[yitosda]

This is exactly what I'm talking about. You've narrowed down the scope of logic to apply to everything !good, which is some emotional value that exists outside of logic. In reality "good" is a vast trove of information which differs in the minds of every party to the problem.

Logic absolutely applies to this set of information!

Wanna-be technocrats should understand that exploring that vast trove of information (which they can't actually do, in practice) will allow a more widely accepted solution.

Accounting for all these various "goods" logically results in messy compromises which run exactly counter to the technocratic dream.

Democracy is an imperfect attempt to distribute the logical calculation of all these "goods" and come up with a big ugly messy solution.

(Some parallels with capitalism exist here)

[manifestsilence]

Yep. Often when people take the time to have a more thoughtful argument where they seek common ground instead of "winning", they quickly find that the differences are not in the logic and semantic games they were playing, but were a difference in either values or assessment of some fuzzy probability or heuristic. They find that one of them didn't think a certain outcome was either A. likely, or B. important, and the other differed on that. If it's about the odds, common ground can be reached by comparing experience and knowledge. If it's about values, that's harder, unless those values are based on further assumptions that can be picked apart, like saying seat belts are good because they save lives. That can be verified statistically. If they say cherry ice cream is the best, it's a case of agree to disagree...