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[Reelya]

The Constitution is a beautiful document, and it works amazingly well given that it was the first time anyone had ever tried to write anything like it.

It wasn't really the first time "anyone  had ever tried to write anything like it", that's really just the horn-blowing they teach you in American history classes. There's a long, long history of documents in Europe that lead up to the ideas in the US Constitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution#Modern_constitutions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_of_Government

[TheBiggerFish]

The Constitution is a beautiful document, and it works amazingly well given that it was the first time anyone had ever tried to write anything like it.

It wasn't really the first time "anyone  had ever tried to write anything like it", that's really just the horn-blowing they teach you in American history classes. There's a long, long history of documents in Europe that lead up to the ideas in the US Constitution.

In some US History classes.
*points at above links*

[origamiscienceguy]

Something like the constitution probably wouldn't have worked in Europe because that country would be destroyed. I think the New world was the only place that this could happen because the distance protected them from the hungry Europeans.

[misko27]

The Constitution is a beautiful document, and it works amazingly well given that it was the first time anyone had ever tried to write anything like it.

It wasn't really the first time "anyone  had ever tried to write anything like it", that's really just the horn-blowing they teach you in American history classes. There's a long, long history of documents in Europe that lead up to the ideas in the US Constitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution#Modern_constitutions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrument_of_Government

And yet it was influential in the rest of the world separate-and-apart from it's ideological antecedents. I doubt many claim that the Constitution sprung wholesale from the bosom of Thomas Jefferson as a like an Oracle from God (although they sound like it sometimes). It relied on many documents and influences, true, but Constitutionalism was greatly impacted by that document as well, as your own link notes:

The United States Constitution, ratified June 21, 1788, was influenced by the British constitutional system and the political system of the United Provinces, plus the writings of Polybius, Locke, Montesquieu, and others. The document became a benchmark for republicanism and codified constitutions written thereafter.

But that is off-topic. The real issue is the constitution and potential revisions. As FJ has inadvertently reminded us, the constitution is a document that has tremendous appeal to the American people as a whole, and while, as people have noted, the old constitution had more then its share of disagreements and fights, changing it would require doing so while appeal for the old Constitution exists, and any group that feels it is stepped upon by the new Constitution would, at the very minimum, call bloody murder, and at worst provoke violent reaction.

Think about this: You would be taking away the constitution that is fetishized by militias, and potentially replacing it with something that represents everything that (to them) the old Constitution stands against. Many of those militia movements have as their overarching motto "Defend the Constitution". Can you imagine how they might react?

I say that the benefits (whatever they may be) need to be weighed against steep costs and risks. Can someone start by telling me what we might gain if the eventual result is in question? If you think its outdated, why *specifically* other then its actual age? And to that question I add, isn't it possible that some specific group will get its way and make it even more unsuited to the modern era?

[Strife26]

We should try to write a constitution by science....

So write a Constitution, let the country run for a few centuries, let it implode, then write a new and improved one?

Or just trust law, economics, political science, and constitutional studies professors to do it? Because, I gotta say, those are pretty close to the bottom of the heap for purity of scientific fields.

[mainiac]

You want purity of field?  So mathematicians would be good at writing a constitution?

[Strife26]

Well, I'd trust them slightly more than some law professors I read about.

[IronyOwl]

We should try to write a constitution by science....

So write a Constitution, let the country run for a few centuries, let it implode, then write a new and improved one?

Or just trust law, economics, political science, and constitutional studies professors to do it? Because, I gotta say, those are pretty close to the bottom of the heap for purity of scientific fields.

Figure out what you want to do, ask scientists how to get it done. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it's quite a bit better than winging it based on what you "feel like" or "makes sense."

Or at least, it's better when we do it that way trying to design or produce every other single thing. Usually.

You want purity of field?  So mathematicians would be good at writing a constitution?

I think this goes by a purity-practicality sliding scale thingy. A mathematician would be really good at writing something that was objectively correct, but terrible at writing anything that actually directed or managed anything. A law professor would be awesome at writing implementable laws, but it'd be wholly and entirely arbitrary garbage with no clear purpose.

Finding the middle ground where someone's kind of full of shit but not too much more than they need to be to achieve measurable effects in a poorly understood environment matching poorly understood and largely arbitrary goals is the... uh, "ideal."

[Culise]

I'd honestly be horrified to ask most scientists to write a constitution, mostly because asking popular and famous scientists to work outside their specialty seems to net you some Noam Chomsky-esque shenanigans.  I wouldn't even trust political scientists to do it, mostly because of my concerns (as Strife26 brought up) regarding the purity of their field and the issue of attempting a practical realization of ideology-driven politics.  It's for a similar reason I dislike technocracy, though that's more a matter of the ever-icky "politicization of science" problem that typically gets quietly skimmed over (by analogy, cleaning up politics by introducing the purity of science is like throwing white linen in a pigpen). 

[Rolan7]

At least with a technocracy, the atrocities produce incremental and semi-permanent upgrades to human knowledge, and thus the human condition.

Seriously though, I wish democracy wasn't literally a bunch of popularity contests.  Too bad there's no reasonable way to fix that, that I can think of.  (without having a government of orphan eunuch scientists)

[Culise]

At least with a technocracy, the atrocities produce incremental and semi-permanent upgrades to human knowledge, and thus the human condition.

That's actually what I'm worried about - not the "atrocities," per se, but the assumption a priori that it will result in improvements.  Determining one's political position based on scientific development results in a circumstance where a perverse incentive to falsify scientific discoveries exists (because some people desire power), and results in one being granted the political power to retard attempts to uncover this falsification.  We have enough of this in the regular politics of academia, where the backbiting is fierce and the net benefit is typically accolades.  When I think of politics and science, I think of Lysenkoism first and foremost, where science is corrupted to serve political masters.  When science becomes a route to power, it will draw people who desire power rather than knowledge, and when science becomes a *threat* to people who possess power, then...well, it's not those who wield power who will lose.

EDIT:
Oh, and that's just based on people who act corrupt from the get-go.  That entirely neglects people who would be corrupted by power after obtaining such, or people who end up promoted due to early discoveries beyond their competence.  Imagine a world where an admitted brilliance in the field of linguistics, particularly in universal grammar or hierarchy in languages, leads to Noam Chomsky becoming Minister of Culture, or where rocket scientist Jack Parsons introduces occultism, Scientology, and Crowley-style "sex magic" to NASA.  Those are just the crazies; I love Paul Erdős dearly, but I fear political life would have broken him.

[Rolan7]

Reasonable!  However, proper science is based on being testable by third parties.  If a "technocrat" rose to power based on claims which couldn't be verified by others (either because they're untrue, or simply too difficult to test), I'd argue that wouldn't be a true scotsman technocracy.  More like a theocracy.

[Culise]

Sorry, I edited in a second bit after because I realized I had only covered willful corruption and malice.  But to extrapolate on it, basically, even (or perhaps especially) scientific theories can always be found to be wrong or incomplete after the fact; that's a fundamental part of science, after all, that we're always pursuing the truth.  Let's say we've got our Lamarckian genius who comes into the picture based on his works on heritability; his experiments have been confirmed, his genius unquestioned, his political power within his field of study unparalleled.  Now, suddenly we have this young upstart who suddenly pops in and says that there's this funny thing called genetics that explains all of his own work as well as quite a bit more.  Our dear Lamarckian genius has made his life quite comfortable and has gotten quite used to power; now, he has a strong motive to suppress and/or discredit this upstart before his cozy nest egg can be pulled out from under him.  Whether he succeeds or not in this, it's a dangerous incentive to create, and it's bad enough when the only thing at risk is tenure, one's name as a scientist, and one's potential mark on history; when one introduces real political power and financial benefit into the equation, it only becomes even stronger.  Moreover, he may not even be doing it out of practical self-interest; he may have simply become set in his ways and, as you say, positively theological in his belief in his own theories. 

[Rolan7]

That does provide a perverse incentive, yeah.

[Reelya]

There's a reason that many visions of a technocratic utopia have a computer running the show rather than a bureaucracy.