Yes. But they have to couch it in terms of them not having experience, and instead have only had observations of those who have. e.g A therapist can talk about Depression without having had it, as long as they’re talking about it academically and via other people’s experiences of it.
I think the problem comes in when a person who hasn’t got experience with something refuses to listen to those who have–not to blindly agree, but to listen. This was the core of the whole “mansplaining” thing: having a man speak confidently about how he’d deal with sexual harassment or workplace discrimination or sexual assault is frustrating at best–especially when attempts to explain why his perception is wrong are casually dismissed. In the same way, having a non-parent talk about solving a parenting problem as if it were simple (“just be consistent!”) or that the issue was fundamentally one of character (“But some parents are just too lazy to/don’t care enough to . . .”) can really grind a person the wrong way.
I’m remembering a thread where some poster was opining on American slavery, and it quickly became apparent that all his opinions were based on how he thought slavery probably worked–he’d just inferred a bunch of shit based on what he thought the priorities and attitudes of slave owners and slaves alike would be, extrapolating from his own experiences and attitudes toward property ownership and such. He’s never read any of the thousands of primary sources on the subject, nor the thousands of secondary sources that contextualized those. He was just wrong about a lot of things but he refused to listen because what made a sort of internal sense to him was more reliable than all the actual evidence in the world. Now, no one in the thread had direct experience with slavery, but I think it was the same kind of frustration–people in a position to know were having their knowledge dismissed as incorrect by someone with much less knowledge because it didn’t fit his preconceived schema.
I have to agree about addiction.
When I sobered up eleven years ago, Kaiser put me through a 12-week group therapy program. About halfway through, one of the two main counselors left, and was replaced by a young guy, fresh from earning his Master’s in Addiction Therapy. He was very Pollyanna-ish about the whole thing, like he expected to follow procedures from a book, have them work out a certain way, and move on to the next.
We had a very hard time taking him seriously. After a couple of weeks, it came out that he wasn’t a former addict himself, but that several of his family members were. That was the end of it. We pretty much did our best to ignore him after that.
After I “graduated” and moved on, I never went back, so I have no idea if he made it in the long run.
I have a personal, anecdotal example. Everyone’s read stories where someone was described as being paralyzed with terror. I always thought that was hyperbole, until it happened to me. First time scuba diving, after having 30 pounds of equipment strapped to my body and then asked to jump off the boat. My brain said that these people would not try to kill me, my instinct said that with all the extra weight I’d surely plummet to the bottom and die. They ended up having to push me off the boat (after which I had a terrific time) because I literally could not move.
I also love this, from the tv show Firefly:
Jubal Early: You ever been shot?
Simon: No.
Jubal Early: You oughta be shot. Or stabbed, lose a leg. To be a surgeon, you know? Know what kind of pain you’re dealing with. They make psychiatrists get psychoanalyzed before they can get certified, but they don’t make a surgeon get cut on. That seem right to you?
(Later, near the end of the episode Jubal shoots Simon in the leg.)
Jubal: See? That’s how it feels.
Yeah, this is the crux of the problem.
Decades ago I read an essay by Wendy Rose, who characterized herself (IIRC) as a Native American, a poet, and an academic, in that order. She’d written extensively about her own experience growing up on a reservation. But she’d be invited to readings at bookstores and be asked to wear a buckskin dress, even though that wasn’t traditional clothes for her culture, and when she said so, people would argue with her. Or she’d sit on panels alongside anthropologists, and the anthropologists would say that a particular custom had died out among her tribe; when she argued that she personally knew several people currently practicing that custom, the academics would dismiss her and insist that they were right.
That’s some serious nonsense.
As a teacher, I don’t mind at all when people talk about their own experiences in school, with good or bad teachers. But when someone believes that teaching is no more than glorified babysitting–as if I haven’t spent hours this week thinking about how to incorporate more inquiry into my botany unit, as though I haven’t been figuring out how to merge different multiplication curricula to maximize student understanding of this novel concept, as though I haven’t been struggling with the balance between teaching writing conventions (CAPITALIZE YOUR OWN NAMES, DAMMIT) and writing concepts–I certainly expect people to listen. If they insist despite everything that I’m just babysitting, that’s nonsense.
Even teachers from other places don’t always get it. A few years ago I spent the summer with teachers from across the country, studying fairy tales and children’s lit. Some teachers from private schools called their principals and arranged to teach classes in fantasy lit. It was awesome. Some teachers from states with strong teachers’ unions started planning how they could build fantasy lit units into their curricula.
I lamented my own district’s rigid guidelines for teaching–at the time, I was literally told what to teach every single day, given my teaching point and sometimes even the material with which I would teach it. Most of the teachers understood the difficulty, but one kept insisting I could just go ahead and teach whatever I wanted. I explained the lack of a union, the lack of a sympathetic administration, the lack of any recourse for teachers in my state. She refused to budge: I could just do what I wanted!
That was some serious nonsense.
IMHO, the most frustrating disagreements tend to occur between individuals who think they “fully understand” something because they meet the minimal experiential requirements. At least people with no experience will usually acknowledge that they may not know everything.
For instance, a few months ago, I was in an online argument with a Redditor who dismissed another Redditor’s worries about facing racism in her small, isolated community. Essentially she thought this person was freaking out for no reason, since–in her experience–white people love “exotic-looking” people. I immediately assumed this person was posting from a position of white privilege and intimated as much in my response. And her response was “Uh-uh! I know how what I’m talking about because I’m ethnic!”
I wasn’t about to interogate her about what “ethnic” means because it was irrelevant to the larger discussion. But I don’t think simply being in a minority ethnic group gives you special insight into racism, especially since some minority groups are less stigmitized than others. And it is difficult to communicate this without being accused of playing the “more oppressed than thou” card. It was a frustrating debate, but one that I eventually won by pointing out that different minority groups have different experiences, and that just because white people love her “exoticness” doesn’t mean everyone else gets the same treatment.
AKA Dunning-Kruger effect. There are none so blind as those who don’t know they can’t see and are too cocksure to consider the possibility that they can’t. Dunning–Kruger effect - Wikipedia
A co-worker who has never done any kind of recreational drugs opines about the effects of pot on the brain. I think his only research was old Cheech and Chong movies. As if a person who sips a glass of wine at dinner can be likened to a wino who chokes on his own vomit.
People are weirdly hypocritical about this. Things they know about qualify them to have the only valid opinions, but things YOU know about disqualify you because you’re biased.
It’s especially flagrant in the threads about pit bulls, although I’m sure others find it in areas they have familiarity or expertise, like police officers for example.
People will say “what you say about pit bulls doesn’t count because your experience with them means you’re biased, but random crap I read on the Internet or in alarmist news reports is the Word of God.” Well, they don’t say it that way, but that’s what they mean.
You win the thread. Bravo!
For me, there’s a difference between someone without experience saying “This is how something should be done” and “This is how I would do this thing.”
We can all, intellectually, know how some things should be done. What we can’t know, intellectually, is how we would actually do those things.
If the need was the only aspect of addiction, you may be right. Note, I have used the drowning analogy on this board in the past. It is the best I have found but it misses an enormous amount. I am recovering alkie and have also swam out wayyy too far…
Here is another example where I think understanding is almost impossible unless you have experienced it: body integrity identity disorder.
That is the one where individuals believe that certain parts of their bodies are not theirs. Like ‘I need to cut off my arm because it isn’t mine’.
Slee
With all due respect I don’t think being attacked by a dog is in any way comparable with being in combat except in the most basic sense of experiencing fear of injury.
There is the aspect of being part of a disciplined organisation with its own history and values (leaving aside such things as partisans), undergoing various kinds of preperation and training, following and giving orders, working towards achieving mission objectives in an immediate sense and national scale objectives in a strategic sense, fighting both on an individual and group level, group dynamics like not wanting to let down your comrades, trying to kill other people while they are trying to do the same to you, utilising various pieces of equipment both offensive and defensive, being aware that this may go on for years with periods of quiet relative relaxation interspersed with episodes of intense experience (the 99% boredom, 1% terror, thing), and so on, those are just some aspects.
Also ‘Combat’ covers much more than just men with rifles shooting at you, from submarine combat to flying strafing missions against enemy tank columns to indeed being right up and personal with a bayonet or bare hands in a trench. I’m sure being attacked by a dog was a very unpleasant experience, but I don’t think it really gives you any idea what its like to be in combat.
And on the topic of this thread I don’t think reading or studying military history can either, it can certainly help you understand better and empathise with what people have experienced but it is always at a remove, sitting on a comfortable sofa reading a book, no matter how gifted the author, you are not in any actual danger or experiencing the wider environment of being in a combat zone.
One of my favourite quotes is from ‘The Man in the Arena’ by Teddy Roosevelt, I always remember it when someone is mouthing off about something they don’t really understand or have not personally experienced (that is not directed at you btw)
Understanding in the sense of subjective experience is one thing.
But if we consider understanding in the sense of seeking true principles - then, of course, our individual experiences are anecdotes, not science, and may be completely wrong.
It’s particularly interesting that the OP’s example is parenting. The actual research over many decades shows that parenting strategy (except of course in extreme negative cases of child abuse), has a negligible effect on behavioral outcomes. Siblings raised in the same home are, in fact, surprisingly different. The evidence shows that the familial environment (i.e. that which is shared between siblings) makes a negligible contribution to variance in behavior. To a rough approximation, half of the variance in behavior is genetic, and half is attributable to the mysterious “non-shared environment”, i.e. environmental factors that siblings do not share, perhaps non-shared environmental factors experienced within the home, but perhaps more plausibly environmental influences outside the home such as the peer group.
To most people, of course, this is “obviously” nonsense based on personal experience.
To clarify the above: genetic siblings are obviously somewhat similar, but the point is that almost the entire similarity is explained by the genes that the parents contribute, not by their parenting strategy. In other words, adopted genetic siblings that are raised by two different families are just as similar as genetic siblings that are raised in the same family.
The non-genetic (environmental) contribution to behavior is significant (about 50%), but almost none of it is contributed by shared family environment.
I think it’s fairly common to be able to grasp a portion of what something would be like, but only experience can show us the full “picture.”
There’s one that can be sort of understood in a purely intellectual/imaginative sense, but can’t be fully understood without experiencing it. Most people live their whole lives without having this experience.
Not me, however. I’m talking about attending a double funeral – of extended family members. I had a great-uncle and aunt who died from injuries sustained in a car accident. One died on scene, the other a few hours later.
My eight year old daughter wanted to learn how to swim.
Well, I am a swimmer. I will teach her.
She quickly learned I was trying to kill her.
I enrolled her in a Red Cross swimming school. She learned in one hour!
So, you may know a subject. But the delivery is important, also. How do you get to the end product?
Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
It is funny because sometimes people with a direct experience of something really do know less about it than other people. Lots of parents used to believe that smacking your kids was the only way to get them to listen. Lots of people believe in ghosts. Lots of people have all sorts of cognitive biases that render them unable to judge the evidence. And lots of people have no self-knowledge and profess to believe things about themselves that are obviously untrue.
That doesn’t mean outsiders aren’t biased either. But just because you used to be a junkie that doesn’t make you an expert on junkies, at most it makes you an expert on yourself, and often times not even that. Getting shot doesn’t make you an expert in treating bullet wounds. That doesn’t make some guy who never got shot correct when he talks about how it feels to get shot either.
Point is, human beings are fallible, and it’s really easy to fool yourself. I see it happen all the time. But I’m fallible too, so maybe all those times I think people are talking bullshit about their experiences I’m the one who’s wrong.
Racism. There is no racism any more, because we white people aren’t being subjected to it. AllLivesMatter, man, because I’ve never been the victim of police brutality.
An obvious example is public policy on safety issues. Should FAA/NTSB policy-makers listen to people whose relatives have died in a plane crash? Sure, as a matter of compassion - but they should then totally discount those people’s biased views, often motivated by emotional desire to make air travel absolutely safe from the specific factor that by chance happened to kill their loved ones. It’s careful dispassionate analysis of statistics, probabilities, cost vs benefit and consideration of overall effects (such as more expensive air travel pushing people toward far more dangerous car travel) that actually make us safer in the future.