matt ridley closed The Red Queen with an idea that we’ll never truly understand what human nature is like “objectively” because our nature is inescapable: we will always impose our nature on the findings we have, regardless of what they are.
The “impartial observer” is a myth. No matter what exists “out there,” beyond our senses, “in real life,” it is filtered through our senses. Our thoughts are a product of these entirely subjective sensations and neural processing, the latter of which is a combination of past sensory inputs, genes, and the connections between them.
Meditation supposedly gives us clarity by recognizing how much we impose the “self” in our judgements of things. We can’t escape it, but the awareness itself is a powerful thing.
The “objective science” is a myth. We always project our biases, culture, and frameworks on the data we discover through “science”. Every step of the scientific method from hypothesis to conclusion is imbued with the researcher’s subjectivity. The questions she asks, what patterns she sees, how and what she decides to measure, and her interpretations are as much a function of her neurological processing as they are of the data itself.
Numerous historical accounts detail the human rights abuses done in the name of science, from Tuskegee to forced sterilization. People think they’re doing what’s best for “science” but impose their own biases in their work. People think there’s one right answer and like minded people in bubbles (such as academia) pat each other on the back when they achieve results based on one way of seeing the world, not acknowledging (or hand-wavingly referencing) the myth of objective “truth”.
Science is exclusionary. We dismiss “subjective” media such as narrative and seek to find “universal theories” that provide unifying frameworks in the social sciences. But the more people you try to generalize to, and the more different these people are, the less success you are probably going to have. Universalizability is a myth, even in physics. Just like you have different “laws” when it comes to the subatomic vs. the planetary scale, there are different “Truths” depending on who, where, and what you are.
The whole point of studying the world and ourselves is to know how we can be better—how we can be happier, treat each other better, and foster communities of belonging. We do this when we accept and normalize pluralism in our frameworks. There is no “one right answer,” and that is okay.
