In regards to the 'glimmerings of a solution', I was left wondering about the imperfectness and bias in information gathering. That is, your data is only as good as your ability to gather and interpret it. Sometimes the very process of outlining a problem imposes a bias upon which data is gathered, and the importance given to what is gathered, and what is not. Also, I wonder about issues of scale, and improper mapping. As a worst-case scenario, I can think of Chairman Mao being fed BS about how much collectivization was increasing crop yields. -I've read that crops were transplanted along railway lines that he was scheduled to travel on. I do buy that institutional decay occurs by imperceptible creep. However, I don't know that well-informed deliberate steps have an advantage over a messier evolutionary process of smaller, less-educated ones, considering that as the scope of information increases, so do the scope of assumptions buttressing it.
Yeah I agree with everything you said. Everything we do is imperfect, yes, but if we could write down our intentions then future generations could know where we were imperfect and biased, rather than guess and never be sure. That at least has a possibility of adding new biases that might destructively interfere with the old ones :) I think the analogy with unit testing is correct in a very deep way here. Even if after TDD you may have missed tons of tests you should have written, things that you unconsciously intended but forgot to be explicit about. But the presence of a growing set of tests still makes life easier for those who come after, and the accumulation of tests holds hope of one day being comprehensive.
Interesting idea, in light of the Hobby Lobby decision. In that case, the Court wasn't interpreting the Constitution, but rather the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The act was passed in the early 90s. Many of the legislators that crafted the bill are still alive, and many are still in Congress. They, therefore, could be interrogated directly. They filed an amicus brief on behalf of the government that said "THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE MEANT, AND WE CATEGORICALLY REJECT HOBBY LOBBY'S ASSERTION!" Justice Alito, in his opinion, interpreted what Congress "meant" as exactly the opposite of the original authors' clarification.Perhaps legislation should come with a Declaration of Intent, and commentary from those opposed.