#soapbox

I'm not posting this in agreement. Or not full agreement, anyway. It's been posted and shared on my feed in facebook. As a general principle: Absolutely. Your opinion about my experience is not as valid as my experience... usually.

The problem is that I'm a social scientist. That word "opinion" is carrying a lot of weight. If someone's ideas of what a non-lived experience is like are based on supposition, best guesses, and their own experience, then the graphic is valid: lived experience is much better.

However, if an "opinion" about my lived experience comes from the reported lived experiences from relatively representative thousand or so people, the opinion is probably more valid, for certain purposes/contexts.

"Validity" always has a context or target. No matter how much amazing research I have about a certain issue, my knowledge is never as good for an individual as that individual's lived experience. However, if "valid" means "generalizably true across lots of individuals," then one person's experience will never be as valid as a reasonable (lots of weight on that word) summation of many others' experiences. Another detail is whether one's interpretation of one's experiences (especially interpretation of causality) is necessarily more valid than interpretations by others who haven't lived the experience.

If you're feeling uncomfortable about this analysis, consider a parent whose child develops autism. The parent is fully convinced their kid's age 2 vaccinations were the cause. That parent has definitely had an experience, which included seeing their kid vaccinated, then seeing autism symptoms emerge. None of that means the parent's interpretation of that experience is accurate. No, the vaccines did not cause the autism, but try telling the parent that. They might tell you that they lived the experience so their interpretation is right.

And they're still wrong. Yes, the experiences they had are theirs and valid and valuable. That doesn't mean nobody else can have a more valid opinion about their experience--specifically, a more valid opinion about the causes of their child's autism.

This dynamic applies in many areas of our world: are soldiers' views of American foreign policy always more valid than non-soldiers" views? The soldiers lived the foreign policy experience, after all. Are a patient's views of their disease/diagnosis/disorder etc. always more valid than the views of medical professionals? The patient lives the experience, right?

In plenty of domains and applications one's lived experience should not be questioned by those who didn't live it. I'd say this should be the default in living our lives (hence my lack of concern about this meme even though I don't quite agree with it). However, the vague use of terms in messages like this might contribute to a belief, as Asimov said, that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" (not Sagan; thanks, @courtcan) fueled by the insistence that one's interpretations of one's experiences are superior to all other interpretations.

#experience #soapBox #antivax #cognitiveBiases #facebook

Why did #Soapbox put a wallet in my #Mastodon?

cc @0461fcbecc4c3374439932d6b8f11269ccdb7cc973ad7a50ae362db135a474dd @alex

@p @epsi @Stellar @NonPlayableClown Are they actually going to leave #4chan then? Make a new forum? Spin up their own #rebased / #Soapbox / #Mastodon instance on the #Fediverse?

Seems like many users are leaving for #8chan tho.

Dr. Abraham Low trains us that to know is to know when we don’t know - at times, perhaps often, we don’t really need to know

Earth is full of ppl in pain, stuck in the crazy of fear and anger. All human beans are subject to the possibilities of this reality. We are all biologically & physically affected as well as emotionally. Learning the ways we work & our world works will give us the best chance at self control, influence over our worlds, and positive productive lives

#SoapBox #LifeSkills

Discovering the #fediverse gives me the same feelings #linux did years ago. The endless choice, excitement of discovery, clash of philosophies and a community.

I spent years #distrohopping from #ubuntu , #arch , #voidlinux , #nixos etc and then back to arch. Also spent a long time switching desktop environments and window managers like i3.

I started on #lemmy and #mastodon . What do I try next? #selfhost an #activitypub server? Which one?

#akkoma #WriteFreely #Mitra #soapbox #misskey

I didn't know that #Mastodon had badges, I thought that was a #Rebased / #Soapbox thing

Another thing I'm noticing in #Soapbox, all links in posts are getting truncated

One downside of #Soapbox on #Mastodon is that clicking on inline hashtags in a post will pop open a new tab that takes you to your instance's FE view of those hashtag results.

Switching to the new #Soapbox interface for now on my #Mastodon acc

@33c74427f3b2b73d5e38f3e6c991c122a55d204072356f71da49a0e209fb6940 @5f0a6c0c4ad5a0766a451b7b34ee8ae4c266a96779339f672f9a2d140c820c14 Well on my main (this acc) I usually use #Soapbox via fe.soapbox.pub so I think I see the latest changes here first as well. I thought about using it on my #Mastodon alt I use at work but I don’t believe that #Soapbox supports #Mastodon’s news feature yet.

Happy Boxing Day to all who celebrate!

And Happy Thorsday!

#AllCatsAreBeautiful #Thorsday #ThorToots #CatsOfMastodon #Catstodon #CatsOfFediverse #Cats #Cat #Caturday #BoxingDay #RagdollCats #USPS #SoapBox

Hope is earned. And it's a byproduct of taking actions that are risky to you, personally.

Stop "looking for hope" and start earning it.

#soapbox

Came back to the #soapbox front-end for this account. Really nice.