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Surely the whole of the human experience is, in the end, “informal recollections of past events”? What tells you more about poverty — learning that an individu

Surely the whole of the human experience is, in the end, “informal recollections of past events”? What tells you more about poverty — learning that an individual lives on less than a dollar a day or, say, spending 24 hours without food and shelter? I would argue that the experience of lived history and the “facts” of history cannot be separated, and both must be equally valued.

threatofrain 5y ago
The "whole of human experience" is a formal concept, since you surely don't believe any of us can informally experience it. Societies formalize it by collecting data and debating theories. And big human stories are the ones which are difficult to intuit. There are those who do nothing more than collect information on homeless people, documenting them for various organizations or gov't agencies, sometimes paid. They are doing the fundamental work of demonstrating a phenomena whose scale would otherwise be belittled or denied. Some would say SF is actually pretty nice, with only a small homeless population. When experiences disagree with each other, how should we move forward with discussion? With personal experience or with data?