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A personal experience is a fact. It is a fact we can be pretty sure of, and we know the context of that fact. Obviously, once we extrapolate from that experienc
by auggierose 6y ago
A personal experience is a fact. It is a fact we can be pretty sure of, and we know the context of that fact. Obviously, once we extrapolate from that experienced fact, it becomes bias.
A fact that is not a personal experience is difficult to trust. Even if I trust the source of that fact, I am often not sure if I understand the fact properly. Anyone who has ever tried to understand a math theorem might relate.
It is entirely rational to trust more in your personal bias. In fact, I would argue that the only way to trust a fact is to make it somehow into something that you can personally experience. For example, to understand a math theorem, it helps to look at lots of different kinds of examples where it holds (and where it doesn't).
- hashkb 6y agoEyewitness testimony is a personal experience that's been well proven to be poorly correlated with others' personal experience of the same event. You may be redefining "fact".
- 6AA4FD 6y agoI agree that person experiences are not exactly reliable, but I think it's also good to remember that they can have the appearance of facticity and accuracy, as indicated by the sentiment of the person you were replying to.
- space_rock 6y agoPlease tell me where you get your input if not from personal experience? Logical fallacy to say because interpretation of sensory inputs is not perfect therefore we are bind and know nothing about the world
- hashkb 6y agoYou're attacking a straw man. My point is that there's a method by which we start from observations and, through a process that (critically) involves other people, we reach an objective understanding of a subject. The observations aren't facts, but the conclusions can be.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- auggierose 6y agoI am not redefining fact, but you are trying to reinterpret a personal experience as something it isn't. A personal experience is not an objective accurate fact about the world. There is no such thing. It can only ever be a bias. Just as an example can usually not be the proof of a theorem, just an indication that the theorem might be true.
- hashkb 6y agoThere are facts. Like: "My laptop will not run indefinitely without power". Right?
- auggierose 6y agoTell that "fact" to a person not speaking English. Or to somebody who has never seen a laptop. Or to somebody, who doesn't know what "power" is. If you interpret "indefinitely" as in "within my lifetime", will that sentence still be true in the future? Once we've stripped the contextual stuff from your sentence, your sentence is a fact in a similar way to "1 = 1" being a fact. These kinds of facts are not that terribly interesting, because they are context-free, and context is usually the entire point of a fact. Oh, and I would argue that your laptop does not run indefinitely without power is a very personal experience, at least for me.
- jmcqk6 6y ago> A personal experience is a fact. It is a fact we can be pretty sure of, and we know the context of that fact. Obviously, once we extrapolate from that experienced fact, it becomes bias. > A fact that is not a personal experience is difficult to trust. I think this is a very common sentiment, because of the immediacy of the experience, but that doesn't make it true. My biggest gains as a human came when I started questioning whether my natural interpretation of the world was actually very good. It turns out, my natural inclinations for understanding things is pretty bad, and now that I recognize that, I am a much more effective human being. Having gone through that journey, I now spot it all over the place with others. People misinterpret the world all of the time, and they do it without question because it's their personal experience, and how can that be wrong? It's too bad. We waste so much potential not accounting for our own limitations.
- auggierose 6y agoI don't disagree with you. You just don't understand what I wrote.
- inadequatespace 6y agoRight, STEM-types tend to lampoon religion due to being based on "mere faith" rather than "hard evidence." But anything that is not directly experienced by oneself requires some substantial faith; one cannot possibly redo all science experiments oneself and personally collect evidence. Therefore one must have faith that the aggregate scientists had no motivation to skew or misrepresent evidence. As a scientist, I know how reasonable doubting this to be.