Villains love dichotomies.
I am reminded of the way Answers in Genesis builds up this phony definition of Real Science™ so they can declare that conclusions they don’t like are Fake Science🤡.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Yes, it is a crude dichotomy buy how else are we to distinguish the more false from the truer narratives?
“how else are we to distinguish the more false from the truer narratives?”
Because they are not backed by evidence? Evidence doesn’t have to be numbers. Even if we can’t narrow down something to a number it still has evidentiary value. Numbers are just easier to deal with.
“how else are we to distinguish”
Also, qualia are real. They are real experiences, and they matter.
‘Qualitative’ might be applied to the quality of life in a city where real estate has been so exploited that hardly any parks or culturally significant 20th century houses remain. It cannot be translated to $ so it does not matter.
A more important dichotomy: We and The Other.
In the absence of ze Joos we must build up the illusion of other enemies.
Like poor = parasites and welfare cheats. Unemployed= lazy.
.
This is off on a tangent, but it is relevant in regard to demonising the very most vulnerable.
Britain: “Desperate Tory Acts of Cruelty”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=OYrRZPXP0OU
No different than Stupid Idiot Trump declaring anything he hates, yet rightfully expose his own corruption as “fake news.”
What gets me is that people who believe in this dichotomy are quick to say we’re inherently wrong because they think we’re experiencing the qualia of “offense,” which overrides any consideration for facts and data we present.
There’s the usual saw of “if you don’t measure it, you don’t improve it” which isn’t necessarily true… but as an empirical fact it’s reasonably accurate.
There is a name for this: McNamara’s Fallacy, after the Secretary of State during the Vietnam War who refused to listen to intelligence based on non-numerical data, thus making it impossible to consider issues like troop morale, enemy resolve, or population loyalties.
The flip side of this is the current conservative movement that talks endlessly about the superiority of objectivity over subjectivity/postmodernism and yet refuses to accept objective, numerically measurable evidence such as global warming, the failure of tax cuts for the wealthy to improve the economy, the damage done by racism and sexism, the failure of chromosome count or gamete size to account for gender identity, and so on and so on, while latching onto demonstrably false narratives like the furry school crisis or the pizza restaurant paedophile ring or Jewish space laser forest fires.
@8 — yes, but there are plenty of ways to measure qualitative entities. It’s even possible to approximate qualitative experience with a numerical scale, e.g. the Likert pain scale, even though we all know that pain does not come in discrete unidimensional aliquots.
@9 — McNamara was secretary of defense, not state. But otherwise you are spot on, thanks!!
We saw that with the Covid-19 virus deniers, the antivaxxers, and the Ivermectin fanatics.
.1. Yes the Covid-19 virus exists and yes, it will make you sick and can kill you.
.2. The antivaxxers focus on the rare and mostly mild vaccine side effects while ignoring the very real direct effects of the Covid-19 virus itself.
The antivaxxers were 14 times more likely to die from the Covid-19 virus.
.3. Ivermectin doesn’t do anything to treat Covid-19 virus infections as proven by multiple clinical trials.
chrislawson: the way I’ve seen the term used it’s more an indictment than a directive. I think the first context I heard it in, it was to point out that traffic engineers at the start of the discipline only were counting traffic volumes, nothing else. So they optimized traffic volumes… which meant pedestrians got screwed.
@chrislawson #9,
All of which can be examined quantitatively by social scientists, but they tend to produce results conservatives disagree with, so those sciences have to be squashed. Qualitative data is easier to ignore because you can just attack the reputation of whoever provided it.