As I see it this thought process only takes you so far in most areas of importance. The main purpose of an ITT is for those areas for which capturing knowledge

As I see it this thought process only takes you so far in most areas of importance. The main purpose of an ITT is for those areas for which capturing knowledge and comprehension of that is trickier. In the hard sciences, objective truth serves and you can talk of approximating towards something truer than before. That is something linear. The model gets measurably improved. Most of everything else in society, economy, social, politics, ecology - I don't think runs well on such thinking to the point using it is counterproductive aka you will not survive by thinking like this. Practical people with rational ideas inserted into the political arena appear to typically get eaten alive. You're left with ogres, hopefully enlightened ones. It's likely the spectacularly convoluted nature of human politics is responsible for our biological evolution - like A/B testing with millions of lives, there's a nice essay musing on the cruelty of ourselves called Meditations on Moloch at Slatestarcodex. Objective truths remain in all of those areas, society, economy, social, politics, ecology but they're the kind of truths which are not especially helpful. There's these cyclical patterns, emergent phenomenons. One day the model will be Fedualism, another Liberalism, another day Communism, another day another -ism, but what is really going on? So maybe some of the time some people are wrong, but more often the new -ism is saying "incomplete model" and if your society decreases in complexity it may even start to say something like "reduce model", deregulate, even promote anarchy. The most appropriate model is that of a Garden. You may grow blackberry plants or oak trees, but you can't really think of "how do I optimize it all" because bluntly you're not that intelligent and nobody is that intelligent. Instead you get weeds, experiments, patterns of growth, environmental conditions, incentives, bad weather - all those joys. In one way you may read scientific literature on optimizing particulars - but I wouldn't say that's what Gardeners really do unless their only goal is to produce spuds - and even then any farmer will update you on just how much of that is outside their control. It's like that with Society but we're in a worse devil of a position. Talk about legacy code, yikes. tldr; You're maybe not looking for "the truth" as wondering "how do you get a benevolent gardener" and still deal with the slugs :-).