I think that we have an obsession with objectivity, and that it’s revered status in our culture is undeserved and also problematic.
Problematic roots: Empiricism & Cartesian Masculinization
- Today’s objectivity is a descendant of the Enlightenment obsession with empiricism and rationalism
- From Susan Bordo’s essays on Cartesian Masculinization: Descartes advocated for a complete detachment: mind from the body, humanity from nature/the world.
- The world was stripped of a generative femininity, and given instead a commodifiable, exploitable feminization, to the extent that the world could be referred to as a ‘she’, but only in the way Francis Bacon used it:
- “Nature must be taken by the forelock…lay hold of her and capture her…conquer and subdue her…neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating these holes and corners”
- The individual thus becomes an island, and perfect control over one’s mind and body becomes a necessity and a duty. This is a rejection of participation in any environment or system larger than the lone self, a complete and dominating individualism that rejects communion with nature/the world/others in favor of territorialism and exploitation
Problematic consequences:
- Pipeline: empirical science → capitalism
- Primes you for corporate colonialism, exploitation & domination — aka The Mindset (Rushkoff)
- Quantification to decide what’s good and right (utilitarianism / consequentialism) → universal, top-down gaze → the bad side of Effective Altruism
- Srinivasan on EA: “A more pressing objection to utilitarianism is not that it demands too much, but that it demands the wrong things, the things that constitute us as humans: our personal attachments, loyalties and identifications”
- Exporting objectivity to machines, over addressing human subjectivity
- EG: a machine can make a more objective hiring decision than HR professionals… despite there being a necessity for a human touch, and despite the algorithm’s training data being unrepresentative
- Historical precedent: conceding objectivity to the photographic camera
- Prioritizing verification over validation in daily life
- If someone is upset, it’s less about “did the thing actually happen” or “is it right that you got upset”, and more about how exactly they got upset, what went through their mind, how we can work together to approach the problem
- This really great tiktok