Facts Are Not Over Feelings

My Response to Intellectual Supremacy

Photo by The Climate Reality Project on Unsplash

It’s frustrating as a science communicator to deal with dumbasses online.

People will sit there and try to tell you about the field you’ve spent years studying without the slightest clue about it. Some might ask obnoxious questions to undermine your work. Others might try to attack you personally, but we try to remain strong.

Even so, sometimes we get frustrated, we want to scream out “Fuck your feelings, here are the facts!!!”. But when has that convinced anyone to change their mind?

There are some people who will say I am missing the context of the phrase “data/facts > feelings”, but when a person makes a statement without elaborating on what it means context for the phrase is itself missing not being missed.

What is the goal of science communication?

If the goal is to change hearts and minds, then the phrase “data > feelings” is inappropriate for a number of reasons. However, even if the goal is to differentiate between subjective feelings and experiences from empirical facts the phrase is still inappropriate.

Persuasion Over Tribalism

The purpose of science communication is the bridging of understanding between scientific knowledge/discovery and the general public.

As science communicators, we want to educate the lay public about not only scientific discoveries, but its processes, its methods, and its function in society. Science communicators are not merely the updaters we are the bridge buildings in the landscape of knowledge.

Coaches, dietitians, physical therapists, and anyone else involved in the health sciences helping people understand nutrition and exercise are science communicators. Clients and patients depend on these professions to educate them on the science of health. Therefore, we collectively have a major responsibility for bridging this gap.

Bridging the gap between the general public and scientific knowledge is not an easy task, but it is made harder by tribalism.

When I refer to “tribalism” I am referring to the fact human beings rely on and work in groups, these groups are called tribes. Our tribes or social groups can influence the way we think, act, and feel.

In fact, social groups are so powerful they can become a part of our identity, this is known as social identity. Our identities with groups can influence our ability to reason morally, mathematically, and financially.

Just by us identifying as “evidence based” we are establishing a social group of other “evidence based” practitioners which can impact or become a part of our identity. So, when we rally behind phrases such as “data > feelings” we are being good group members of the evidence based community, but poor science communicators.

When has throwing such a phrase at people actually get them to change their minds or engage with our position? We want to help change hearts and minds not rally our bases even further.

The Problem with Knowing

The study of knowledge is known as epistemology. Epistemology is important for engaging with what we know, how we know what we know, and if we can know in the first place.

Historically, knowledge was gatekeept from marginalized communities based on race, gender, and class. What was ‘known’ or ‘knowable’ was often dictated by those in power, wealthy white men.

But as time passed by many of these barriers subsided (even though some persist). Increased access to higher education, free education, and now with the internet… have opened up what it means to ‘know’ for many people.

At the same time this newfound abundance of information avaliable has given people a false impression of knowledge. People often confuse access to information with knowledge of that information.

Plato traditionally categorized knowledge as a justified true belief. You could know something if you believed it, if the thing you believed was true, and you have strong justification for believing it was true.

However, philosopher Edmund L. Gettier pointed out there is a way to satisfy the criteria of justified true belief without it being knowledge. For example, lets say I believe the time is 12pm, I walk up to a clock and it states the time is 12pm, but the clock is actually broken to be stuck on 12pm… yet the real time is 12pm.

In this example, I am not knowledgable about the time I am just lucky. To take it a step further it is easy to question the justification aspect of my knowing by consulting the internet. How would I know the website, blog post, or video I watched are reliable sources of information? How would I know the people who made the content I am consuming know what they’re talking about?

As a non-expert in whatever topic I am looking into I would probably rely on a set of intuitions or “rules of thumb” to help me make those justifications. These “rules of thumb” can also be called heuristics, these are cognitive shortcuts that help us safe brain energy when living in the world.

These heuritics might feed into emotional and or motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is best described as “tendency to find arguments in favor of conclusions we want to believe to be stronger than arguments for conclusions we do not want to believe".

There are numerous barriers getting in the way of ‘knowing’, taking all of this into consideration we need to be more understanding for those who do not study nutrition, health, or fitness full time.

Intellectual Supremacy

Keeping in mind the social barriers to knowledge, the problem with knowing, the overabundance of information on the internet, and human psychology… we shouldn’t be surprised people rely on “feelings”. emotions, and intuition when decerning and interpreting facts.

While some philosophers might argue against ‘epistemic supremacy’ in favor of indigenous ways of ‘knowing’, I do not want to overstep into that realm. I do not believe there are multiple ways of “knowing” in terms of fact.

There can be multiple ways of exploration to ‘know’ or find facts to state we know something. However, certain individuals can become extreme in their ways of ‘knowing’, by this I mean certain individuals dismiss the lived experience of others because it does not live up to their ways of knowing.

While I will concede anecdotes and testimonies, aka lived experience, are imperfect and unreliable in many ways they’re still ways in which people reason about the world. We cannot purely discard someones anecdotes in conversation especially when the goal is changing their minds.

The automatic dismissal of personal experience and anecdotes for peer reviewed scientific evidence is not pragmatic, I dub it ‘intellectual supremacy’.

The phrase “data > feelings” prepeuates this false idea those who rely on “feelings” instead of “facts” are somehow less than or intellectual supremacy.

Final Remarks

The evidence based community can be seen as a social group and evidence based practitioners make this group a part of their identity.

If evidence based fitness practitioners want to be effective science communicators they should understand epistemology, barriers to knowledge, and fundamental human psychology.

The phrase “data > feelings” is the antithesis of that.