I couldn't help but notice a recent trend in certain activists. There seems to be a new expression in town. (#wewillneverforgetyouconjunctionjunction) There seems to be an obsession with the "Lived Experience". In fact, there seems to be a direct conflict brewing between historical/statistical data and "Lived Experience". If the only reason for this was an interest in obtaining knowledge, I would find no issue. Note, we live in the era of big data. All companies are busy trying to get their hands on data. But data does not equal knowledge. To obtain knowledge, one needs context. I'm the first to say that one should go beyond just the numbers, so "Lived Experience" does have a place. However, "Lived Experience" is not without its issues and incorrect thinking can ensue when the "Lived Experience" is used as an emotional battering ram to overcome serious deficiencies in ones logical and historical data driven arguments.
Recently, I was having a bit of an argument with a co-worker about disproportionate outcomes being used as evidence of an unequal society or system. When I reached for deductive reasoning to show that disparate impacts does not mean that there was not equal opportunity, my co-worker was struck with shock and immediate silence. He eventually piped up and informed me that those types of arguments are usually rebutted as "White Privilege". There is a good reason he found it strange that I would utter such an argument. While I agree I have privilege, I'm certainly not white (#wishingyoucouldseemenow), but I reminded him that deductive reasoning really has nothing to do with race. Proper reasoning has one really great thing going for it. Deductive reasoning is not biased or prejudice, but "Lived Experience" surely can be.
Yes, let's have the elephant in the room out. While stacks of data do not translate to true knowledge, pure locally "Lived Experience" doesn't translate to global reality. As a child, I loved magic. It comes as no surprise that illusions were a clear example that the mind can see things that are not really there. This is true of the physical world as well as the psychological world we all react to on a daily basis. If you are not married or in a relationship, you might have not stumbled across this little exercise:
BEGIN SCENE
You come home from the grocery store. Your spouse has a mean look on their face. You immediately get upset because you couldn't help the grocery trip took twice as long as usual. The store was a complete mess and packed with people. How dare they judge you for something you had no control over.
END SCENE
Now, be honest. Do you know what your spouse is thinking? What you do know is that they look unhappy and you were really late getting back from the store. You are completely assigning intent to behavior. Last I checked, none of us are mind readers. The reality is you should have done the hard work of properly communicating before getting upset. Save this line for your next couples moment, "Hey dear, I saw that you looked like you are upset. It made me feel like you were unhappy with me." This is a more factual statement instead of assuming her intent was anger with you. (#everybodyneedscouplestherapy) The point of this whole thing is that our "Lived Experience" rarely if ever takes into account the other parties "Lived Experience". We can get caught up festering in our own experiences. While both sides should be heard, there is a reality to the fact that we often assign incorrect intent to other people during and after our "Lived Experience" without ever doing the hard and uncomfortable work of asking the other person. This reality of human behavior leaves much to be desired.
But let's talk about what's going on right now. It's what we all love to do. Got no time to talk about what happened a year ago. I want to talk about right now. Recency Bias is real folks. (#butthecakeisalie) Oh wait, what did you say? Recency Bias? Oh yeah, the dark little secret of the world we live in. It is perfectly natural for people to put more emphasis on what has most recently occurred. Sad truth is once the truth comes out about what happened a year ago we will all ignore it because we have moved on already. A prime example of this bias is the last presidential election. There were many who felt that the first Trump election "proved" that polling doesn't work. While I will admit that the polling was not particularly accurate in 2020 either, the reality is that many were completely discounting the polls due to just one data point in 2016 versus a long history of polls being fairly accurate. The thing that caused this overconfidence was that this one data point was the most recent data point. (#onedatapointdoesnotatrendmake) Recency bias is even a malignant cancer on our justice system. If defendant 1 has a mild record with a really horrible recent crime and defendant 2 has a horrible record with a recently mild crime, judges have shown they will provide a bias towards sentencing defendant 1 much more harshly because their horrible crime was more recent even if defendant 1 had fewer horrible crimes than defendant 2. As a final point, I had a fascinating discussion with my mother. She found the January 6th riots at the Capitol to be a clear sign that the country is in the worst shape as far as racial harmony ever. I quickly had to remind her that she grew up in the South when schools were being integrated. She quickly retracted her statement, but the fact that she was so quick to put a recent riot above her own historical knowledge was shocking. This recency bias lives squarely in the world of the "Lived Experience". It tempts us all to throw out the past at times.
To round things out, let's go back to old Richard Feynman. If you don't know who Richard Feynman is, I say our schools have already failed us. (#physicsismyrideordie) Mr. Feynman was my first teacher in personal bias. As he taught me, at the end of the day, we will generally always place more weight on our own personal experience because it happened to us and we know it first hand. We just suck at walking in another's shoes. (#livedexperienceisaspersonalasitgets) This is a natural bias in all humans, but it can lead to really poor thinking. Everyone's "Lived Experience" is real. However, it doesn't trump other people's "Lived Experience". And as we have already noted, there are pre-existing biases built into "Lived Experience", so the fact that we naturally weigh it above all other forms of data is asking for disaster. Couple this with media that has become highly personalized and does not provide balanced data, and media actually becomes a very real part of the "Lived Experience". I knew many black people who became depressed from watching repeated footage of black people killed by police. There could have been 10 of these events last year, but you would have imagined 10,000 with the non-stop media binge watching. Not that these deaths should not be covered, but we often do not realize the media is a component of our emotionally and personal "Lived Experience".
So what are we to do? I gave it away at the very beginning. I'm a fan of science, technology, and all things big data. However, tons of data doesn't actually provide knowledge because it lacks context. On the other hand, collecting everyone's personal context is practically impossible. I think we have to sample the population of "Lived Experiences" and hold it up next to the historical data in order for us to obtain enough knowledge to build solutions to our countries problems. Historical data and Lived Experience are like two sides of the Coin of Knowledge. You don't get very far ignoring either side.
Comments