You mean a record of collective experience painting a bigger picture about a subject may be more valued than a single anecdotal account?
Ask a white middle class boomer how was growing up in the American 50s and he might say it was a great time based on his experience… a black person might give a different perspective…I believe more often than not a quick Google search may provide more information than someone you are talking to. I’d take a Google search over 99% of what any of my relatives have to say about any subject :P
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I get your point, and I was actually kinda playing devil’s advocate here, I really thought I’d be the one getting downvoted lol
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Ask a person what sex feels like or how should a roux smell - these are not things you can explain in words, whether it’s in an article or in person.
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Go on then.
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Right, so you can’t explain it in words. You have to experience it yourself.
But experiencing things yourself is not what we’re talking about; if you already have the experience, you don’t need to ask Google (or another person) to confirm it. What we’re talking about is, if you want to find about something you don’t already know about, should you go to Google or get an individual’s take on it, given that individual has experienced it themselves.
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You’re describing qualia which are necessarily subjective. These accounts are not helpful whether you get them from Google or anywhere else.
Anecdotes may be interesting, but on the whole they are not as useful as objective answers.
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No?
If there’s no objective, correct answer to a question then the point is moot. If you’re getting something out of some individual’s subjective answer it’s based on the want to build a relationship or gain understanding of that person which inherently has nothing to do with the question itself.
That’s fine and all, but not really what I understand your original question to be asking. People have experiences, and those experiences are theirs: they can’t give them to you. If you like hearing about it anyway, cool, but you might as well read a poem.
Edit: substitute “a book” for “Google” in your question and see how it’s a weird take.
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I value my lived experiences more than public sentinment.
Like jesus christ all these tankies telling me how “great” China is…
then why the fuck did my family leave? Why do I have memories of living in some slum when I was in Guangzhou?
You call them tankies, but every country has that. People blindly patriotic to their own country. Willing to overlook the biggest of flaws with their country.
I live in the united states, and have seen people defend ICE. I’ve heard people defend the Vietnam War. I’ve seen people defend our multiple invasions of Iraq. I’ve seen people online defend the killings of Renėe Good, and Alex Pretti.
All because “Home good, outsiders bad!”
And that’s as far as some people think.
If they were Chinese, I’d give them a pass for being pro-CCP, but these are western tankies on Lemmy… 🤦♂️
It’s because people lack the ability to subjectively look at all possible aspects of life. They latch on to one thing that’s better and say that means the entire country is better. For example China objectively has better public transportation and infrastructure around things like internet and cellular despite also being an absolutely massive land mass. Pretty much anywhere has objectively better health care than the USA. So if those things have been causing them grief lately in their life they are going to latch on to that and declare that the country that has the better that is better in general even if there are other aspects not related to those subjects that would ultimately make life much worse
Single issue voter mindset basically.
Like US-republicans with the gun thing, and they sacrifice their healthcare and social security just for the guns… (and the thing is, republicans aren’t even really pro-gun)
Both have biases, and we should not diminish neither of them, but weight accordingly.
When it comes to personal experience, we should consider the person’s background and personal beliefs. When it comes to information on the internet, we should consider the source’s demographics and the fact that it tends to be more generic and miss the more specific aspects.
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Maybe to YOU. There’s a reason I come to Lemmy, and formerly reddit, and ask questions that I COULD just google. But I ask people. Because people aren’t robots. Family Fued is a tv show based around the idea that you can ask 100 people the same question, and get different answers.
If I ask google the same question 100 times, it loads the same info everytime.
Name something you’d find in a haunted house.
NAKKID GRANDMA!!!
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Makes sense. Lots of individuals are dipshits.
Your experience is one data point. When it comes to how something feels to you, which is a personal and individual thing, then it’s more valuable to you than aggregated data. That’s a subjective opinion.
But the data on the Internet is more accurate for objectively measured things.
For example: some men think it’s normal (ie typical) to not wipe your ass. But if you look at lots of data points, measured objectively, you can see why their one data point is wrong. And nasty.
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Yup. I’ve tried in the past to engage with people at times by asking who someone is or what something is in the comments and I’m always met with responses telling me to just google it. And they’re usually not nice at all.
Fuck me for wanting to have a fan of something info-dump the particulars of it and why they like it.
Social networking is such a lonely thing.
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Agreed!
Yes, exactly.
Greatly depends on the question being asked. Some questions actually talking to someone would like to yield better information but there are a lot of subjects where I’m going to get vastly better information from Google.
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