Comment by happytoexplain
1 day ago
>By the way, that article doesn't cite any studies!
That's fine. I think we need to get away a little bit from the implication that any thought not connected to studies or statistics makes it borderline worthless. We need to lean a little bit more toward humanism ("we" as in ostensibly thoughtful people - the average person definitely needs to lean a little bit more toward studies/statistics).
Thought not well grounded in objective evidence has a place, both on matters that are not subject to empirical inquiry and in preliminary speculation about matters that are.
But it also runs the risk of building palaces of elaborate BS with no relation to reality and pure garbage filler content, like article presenting three different non-evidence-based ideas of how a dichotomy itself not grounded in evidence supposedly plays out in reality, with no effort to do look at any evidence or do any analysis as to whether any of them or the underlying dichotomy is connected to reality.
Humanity / humanism and science aren't opposed.
Wrong social models can have bad human implications. It seems to me that being careful with these models and requiring rigor is the humanist thing to do.
Go ahead and present hypotheses, that can be very interesting, just don't present them as facts.
(Now maybe this asker-guesser thing is indeed studied, I don't know)
> Go ahead and present hypotheses, that can be very interesting, just don't present them as facts.
The article called it a provocative opinion described in a comment which became a meme.
Indeed! I didn't remember this (yes, I had already read that article a long time ago, I only scanned it quickly this time).
At least the article is honest with its source.
Thanks for emphasizing this.
> ("we" as in ostensibly thoughtful people - the average person definitely needs to lean a little bit more toward studies/statistics).
I'm not sure what you're getting at here by suggesting an elite class of people above the "average person" who do not require objective evidence. That's not really aligned with the core tenets of humanism.