I agree that it can be misinterpreted by non scientifically trained. But any serious discussion about human needs makes any dystopic scenario impossible. You can read the works of prof Gabor Mate or Robert Maurice Sapolsky, professor of Biological Sciences, and Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences and, by courtesy, Neurosurgery, at Stanford University.
Sure, as long as real scientists interpret it, this is where likes of Sam Harris become dangerous. Most of these are dystopia because of our current conditioning, not because there's something scientifically wrong with them. I can picture a world where everyone is healthy in every way and I wouldn't want to be a part of. I'll take your recommendation and do some reading though.
Fact: research shows that beating and abusing children undermines their psychological development -> we should not employ violence on children.
...and so on. As the research continues, we'll have more and more facts to add to our list, and we'll use the scientific method to achieve those goals.
I think the debate here originally was whether we had enough science to start building on or not. That's a tough question. If you started engineering society by putting science in charge, and set the goal to "well being of all", would the world prosper? Or would it kill the economy so badly that there wouldn't be enough resources to allocate? One problem is that we put scientists in charge, not science, so demagogues will still get in and screw things up. Second, we don't even have a proper theory of mind, let alone clear definitions of suffering or happiness, and we have extremely limited abilities of social prediction. On top of that, social sciences have the habit of inventing reality.
Child abuse is a good example. I agree that there currently isn't an understood practical way to prevent abuse without intervening. I also think that we don't have scientific tools to measure what we sacrifice by doing so. So what if I decided to have sex with my kids? Would that undermine their psychological development by itself, or would the stigmatization of sex in society be responsible of that? Either way, since I'm the one deciding with full knowledge of consequences, I am to blame, no? Since we have no means of determining the intentions in minority cases or the far future outcome, fixing the issue at hand is to label any kind of sexual intercourse between adults and children as rape to be on the safe side. As a conventional parent, I tend to agree with that, but still not comfortable with it. It's probable that the best mode for humans is sexual social behaviour of bonobos, in which case how we are forced to raised our kids (erm, not "raping" them?) is pretty cruel.
Also, who is "we"? There are many "we"s who claim to be scientifically minded in this world, and people still go hungry.
This is where a free and unrestricted market begins to make sense. Got to go now, but this topic probably needs to be divided into smaller ones.