Wandering Adventure Party

@november Yes and no. It really depends on the field. Psychology? Absolutely! Harder sciences? It's much less likely. You may end up down a bunny trail but at the end of the day you test a particular hypothesis, which comes back (conditionally) true or false. Scientists are trained to understand and try to ferret out any experimental error and document all their assumptions. It's less about emotions and more about carefully documenting exactly what question the statistics answered.

That's absolutely true of lay science communication, tough. You see misinterpreted results everywhere. Because the kinds of questions statistics answers are annoyingly obtuse and the number of qualifiers you have on any properly documented result is substantial. People want easy, simple answers and statistics simply doesn't give you those.

Sorry if it sounds like I'm pushing back hard. To your original point, yes, scientists having more emotional maturity will likely make them better scientists.

But one of the other lies running around online is that scientists are constantly running down bunny trails and getting things wrong. Yes, that does happen, especially when someone with a PhD thinks that makes them smart about everything else, even if they haven't studied it. (Listening to math professors talk politics was so painful.) But most of the "OMG! Scientists said one thing and then said something else!" is actually science communication gone bad. (COVID was a fascinating case study in science communication.) The actual science didn't go sideways. The people trying to put it into lay terms jumped to conclusions because they saw a cool paper abstract and didn't fully understand what it actually meant.

The Western idea that emotions are bad and unreliable and that people who are emotional aren't as trustworthy is just sexism, wrapped in something trying to look like science or intellectualism.

First off, emotions often tell us things way faster than logic. Are they always accurate? No but neither are most early warning systems. But that doesn't mean ignoring them is wisdom. Also, the fact that some people don't understand their emotions doesn't mean that they don't have them or aren't affected by them or that the emotions are the problem. It just means people need more emotional understanding.

Second, literally every man I've ever heard make that argument is an emotional mess. "Oh, but logic!", he says, and then proceeds to spin a line of convenient bullshit that he thinks justifies the conclusion he pulled out of his ass.

Okay, I can already hear people getting mad at me. "But science..."

Yes. Science. But do you know why science works? It's not because it removes emotion. Science works because statistics don't care about ANY human reasoning, emotional or logical. Statistics and science focus on what IS, not what we think is or want to be.

Because attempting to reason your way to understanding from first principals is just as unreliable as emotions in a lot of cases. I don't care how much Facebook research someone has done. I don't care what their religion says or what they want to be true based on what they're afraid of. Humans, regardless of how logical they think they are, actually really suck at looking at the world around them and reasoning about it.

Have you ever read how Aristotle thought physics worked? That guy was a smart dude but boy did he have some wild ideas about inherent properties of materials! The facts that airplanes fly and metal boats float are giant "Fuck you!"s to his whole theory. Why? Because he took a few things and just tried to reason it all out from that. He didn't take the time to study what is.

Science works because statistics, when properly applied, cut through all the crap. Emotional and logical.

Now this isn't me trying to take some elitist position and claim that you're an idiot if you're not applying statistics to every decision. That's simply not possible. Statistics is an amazing tool but it has its limits. (Yeah, there's a real analysis joke in there.) Statistics can tell us the COVID vaccine is safe or that the job market sucks. But you can't apply statistics to the decision of whether or not to visit your family for Christmas or whether or not to apply to that job. It can help is build models but it can't reason about individual situations and actions. For that, left with human reasoning from what we know. Science and statistics can help inform what you know but they can't make decisions for you.

For that, we're left with human reasoning, both logical and emotional. And the vast majority of humans are working with both at all times, no matter how much they claim to the contrary. We've just been told that men are more logical and so we should trust them. That's just sexism. It's also false.

So when a man stops a woman and says, "be rational..." He's not using statistics. He's not doing a proper study of her life and situation and likely outcomes. In reality, he's just saying, "I don't believe you. Here, think about your life from my perspective. That'll make things better." It's manipulative bullshit.

This message is brought to you by decades of church trauma.