But that's not how law works, and that's not how policy works.

Maybe it should. Can a system of rules that allow blatant contradictions, inequity, bias, and corruption really be said to "work"? In technology, we call those "bugs", and struggle hard to eliminate them along with other exceptions/errors in the system.

Policy making has been around a lot longer than the Internet or computers or any technology.

So has religion and other superstitious mumbo-jumbo. That doesn't make them right. In fact, it makes them that much less trustworthy. More often than not, pre-scientific thinking has been just plain wrong. The only rational way to "work together" is to educate (or replace) the policy makers, not to "compromise" or work towards a "consensus" that is anything other than an evidence-based approach. I'm all for technology in the public interest, Bruce, but we're only going to see progress when people open their eyes to the reality that science has revealed. I'd argue that it's especially important for the law not to fall for the fallacy that there's some ancient infallible wisdom that must be followed. You tried to make it sound like it was the technologists that were inflexible, but all you really did was expose just how poorly the policy makers do their job. 20bd2fa190784aa1e6876face0d1b380a60da2f6e6fa4ab425d120a345a8b8b9