Objective Experience

It’s interesting that people who try to speak about the world and the human experience in qualitative terms based primarily on subjective analysis tend to be dismissed as “woo woo,” “crackpots,” and “amateurs.”  However, if you attempt to analyze the world in more commonly accepted quantitative terms then you instantly have credibility.  Often, statistics and repeatable processes are the favored methods of validating a position on these quantitative terms.  This is particularly true of psychological and behavioral discussions.  

There’s an irony at work there somewhere.  I think it has something to do with the fact that so much study is dependent on subjects relating to researchers or interviewers their completely subjective experience of a particular situations or stimulus.  If you amass enough of these subjective stories you somehow are left with an objective set of data.

Huh?

I don’t know; maybe I think about this kind of thing too much.  All I know is that not enough credibility is given to those who would teach others on the basis of objective and subjective analysis.  In the end, the vast majority of the accumulated body of human knowledge is simply based on observations made by biased individuals.  I think more emphasis should be placed on learning and teaching based on individual observations.  Your experience of this existence is just as valuable to me as my own.  I have as much to learn from your story as I do from the stats presented to me in some textbook.