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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 liber

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.
  - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
    > “I'm not talking about the emotional content, I'm talking about the recount of actual happenings” This doesn’t make sense. All the recountings of facts in the article are heavily couched within emotional language, statements of feeling and perception. If you think this article offers a clear explanation of facts, then either you didn’t really read it, you read it but are just taking the piss / trolling, or your understanding of what counts as presenting facts is so wildly different from the ubiquitous notion of it that we scarcely could communicate about it given your extreme and unusual set of standards. > “You should remove the emotional weight from your arguments, though I'm not sure what your argument is exactly.“ This sounds like you’re looking for some kind of rhetorical flair to justify what actually is a poor and uncharitable attitude to try to just gainsay me. Seems most likely not worth it to engage further if you won’t be reasonable.
    - h0l0cube 7y ago
      > All the recountings of facts in the article are heavily couched within emotional language So you agree there are facts in the article? > This doesn’t make sense.
      - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
        You seem to be deliberately trying to not understand my clear points. Yes, there are facts in the article. They are presented in unison with emotional retellings of difficult circumstances from the author’s subjective perceptions. Because of this, it’s not easy to extract meaning about the facts that is not biased by the emotional presentation. Yet when dealing with an issue of this importance, where there is great potential to do harm to a large cohort of people if we design ineffective or incorrect policies, it is paramount to consider just the facts and understand quantitatively how those facts would relate to measurable outcome changes society would value. That makes it so much worse when a subjective narrative story creates a mixed picture of what the facts mean.
        h0l0cube 7y ago

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.
- mlthoughts2018 7y ago
  > “I'm not talking about the emotional content, I'm talking about the recount of actual happenings” This doesn’t make sense. All the recountings of facts in the article are heavily couched within emotional language, statements of feeling and perception. If you think this article offers a clear explanation of facts, then either you didn’t really read it, you read it but are just taking the piss / trolling, or your understanding of what counts as presenting facts is so wildly different from the ubiquitous notion of it that we scarcely could communicate about it given your extreme and unusual set of standards. > “You should remove the emotional weight from your arguments, though I'm not sure what your argument is exactly.“ This sounds like you’re looking for some kind of rhetorical flair to justify what actually is a poor and uncharitable attitude to try to just gainsay me. Seems most likely not worth it to engage further if you won’t be reasonable.
  - h0l0cube 7y ago
    > All the recountings of facts in the article are heavily couched within emotional language So you agree there are facts in the article? > This doesn’t make sense.
    - mlthoughts2018 7y ago
      You seem to be deliberately trying to not understand my clear points. Yes, there are facts in the article. They are presented in unison with emotional retellings of difficult circumstances from the author’s subjective perceptions. Because of this, it’s not easy to extract meaning about the facts that is not biased by the emotional presentation. Yet when dealing with an issue of this importance, where there is great potential to do harm to a large cohort of people if we design ineffective or incorrect policies, it is paramount to consider just the facts and understand quantitatively how those facts would relate to measurable outcome changes society would value. That makes it so much worse when a subjective narrative story creates a mixed picture of what the facts mean.
      - h0l0cube 7y ago