Here Goes Nothing

by Steve Toltz

‘Why do we give credence to “lived experience”? All the time people misperceive intentions, misread facial expressions, misunderstand tone; they project, transfer, carry a history of past troubled confrontations with them into benign interactions, and then you have to factor in confirmation bias, negativity bias, inter-group bias, the availability heuristic, the fundamental attribution error, the bandwagon effect, the clustering illusion, the empathy gap, salience, herding, selective attention. How can anyone know enough about every individual’s psychological state to confirm how much of their inner subjective experience corresponds with objective reality? Maybe it’s seventy percent. Maybe it’s eighty percent. Maybe it’s thirty percent. Let it be said once and for all: lived experience as an evidentiary standard is mostly garbage.’