TBC: Actually, facts do care about your feelings
Any individual fact (singular) is unlikely to be affected by your feelings, as long as it is a clear-cut statement. However, when you start talking about facts (plural), things get messy.
The reason for this is that very few people have a complete understanding of the facts on any issue. If you’re not a Ph.D in a relevant field, or haven’t spent hundreds of hours studying this topic, you almost certainly don’t know all the facts.
This isn’t hyperbole. Multiple new papers on a topic can come out daily. Some topics have over a half-century of accumulated research that you have to wade through. To even begin to start to comprehend this stuff at a necessary level one has to understand scientific methodology, how to appropriately weigh conflicting pieces of evidence, and how to detect pseudoscience masquerading as science. To fully comprehend this stuff, it usually requires advanced understanding of statistical analysis, a well-trained ability to break down and rip apart underlying assumptions and flaws in the experimental design and conclusions, and an encyclopedic recall of the details and findings of similar experiments. Ask someone with a Ph.D how long it took for them just to learn the required background of a new subject they wanted to broach.
Or, “Selection Bias is a Thing”Report
Also, the worst thing about the Dunning-Krueger effect is that — by definition! — you can’t know when you’re doing it.Report
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You clearly don’t understand the DK effect as well as you think you do.Report
Yeah, whats even worse is that nearly everyone on the Internet suffers from it, according to the comments.Report
But everybody else will, and they’ll be happy to smugly tell you about it.Report
There are two ways in which to think about what a fact is. One is as something that is true rather than false. The other way is as something that can be proven either true or false. If you spend more time in the realm of the latter, the former will tend to take care of itself.
One thing I see a lot, especially on internet discussions is that people really want to appear to be right, so they spend lots of time and energy constructing unassailable positions built mostly on tautological foundations. Those arguments do very well, so long as no one thinks to question the foundations. Once that happens, they tend to fall apart.
If you to be right then you ought to spend an awful lot of time trying to prove yourself wrong.Report
Liked the sub header: “Pursuing objectivity requires being cognizant of your biases, not pretending they don’t exist.”
Know a lot of reporters / writers that need to take this to heart.
Besides, “the internet is wrong”Report