This obviously works well when it comes to Alice and Bob's little dispute, assuming we don't have a personal connection to either.
This approach doesn't scale up to meet most of the world's difficult and interesting questions and problems. Issues of society, race, gender, economy, and so forth affect all of us.
How can there ever be a disinterested party when it comes to matters of national or societal importance?
> How can there ever be a disinterested party when it comes to matters of national or societal importance?
The scientific method doesn't require that I be a disinterested party, but it does require that I evaluate evidence, to the best of my ability, in a disinterested manner.[2]
E.g. I might believe women are discriminated against in academia and locked out of opportunity; my heart might beat out of my chest because of all the horror stories my friends tell me. However, the data seems to indicate that 57%[0] of university degrees in the U.S. are awarded to women, and that this proportion is increasing. I am emotionally invested in my belief in the former injustice, but I have to evaluate the data as though I weren't and update my beliefs accordingly.[1]
> This approach doesn't scale up to meet most of the world's difficult and interesting questions and problems. Issues of society, race, gender, economy, and so forth affect all of us.
Anecdotally, I've heard many social justice advocates recently assert that dispassionate analysis of evidence and data can't lead to solutions for social problems. "Other ways of knowing" or different "epistemological frames" such as "lived experience" are emphasised. I find this misguided: Indeed mathematics and the scientific method are _the only_ tools that can help us find the truth about social problems. Why would the intellectual tools that build homes, bridges, hydroelectric dams, energy grids, the internet; that find surgical methods, discover medicines, design microchips, and so on, be somehow less effective than lived experience in the social realm? No, these are humanity's most powerful tools. We must not abandon them.
> my heart might beat out of my chest because of all the horror stories my friends tell me. However, the data seems to indicate that 57%[0] of university degrees in the U.S. are awarded to women, and that this proportion is increasing
Both of these are true; women face substantial gendered barriers in academia, and numerically women are doing well. You can't say "you weren't sexually assaulted because some other women got degrees".
It is also fair to ask "are men facing structural barriers in access to university?" Or are they choosing not to, or experiencing barriers further down the pipeline, and so on.
The problem with using aggregate statistics on humans is that they tell you nothing about whether a particular case was dealt with justly or unjustly. (In fairness, there's also a problem going the other way, of over-extrapolating from a single example).
> Why would the intellectual tools that build homes, bridges, hydroelectric dams, energy grids, the internet; that find surgical methods, discover medicines, design microchips, and so on, be somehow less effective than lived experience in the social realm?
This is Le Corbusier style high modernism, the idea that living should be mechanised and human life subjected to statistical process control.
> Then you encounter the problem that there are no average humans
[sigh] In statistical modelling at the population level, we don't make conclusions about "average humans". We derive conclusions based on distributions. And the average is rarely indicative; the median is often more useful. Simple conclusions can be derived through power laws e.g. the divergence in income of the median male since 1970 relative to GDP growth.
> This is Le Corbusier style high modernism, the idea that living should be mechanised and human life subjected to statistical process control
Is this an argument of some kind? I'm sorry but I can't parse what point you're trying to make or the relevance of the statement in determining the correctness of concepts and policies that affect a society.
I find this misguided: Indeed mathematics and the scientific
method are _the only_ tools that can help us find the truth
about social problems.
I love "analysis of evidence and data" as much as the next guy, and quite possibly more.
That's why I am extremely wary of lending too much credence to data when it comes to something as messy as a society of human beings.
What's one of the very first things we learn when we learn about "the scientific method" as schoolkids? For an experiment to be valid, we need control samples. This can rarely, if ever, be practically or ethically achieved with human beings. There are, to put it mildly, an overwhelming number of confounding variables at play in any statistical study of human beings.
That doesn't mean data is useless when it comes to social sciences, but it is rarely if ever sufficient. (This is also resoundingly true for "lived experience", of course)
This approach doesn't scale up to meet most of the world's difficult and interesting questions and problems. Issues of society, race, gender, economy, and so forth affect all of us.
How can there ever be a disinterested party when it comes to matters of national or societal importance?