If you have a provably-better alternative let's use that. Do you happen to have one?

No, I wish.

This is the the stage where I'm hoping to collaboratively identify what the relevant unknowns are and what bounds we can assign to them. The next stage is to brainstorm what solutions might work and see if they cluster into any particular regions of the solution space. Also, to break them up by scale-- individual, local, national, global. Come up with recommendations for actions one can take immediately to implement the first two (i.e. how to make the place where you live more likely to be a beacon of civilization). If we have some really smart/entrepreneurial LessWronger get interested, possibly come up with individual/local actions that scale to have national/global impact if they catch on with enough people.

This is a big problem and I'm not under the illusion that it's going to be solved by this post. But we have to start somewhere. And if the best problem-solvers are ignoring this problem because the moral scolds and luddites have pissed all over it, maybe changing that state of affairs is a good place to start.