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I'm not sure what to make of this article, but I couldn't stop reading it. It's was well worth the time.

by redm 7y ago

buboard 7y ago
She was not lying about being articulate
mlthoughts2018 7y ago
I tend to have the opposite reaction. All the accoutrements of interspersed personal narrative and details about rando other people she met along the way feel gratingly boring and indiosyncratic to me. It’s like it has to conform to some very narrow “edgy” journalism standard that immature college kids writing screenplays in Starbucks would find compelling. I once described my ideal way to hear about news or human interest stories like this: take that old robotic voice from ~1997 era Mac computers and just have it read off a list of declarative sentences. To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy, especially idiosyncratic empathy for individual sex workers that invites me to indulge all sorts of cognitive biases, availability heuristics, invented narratives. You need to approach this kind of important topic in the Scroogiest, wet-blanketiest possible way.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > You need to approach this kind of important topic in the Scroogiest, wet-blanketiest possible way. Why? We're not and should not be robots.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    It seems like an extreme false dilemma to end with the sentence “We’re not and should not be robots.” What has that got to do with anything I said? Dispassionately trying to understand the situation with careful skepticism, focus on facts and holistic data, and calculated consideration for the type of human flourishing outcome we want is compassionate not robotic. It’s a way of arriving at correct and optimal social policy instead of feel-good social policy that ultimately hurts people.
    - brenschluss 7y ago
      I understand what you are saying, but I disagree. Society isn't a machine, it's a cultural-social-economic ecosystem that ebbs and flows according to emotions, beliefs, desires, imaginations, as well as 'facts'.
      - luckylion 7y ago
        Should we create policies that disregard facts and are based on emotions, beliefs, desires and imaginations? My impression is that we're typically actively trying to keep the non-factual out of the law-making. "I had a dream once that a great evil will come if we tax corporations more" shouldn't be an argument against new tax laws.
    - istjohn 7y ago
      To understand a complex issue, you need quantitative and qualitative data. The anecdotes provide that qualitative data.
      - angry_octet 7y ago
        Moreover this is not attempting to present anecdotal data, but to explain her position eloquently, to illustrate why exactly people might choose sex work, why it isn't black and white. I think it's the grey that hurts people's brains.
        mlthoughts2018 7y ago
        > “this is not attempting to present anecdotal data” > “to explain her position eloquently, to illustrate why exactly people might choose sex work, why it isn't black and white.“ these two items from your comment seem to contradict each other.
        angry_octet 7y ago
        You are confusing anecdotal data (a collection of individual experiences, possibility collected in a systematic way, with structured sampling etc), individual anecdotes ("but when I did went there... ")(which people sometimes call 'anecdata'). It is wrong for anecdata to be given equal weight in an argument to systematic collection, whether qualitative or quantitative. She is not doing either of these things. Instead she explains her history, and then explains the impact of shutting down 3rd party sites has on risk to sex workers. Like many experts in a field, she sees that simple solutions are not going to work.
- h0l0cube 7y ago
  To quote the article: > Even as we reach for the less terrible of two terrible ideas, we’re constantly reminded of how little say we have at all. Neither liberal feminists nor libertarians, radical feminists nor the religious right, can hear us speak in our own words. They do not want to hear us; they want to collect the scraped-bare “facts” of our lives and call them data. The author laments that data and statistics have not proven effective tools unto themselves. And to quote you: > To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy What the article does is provide real-life anecdata of how public policy has been harmful to sex-workers. This is useful information: seeing a law or policy, and then seeing a counter-example of how it didn't work in practice, some times even in spite of good-intentions, from people who have access to data. A scientist will build their hypotheses first, then build the data to either affirm or refute their intuition. And this article can inform future policy-making and data acquisition.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    > “This is useful information: seeing a law or policy, and then seeing a counter-example of how it didn't work in practice, some times even in spite of good-intentions, from people who have access to data. A scientist will build their hypotheses first, then build the data to either affirm or refute their intuition. And this article can inform future policy-making and data acquisition.” I suspect it’s just an agree-to-disagree situation, but I disagree very strongly about all this, and in particular I disagree very much that any aspect of this piece offers useful anecdata to either inform, confirm or refute policy. A single narrative, the interpretation of which I’m likely to overstate because of the emotional weight of the person’s experiences, just cannot count for much. What is the emotional equivalent of multiplying this article by ~1 / 50 million to give it around the right amount of weight in my opinion-forming analysis?
    - h0l0cube 7y ago
      >emotional weight of the person’s experiences, just cannot count for much. I'm not talking about the emotional content, I'm talking about the recount of actual happenings (re: facts), of which the article is overwhelmingly composed of. Perhaps you should read it. Edit: > I disagree very strongly about all this You should remove the emotional weight from your arguments, though I'm not sure what your argument is exactly. Perhaps it is that there's nothing to be gleaned from the world of human experience that can inform policy in democratic institutions? It begs the question.
- yowlingcat 7y ago
  If you can't see a structure in something and it feels like idiosyncratic noise, does that mean that it's noise or that there's a structure you're failing to identify? In general, I'd say it depends, but in this case, you may be missing the point. If you read through the entire thing, you'll see that she presents her story of how she got involved with sex work, and how that particular vocation for her changed over time, highs and lows, major and minor characters included. There's a problem with the kind of mentality associated with privileging "facts totally divorced from human empathy, especially idiosyncratic empathy" because it oversimplifies the problem. You have a plurality of testimonials, you can have patterns, you can have structures, but to say that you need facts to be able to even reason about things seems like a little lazy to me, even if it comes from an honest attempt to avoid "all sorts of cognitive biases, availability heuristics, invented narratives." To use an imperfect analogy, how would you imagine lawyers and judges to ever be capable of doing their jobs when they need facts but they only ever receive testimonials and arguments? How does even flawed justice ever work itself out from the process of any kind of legal arbitration or intermediation? I think it's because you learn quite a lot just by listening to someone's account of things, even if it doesn't tell you exactly everything you need to know. Even details that seem irrelevant can, if you're paying attention, illustrate something later on that might not add up. On the other hand, a seemingly irrelevant detail could give a crucial element needed to see something form a pattern that maybe wasn't explained in a manner where that pattern would come across as obvious. Even if you consider a large collection of anecdota to be partially falsehoods and partially truths, if you begin to see patterns come up over and over again in stories told by people who do not know each other, what do you think the statistical likelihood is of all of them colluding to lie versus it actually happening at least occasionally? I think that to actually reckon with cognitive biases, availability heuristics, and invented narratives, you need to reckon with those as an individual and learn to see past those, whether it's by broadening your world of folks you talk to or whose narratives you read about, or by reflection on how you think about things, so that your internal judge starts becoming more intrinsically fair and even-handed. If one's internal judge struggles with those issues when reasoning and commenting and exploring testimonials, what is to make us think that adding data and determinations made by others to be facts to the mix is going to help that internal judge rather than amplify its intrinsic biases? All those "accoutrements of interspersed narrative" and "details about random other people she met along the way" are all purported details of a sequential account. When accounts are inconsistent, they begin to leaking narrative directions perhaps they were not intended to. My admittedly subjective impression here was that this was not the case, and my broader impression of how this narrative integrates into those of others I've heard or read about is that she is largely accurate, and presenting a story in a way that honestly shines a light on the catch-22 societal situation that sex workers in America are trapped in.
- inimino 7y ago
  > To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy, Honestly, this is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you. Maybe, if you look into it, there's something going on there that would be worth knowing about yourself?
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    You sound very sanctimonious and unwilling to consider the idea that in order to be compassionate on a large scale, such as population ethics, you have to minimize the effect of idiosyncratic stories and consider aggregate measures of well-being or harm. > “Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you.” This is just egregious trolling. Seriously, you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to equivocate my point of view with finding human empathy “abhorrent.” In all seriousness, that is borderline psychotic of you to say. Far from finding human empathy abhorrent, I care a great deal about human empathy. In fact, it is because I care about human empathy that I don’t attach nearly as much importance to idiosyncratic stories as I do to large scale measurable outcomes and statistical understanding of how policies are actually likely to relate to outcomes that help people. You are never going to get to constructive policy decisions that have high chances of success across large cohorts of people if you make up your opinions from idiosyncratic emotional journalism. You’re just going to lobby for bad policies driven by emotional thinking and end up hurting people with policy contrary to your intentions.
    - inimino 7y ago
      (First, a small aside. This is petty, but... the words "equivocate" and "psychotic" don't mean what you think they mean and you should probably look them up.) Atrocities have been committed by those who believed they were being "compassionate on a large scale" but somehow didn't want to get into the messy details of what people affected by their policies thought and felt on an individual level. > All the accoutrements of interspersed personal narrative and details about rando other people she met along the way feel gratingly boring and indiosyncratic to me. You chose to reject her lived personal experience accumulated over decades as having any weight or relevance to policy because it bored you and you apparently prefer dry statistics. Or, as you put it, declarative sentences read by a robot voice. You sound like you've had a sheltered life and you lack the life experience to have an informed opinion on policy around sex work. (That's perfectly fine, by the way. It can be quite liberating to accept the fact that you don't have to have an opinion about everything.) What's unfortunate is that you think you're the enlightened one with your insistence on solid statistical aggregate data only, when in reality you're exactly what she's describing -- blindly locked in your own narrative, sure that you know what's best for other people while refusing to listen to those same people when they tell you you're wrong. Now honestly you probably don't need to have an opinion on this topic, and you'd probably be a lot better off if you just admitted that you don't know and don't need to know what's up. But if for some reason you do, and you're worried that just one "idiosyncratic emotional story" is going to bias you, then you always have the option of doing some research or even going out and talking to the people affected by these policies and buying them a coffee in exchange for a piece of their mind on these topics. I'm guessing you wouldn't, and the very idea probably terrifies you, but feel free to prove me wrong. Now I don't suppose you're going to take advice from a "sanctimonious" asshole like me, but in case some of this is getting through to you, consider that rather than being unwilling to consider your ideas, I might just know a few things you don't. People who look at measurable metrics but refuse to listen to individual people never get the outcomes they really want, and have done incalculable damage along the way in human history, much of it in the name of "science".
- lnanek2 7y ago
  I found the narrative very useful. For example, she asserts that rape and prostitution feel very different, and that American laws (compared to UN ones) consider them similar in that there can be no consent in either case. But if she had just said they are different, it would just be a meaningless opinion. Instead she tells her whole story and gives you the facts and feelings that occurred when she was raped, and the ones that occurred when she was a prostitute, the helps you understand for yourself why they are different. That's a much stronger effect on the reader than just reading person A asserts fact B without them showing the work. Similarly the story about the drudgery of other jobs she performed that were not prostitution helps you compare what her life would be like if she didn't have that option. Then the same thing happens for filming porn vs. doing privates. A lot of people without experience might think porn stars/models don't often also do prostitution, so it's important to bring up in the narrative that a lot of the film stars were also doing privates the whole time, which makes the film work seem less pure and separate from other sex work just because it is legal.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    > “That's a much stronger effect on the reader than just reading person A asserts fact B without them showing the work.” Exactly. That stronger effect is a very bad thing. In this article maybe it was used for morally good purposes to help you understand the differences in treatment of consent in rape cases or prostitution cases. But then tomorrow someone uses the same rhetorical trick to have an emotionally “stronger effect” on the reader because of some one-off harrowing tale about a consensual prostitution story that turned out very badly, and now suddenly readers’ emotional judgments have swung back the other way and they feel like so-and-so’s gripping op-ed justifies a belief that prostitution cannot contain consent. It’s naive to think this kind of “dress up the facts with a narrative” approach would only serve “good” purposes, rather than being used to reinforce existing harmful biases or prejudices, fan the flames of nationalism, etc. It’s pretty much equally naive to think you can personally identify when it is “good” emotional rhetoric vs when it is bad. It’s like saying, “advertising doesn’t work on me.” This is why regardless of the effect in this one idiosyncratic situation it has got to be systematically ignored and boiled down to analytical judgment not significantly affected by emotional or situational window dressing. This process of boiling down to facts has got to be elevated as a more important social norm in our world.

I'm not sure what to make of this article, but I couldn't stop reading it. It's was well worth the time.

by redm 7y ago

I'm not sure what to make of this article, but I couldn't stop reading it. It's was well worth the time.

buboard 7y ago

She was not lying about being articulate

mlthoughts2018 7y ago

I tend to have the opposite reaction. All the accoutrements of interspersed personal narrative and details about rando other people she met along the way feel gratingly boring and indiosyncratic to me. It’s like it has to conform to some very narrow “edgy” journalism standard that immature college kids writing screenplays in Starbucks would find compelling. I once described my ideal way to hear about news or human interest stories like this: take that old robotic voice from ~1997 era Mac computers and just have it read off a list of declarative sentences. To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy, especially idiosyncratic empathy for individual sex workers that invites me to indulge all sorts of cognitive biases, availability heuristics, invented narratives. You need to approach this kind of important topic in the Scroogiest, wet-blanketiest possible way.

pjc50 7y ago
> You need to approach this kind of important topic in the Scroogiest, wet-blanketiest possible way. Why? We're not and should not be robots.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  It seems like an extreme false dilemma to end with the sentence “We’re not and should not be robots.” What has that got to do with anything I said? Dispassionately trying to understand the situation with careful skepticism, focus on facts and holistic data, and calculated consideration for the type of human flourishing outcome we want is compassionate not robotic. It’s a way of arriving at correct and optimal social policy instead of feel-good social policy that ultimately hurts people.
  - brenschluss 7y ago
    I understand what you are saying, but I disagree. Society isn't a machine, it's a cultural-social-economic ecosystem that ebbs and flows according to emotions, beliefs, desires, imaginations, as well as 'facts'.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      Should we create policies that disregard facts and are based on emotions, beliefs, desires and imaginations? My impression is that we're typically actively trying to keep the non-factual out of the law-making. "I had a dream once that a great evil will come if we tax corporations more" shouldn't be an argument against new tax laws.
  - istjohn 7y ago
    To understand a complex issue, you need quantitative and qualitative data. The anecdotes provide that qualitative data.
    - angry_octet 7y ago
      Moreover this is not attempting to present anecdotal data, but to explain her position eloquently, to illustrate why exactly people might choose sex work, why it isn't black and white. I think it's the grey that hurts people's brains.
      - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
        > “this is not attempting to present anecdotal data” > “to explain her position eloquently, to illustrate why exactly people might choose sex work, why it isn't black and white.“ these two items from your comment seem to contradict each other.
        angry_octet 7y ago
        You are confusing anecdotal data (a collection of individual experiences, possibility collected in a systematic way, with structured sampling etc), individual anecdotes ("but when I did went there... ")(which people sometimes call 'anecdata'). It is wrong for anecdata to be given equal weight in an argument to systematic collection, whether qualitative or quantitative. She is not doing either of these things. Instead she explains her history, and then explains the impact of shutting down 3rd party sites has on risk to sex workers. Like many experts in a field, she sees that simple solutions are not going to work.
h0l0cube 7y ago
To quote the article: > Even as we reach for the less terrible of two terrible ideas, we’re constantly reminded of how little say we have at all. Neither liberal feminists nor libertarians, radical feminists nor the religious right, can hear us speak in our own words. They do not want to hear us; they want to collect the scraped-bare “facts” of our lives and call them data. The author laments that data and statistics have not proven effective tools unto themselves. And to quote you: > To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy What the article does is provide real-life anecdata of how public policy has been harmful to sex-workers. This is useful information: seeing a law or policy, and then seeing a counter-example of how it didn't work in practice, some times even in spite of good-intentions, from people who have access to data. A scientist will build their hypotheses first, then build the data to either affirm or refute their intuition. And this article can inform future policy-making and data acquisition.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  > “This is useful information: seeing a law or policy, and then seeing a counter-example of how it didn't work in practice, some times even in spite of good-intentions, from people who have access to data. A scientist will build their hypotheses first, then build the data to either affirm or refute their intuition. And this article can inform future policy-making and data acquisition.” I suspect it’s just an agree-to-disagree situation, but I disagree very strongly about all this, and in particular I disagree very much that any aspect of this piece offers useful anecdata to either inform, confirm or refute policy. A single narrative, the interpretation of which I’m likely to overstate because of the emotional weight of the person’s experiences, just cannot count for much. What is the emotional equivalent of multiplying this article by ~1 / 50 million to give it around the right amount of weight in my opinion-forming analysis?
  - h0l0cube 7y ago
    >emotional weight of the person’s experiences, just cannot count for much. I'm not talking about the emotional content, I'm talking about the recount of actual happenings (re: facts), of which the article is overwhelmingly composed of. Perhaps you should read it. Edit: > I disagree very strongly about all this You should remove the emotional weight from your arguments, though I'm not sure what your argument is exactly. Perhaps it is that there's nothing to be gleaned from the world of human experience that can inform policy in democratic institutions? It begs the question.
yowlingcat 7y ago
If you can't see a structure in something and it feels like idiosyncratic noise, does that mean that it's noise or that there's a structure you're failing to identify? In general, I'd say it depends, but in this case, you may be missing the point. If you read through the entire thing, you'll see that she presents her story of how she got involved with sex work, and how that particular vocation for her changed over time, highs and lows, major and minor characters included. There's a problem with the kind of mentality associated with privileging "facts totally divorced from human empathy, especially idiosyncratic empathy" because it oversimplifies the problem. You have a plurality of testimonials, you can have patterns, you can have structures, but to say that you need facts to be able to even reason about things seems like a little lazy to me, even if it comes from an honest attempt to avoid "all sorts of cognitive biases, availability heuristics, invented narratives." To use an imperfect analogy, how would you imagine lawyers and judges to ever be capable of doing their jobs when they need facts but they only ever receive testimonials and arguments? How does even flawed justice ever work itself out from the process of any kind of legal arbitration or intermediation? I think it's because you learn quite a lot just by listening to someone's account of things, even if it doesn't tell you exactly everything you need to know. Even details that seem irrelevant can, if you're paying attention, illustrate something later on that might not add up. On the other hand, a seemingly irrelevant detail could give a crucial element needed to see something form a pattern that maybe wasn't explained in a manner where that pattern would come across as obvious. Even if you consider a large collection of anecdota to be partially falsehoods and partially truths, if you begin to see patterns come up over and over again in stories told by people who do not know each other, what do you think the statistical likelihood is of all of them colluding to lie versus it actually happening at least occasionally? I think that to actually reckon with cognitive biases, availability heuristics, and invented narratives, you need to reckon with those as an individual and learn to see past those, whether it's by broadening your world of folks you talk to or whose narratives you read about, or by reflection on how you think about things, so that your internal judge starts becoming more intrinsically fair and even-handed. If one's internal judge struggles with those issues when reasoning and commenting and exploring testimonials, what is to make us think that adding data and determinations made by others to be facts to the mix is going to help that internal judge rather than amplify its intrinsic biases? All those "accoutrements of interspersed narrative" and "details about random other people she met along the way" are all purported details of a sequential account. When accounts are inconsistent, they begin to leaking narrative directions perhaps they were not intended to. My admittedly subjective impression here was that this was not the case, and my broader impression of how this narrative integrates into those of others I've heard or read about is that she is largely accurate, and presenting a story in a way that honestly shines a light on the catch-22 societal situation that sex workers in America are trapped in.
inimino 7y ago
> To form a useful opinion about sex worker laws, that’s what I need. Facts totally divorced from human empathy, Honestly, this is one of the worst ideas I've ever heard. Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you. Maybe, if you look into it, there's something going on there that would be worth knowing about yourself?
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  You sound very sanctimonious and unwilling to consider the idea that in order to be compassionate on a large scale, such as population ethics, you have to minimize the effect of idiosyncratic stories and consider aggregate measures of well-being or harm. > “Maybe you should consider why human empathy is so abhorrent to you.” This is just egregious trolling. Seriously, you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to equivocate my point of view with finding human empathy “abhorrent.” In all seriousness, that is borderline psychotic of you to say. Far from finding human empathy abhorrent, I care a great deal about human empathy. In fact, it is because I care about human empathy that I don’t attach nearly as much importance to idiosyncratic stories as I do to large scale measurable outcomes and statistical understanding of how policies are actually likely to relate to outcomes that help people. You are never going to get to constructive policy decisions that have high chances of success across large cohorts of people if you make up your opinions from idiosyncratic emotional journalism. You’re just going to lobby for bad policies driven by emotional thinking and end up hurting people with policy contrary to your intentions.
  - inimino 7y ago
    (First, a small aside. This is petty, but... the words "equivocate" and "psychotic" don't mean what you think they mean and you should probably look them up.) Atrocities have been committed by those who believed they were being "compassionate on a large scale" but somehow didn't want to get into the messy details of what people affected by their policies thought and felt on an individual level. > All the accoutrements of interspersed personal narrative and details about rando other people she met along the way feel gratingly boring and indiosyncratic to me. You chose to reject her lived personal experience accumulated over decades as having any weight or relevance to policy because it bored you and you apparently prefer dry statistics. Or, as you put it, declarative sentences read by a robot voice. You sound like you've had a sheltered life and you lack the life experience to have an informed opinion on policy around sex work. (That's perfectly fine, by the way. It can be quite liberating to accept the fact that you don't have to have an opinion about everything.) What's unfortunate is that you think you're the enlightened one with your insistence on solid statistical aggregate data only, when in reality you're exactly what she's describing -- blindly locked in your own narrative, sure that you know what's best for other people while refusing to listen to those same people when they tell you you're wrong. Now honestly you probably don't need to have an opinion on this topic, and you'd probably be a lot better off if you just admitted that you don't know and don't need to know what's up. But if for some reason you do, and you're worried that just one "idiosyncratic emotional story" is going to bias you, then you always have the option of doing some research or even going out and talking to the people affected by these policies and buying them a coffee in exchange for a piece of their mind on these topics. I'm guessing you wouldn't, and the very idea probably terrifies you, but feel free to prove me wrong. Now I don't suppose you're going to take advice from a "sanctimonious" asshole like me, but in case some of this is getting through to you, consider that rather than being unwilling to consider your ideas, I might just know a few things you don't. People who look at measurable metrics but refuse to listen to individual people never get the outcomes they really want, and have done incalculable damage along the way in human history, much of it in the name of "science".
lnanek2 7y ago
I found the narrative very useful. For example, she asserts that rape and prostitution feel very different, and that American laws (compared to UN ones) consider them similar in that there can be no consent in either case. But if she had just said they are different, it would just be a meaningless opinion. Instead she tells her whole story and gives you the facts and feelings that occurred when she was raped, and the ones that occurred when she was a prostitute, the helps you understand for yourself why they are different. That's a much stronger effect on the reader than just reading person A asserts fact B without them showing the work. Similarly the story about the drudgery of other jobs she performed that were not prostitution helps you compare what her life would be like if she didn't have that option. Then the same thing happens for filming porn vs. doing privates. A lot of people without experience might think porn stars/models don't often also do prostitution, so it's important to bring up in the narrative that a lot of the film stars were also doing privates the whole time, which makes the film work seem less pure and separate from other sex work just because it is legal.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  > “That's a much stronger effect on the reader than just reading person A asserts fact B without them showing the work.” Exactly. That stronger effect is a very bad thing. In this article maybe it was used for morally good purposes to help you understand the differences in treatment of consent in rape cases or prostitution cases. But then tomorrow someone uses the same rhetorical trick to have an emotionally “stronger effect” on the reader because of some one-off harrowing tale about a consensual prostitution story that turned out very badly, and now suddenly readers’ emotional judgments have swung back the other way and they feel like so-and-so’s gripping op-ed justifies a belief that prostitution cannot contain consent. It’s naive to think this kind of “dress up the facts with a narrative” approach would only serve “good” purposes, rather than being used to reinforce existing harmful biases or prejudices, fan the flames of nationalism, etc. It’s pretty much equally naive to think you can personally identify when it is “good” emotional rhetoric vs when it is bad. It’s like saying, “advertising doesn’t work on me.” This is why regardless of the effect in this one idiosyncratic situation it has got to be systematically ignored and boiled down to analytical judgment not significantly affected by emotional or situational window dressing. This process of boiling down to facts has got to be elevated as a more important social norm in our world.