look at doing the same to Jefferson's notions of democracy. Doing so in accordance with 21st Century science will get us a lot farther than rejecting it.
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