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The whole point of rational dispassionate discussion is exactly because everyone has their own subjective feelings and experiences and biases. You have to put t

The whole point of rational dispassionate discussion is exactly because everyone has their own subjective feelings and experiences and biases. You have to put them aside to have a useful discussion. Prioritizing personal experience and saying “you cant know what its like if youre not X” is a bad bad social meme. I mean lets pretend its true. So what? It doesn’t advance the discussion at all, its only purpose is to end discussion. If a persons feelings trump logic and they cant have a level headed discussion because of that, then frankly they shouldn’t be treated as an adult, they should be treated like a child.

mlevental 7y ago
>I mean lets pretend its true. So what? there are things you don't know that you can find out by listening to people.
- overgard 7y ago
  Sure. Agreed. But the entire point of the "you can't possibly know" is that they're saying the exact opposite. That it's a waste of time for them to explain anything to you because you are apparently incapable of human empathy.
JabavuAdams 7y ago
May I ask how old you are?
JabavuAdams 7y ago
People are excellent rationalizers -- smart people especially. Basically smart people can use reason as a cudgel to win any debate -- not because they've actually constructed a good proof or considered all relevant evidence.
- overgard 7y ago
  Ok, but you can also "win" a debate by beating people to death with strong feelings. Ever watch a toddler throw a temper tantrum?
  - mlevental 7y ago
    Similarly have you ever watched a teenager argue "logically" from their limited experience? It goes both ways (can fail in both ways) because discourse isn't theorem proving. There is no universal set.
throwawayjava 7y ago
Logic is great if you want to shoot a canon at the right target or design a circuit. But our current logical tools -- and especially that extremely simple set of 2000+ year old syllogisms designed by Aristotle to help him classify bugs that you're probably referring to when you say logic -- are not even a remotely good tool for analyzing anything that involves humans or society. Maybe logic can be useful in the way you want it to be, but first you'll need to figure out how to serialize a person's entire life experience into some sort of sequence of symbols. > Prioritizing personal experience and saying “you cant know what its like if youre not X” is a bad bad social meme. But you don't know what it is like, and logic alone cannot help you know what it is like, because the full range of human experience is not expressible is any extant logical system. hell, you can't even beat SoTA object detection if you don't have tons of actual experience in the form of labelled data. And object detection is trivial compared to "being a human". Is it really so hard to believe that you need actual experience in order to really understand how someone experiences the world? Or that your experience might make certain completely true things seem false to you, in a way that would make others experience your view of the world as akin to that of a child? > So what? It doesn’t advance the discussion at all, its only purpose is to end discussion. Sometimes that's true, but very often it is not true at all. Very often, conversations about social/political topics end exactly when someone refuses empathize and instead imposes what they view as "logical" based on their "obvious experience of the world". E.g., "being gay would make me feel bad, and no healthy person wants to feel bad, so therefore gay people must be somehow sick". Completely logical from the priors, but immediately ends the conversation because the speaker assumes their experience of being a human in society is the only valid one. > If a persons feelings trump logic... Try replacing "feelings" with "experience". And then consider all those annoying arguments where someone says "but A is of course true and A clearly implies B so B must be true!" Even though you can go out and verify -- with reproducible experiment -- that the earth is in fact really, really not flat. i.e., that B is false. And look: in this case, logic does not matter! If you can check with experience that B is false, then you don't need to look through the chain of logical deductions that resulted in a derivation that B is true. When people say "logic doesn't matter", what they usually mean is "your conclusion is prime facie false based on how I experience the world"; not "I'm not a blind child, you're a blind child!" This doesn't mean that there is no room for logic. It just means... when talking about topics that involve how other people experience the world, try walking in other people's shoes. And if they come to different conclusions that you do when you try to empathize with them, consider that perhaps they're not just dumb children. Perhaps you're not using enough synthetic training data to really understand where they are coming from. Or even that you can't do this task of imagining the other person's experience with purely synthetic training data. Logic is a bad tool for solving social and political problems. Empathy is a much better tool. Especially empathy grounded in the realization that even empathy isn't quite enough to really understand how other people experience life. Logic can sometimes help you empathize, or explain to yourself why you need to empathize, but logic is just a tool for thinking. And it's not even always the best tool.
fatbird 7y ago
There's actually a well-developed practice at holding discussions where people's feelings are deliberately included--marital or group counseling, integrative negotation, conflict resolution strategies, etc. Recognizing that people's feeling are always somewhat involved, we have the dialectical tools to work with them, because the purely dispassionate approach you believe is the sole path to truth is something that most learn, sooner or later, rarely works and rarely satisfies.
rland 7y ago
There lies the issue. Let's take the extremes: No two people share the same experience, therefore discussion is not possible, because one cannot share exactly the viewpoint of the other. That's the extreme on one end. On the other end, we can only take "rational facts" into account. In order to do this, we must discard completely all personal experience, which is first of all actually impossible between two human beings sharing a discussion, and second of all, will transform both participants into what amounts to deterministic computers who will arrive at precisely the same outcome given the same input. Now clearly if we are arriving at a shared conclusion between two people discussing a shared input, either extreme is impossible. Some nuance is required.
pgcj_poster 7y ago
> its only purpose is to end discussion. Yeah, and that would necessarily be a bad thing if your only priority was pwning people with facts and logic. However, some people care more about things like being kind and getting along with others. Such people have to be willing to stop doing things that hurt others, even if they can't understand why those things are bad. Eg. It's very hard to explain what gender dysphoria feels like. If a trans person isn't able to do this to your satisfaction, that doesn't mean that you can just go on misgendering them. It means you just have to take their word for it.
- overgard 7y ago
  > Yeah, and that would necessarily be a bad thing if your only priority was pwning people with facts and logic. I'm not interested in "pwning" anyone. But if someone says "this guy needs to be fired/resign" (which actually, in the rms case I kinda agree with), then they need to be able to articulate things in a manner that's not just "you're not from [some group] so you don't get it". It's just lazy and disrespectful to other people.
monktastic1 7y ago
> everyone has their own subjective feelings and experiences and biases. You have to put them aside to have a useful discussion. You don't have to "put them aside." You have to incorporate them into the reasoning. It's true that some people are petulant and try to end discussion with the "you can't know what it's like" meme, sometimes it's really just what it looks like: a plea to try and understand what it's like to be me, instead of the caricature of me I see being constructed.

mlevental 7y ago

>I mean lets pretend its true. So what? there are things you don't know that you can find out by listening to people.

overgard 7y ago
Sure. Agreed. But the entire point of the "you can't possibly know" is that they're saying the exact opposite. That it's a waste of time for them to explain anything to you because you are apparently incapable of human empathy.

JabavuAdams 7y ago

May I ask how old you are?

JabavuAdams 7y ago

People are excellent rationalizers -- smart people especially. Basically smart people can use reason as a cudgel to win any debate -- not because they've actually constructed a good proof or considered all relevant evidence.

overgard 7y ago
Ok, but you can also "win" a debate by beating people to death with strong feelings. Ever watch a toddler throw a temper tantrum?
- mlevental 7y ago
  Similarly have you ever watched a teenager argue "logically" from their limited experience? It goes both ways (can fail in both ways) because discourse isn't theorem proving. There is no universal set.

throwawayjava 7y ago

Logic is great if you want to shoot a canon at the right target or design a circuit. But our current logical tools -- and especially that extremely simple set of 2000+ year old syllogisms designed by Aristotle to help him classify bugs that you're probably referring to when you say logic -- are not even a remotely good tool for analyzing anything that involves humans or society. Maybe logic can be useful in the way you want it to be, but first you'll need to figure out how to serialize a person's entire life experience into some sort of sequence of symbols. > Prioritizing personal experience and saying “you cant know what its like if youre not X” is a bad bad social meme. But you don't know what it is like, and logic alone cannot help you know what it is like, because the full range of human experience is not expressible is any extant logical system. hell, you can't even beat SoTA object detection if you don't have tons of actual experience in the form of labelled data. And object detection is trivial compared to "being a human". Is it really so hard to believe that you need actual experience in order to really understand how someone experiences the world? Or that your experience might make certain completely true things seem false to you, in a way that would make others experience your view of the world as akin to that of a child? > So what? It doesn’t advance the discussion at all, its only purpose is to end discussion. Sometimes that's true, but very often it is not true at all. Very often, conversations about social/political topics end exactly when someone refuses empathize and instead imposes what they view as "logical" based on their "obvious experience of the world". E.g., "being gay would make me feel bad, and no healthy person wants to feel bad, so therefore gay people must be somehow sick". Completely logical from the priors, but immediately ends the conversation because the speaker assumes their experience of being a human in society is the only valid one. > If a persons feelings trump logic... Try replacing "feelings" with "experience". And then consider all those annoying arguments where someone says "but A is of course true and A clearly implies B so B must be true!" Even though you can go out and verify -- with reproducible experiment -- that the earth is in fact really, really not flat. i.e., that B is false. And look: in this case, logic does not matter! If you can check with experience that B is false, then you don't need to look through the chain of logical deductions that resulted in a derivation that B is true. When people say "logic doesn't matter", what they usually mean is "your conclusion is prime facie false based on how I experience the world"; not "I'm not a blind child, you're a blind child!" This doesn't mean that there is no room for logic. It just means... when talking about topics that involve how other people experience the world, try walking in other people's shoes. And if they come to different conclusions that you do when you try to empathize with them, consider that perhaps they're not just dumb children. Perhaps you're not using enough synthetic training data to really understand where they are coming from. Or even that you can't do this task of imagining the other person's experience with purely synthetic training data. Logic is a bad tool for solving social and political problems. Empathy is a much better tool. Especially empathy grounded in the realization that even empathy isn't quite enough to really understand how other people experience life. Logic can sometimes help you empathize, or explain to yourself why you need to empathize, but logic is just a tool for thinking. And it's not even always the best tool.

fatbird 7y ago

There's actually a well-developed practice at holding discussions where people's feelings are deliberately included--marital or group counseling, integrative negotation, conflict resolution strategies, etc. Recognizing that people's feeling are always somewhat involved, we have the dialectical tools to work with them, because the purely dispassionate approach you believe is the sole path to truth is something that most learn, sooner or later, rarely works and rarely satisfies.

rland 7y ago

There lies the issue. Let's take the extremes: No two people share the same experience, therefore discussion is not possible, because one cannot share exactly the viewpoint of the other. That's the extreme on one end. On the other end, we can only take "rational facts" into account. In order to do this, we must discard completely all personal experience, which is first of all actually impossible between two human beings sharing a discussion, and second of all, will transform both participants into what amounts to deterministic computers who will arrive at precisely the same outcome given the same input. Now clearly if we are arriving at a shared conclusion between two people discussing a shared input, either extreme is impossible. Some nuance is required.

pgcj_poster 7y ago

> its only purpose is to end discussion. Yeah, and that would necessarily be a bad thing if your only priority was pwning people with facts and logic. However, some people care more about things like being kind and getting along with others. Such people have to be willing to stop doing things that hurt others, even if they can't understand why those things are bad. Eg. It's very hard to explain what gender dysphoria feels like. If a trans person isn't able to do this to your satisfaction, that doesn't mean that you can just go on misgendering them. It means you just have to take their word for it.

overgard 7y ago
> Yeah, and that would necessarily be a bad thing if your only priority was pwning people with facts and logic. I'm not interested in "pwning" anyone. But if someone says "this guy needs to be fired/resign" (which actually, in the rms case I kinda agree with), then they need to be able to articulate things in a manner that's not just "you're not from [some group] so you don't get it". It's just lazy and disrespectful to other people.

monktastic1 7y ago

> everyone has their own subjective feelings and experiences and biases. You have to put them aside to have a useful discussion. You don't have to "put them aside." You have to incorporate them into the reasoning. It's true that some people are petulant and try to end discussion with the "you can't know what it's like" meme, sometimes it's really just what it looks like: a plea to try and understand what it's like to be me, instead of the caricature of me I see being constructed.