But if you're trying to issue prescriptions for the future (i.e. what kind of world do you want to create?), there's nothing fundamentally wrong about first identifying where you want to go and then cherrypicking biological and psychological traits to manipulate in order to get there. It would be just like writing a program to get the results you want.
ID was nuts because of their flawed methodology.
> "But if you're trying to issue prescriptions for the future (i.e. what kind of world do you want to create?), there's nothing fundamentally wrong about first identifying where you want to go and then cherrypicking biological and psychological traits to manipulate in order to get there."
Do not confuse policy forming / social engineering with science.
What I meant is that ID used an inappropriate methodology for what it purported to do, but the same methodology might be appropriate in other contexts such as social engineering.
That is how it is supposed to work, but reality is never so clean.
One of the best modern examples of doing it backwards (starting with a conclusion, and then working backwards from there), is so called "intelligent design"/"creation science". Many different groups and movements are guilty of it, but the ID scene is relatively unique in the lengths that they went to present themselves as legitimate scientists. See: Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitzmiller_v._Dover_Area_School...) Those nutjobs insisted that they were real scientists, despite the glaring contradictions with their nonsense and the scientific method.
His comparison was rather apt.