No Kidding

Business, Modernism, Numbers & Statistics

One of my favorite movie (and life) lines comes from A League of their Own :  “There’s no crying in baseball!”

Here’s something we all know about.

Facts be damned: Rising use of emotional language like ‘feel’ and ‘believe’ has helped displace rational thought in ‘post-truth era’

A new study suggests we are living in the post-truth era where ‘feelings trump facts,’ as language has become less rational and more emotional over the past 40 years.

A team of scientists found words like ‘determine’ and ‘conclusion’ that were popular from 1850 through 1980 have been since been replaced with human experience such as ‘feel’ and ‘believe.’

The team also identified another major shift around 2007 with the birth of social media, when the use of emotion-laden language surged and fact-related words dropped.

Although the drivers behind the shift cannot be determined, the researchers suggest it could be a rapid development in science and technology or tensions that came about from changes in economic polices in the early 1980s.

Reason #2,465 why I could never work in a modern office.

Coming from a business background where every single proposition or proposal had to be justified with fact, research, real-world experience and (lastly) common sense, the very thought of going through the same process where any suggestion of same might “trigger” some kind of emotional response at best makes me want to reach for the gin bottle. (At worst, it makes my trigger finger itch.)

In fact, an emotional response to criticism would have made my time’s audience suspicious:  Why are they getting upset?  What are they hiding?   Why should we take them seriously when they are such weak people that criticism upsets them?

Nowadays, of course, all the above responses would result in Stern Words from HR (or even, gawd help us, from your own Management, so pussywhipped has the business world become).

No wonder Socialism has become so popular:  because while the eventual goal of Socialism is complete societal control, the way it is introduced is through emotional appeal:  “It’s not fair that…”  or “We need to end [whatever supposed evil]”, without any fact-based foundation but with plenty of anecdotal or emotionally-based evidence.

Small wonder too that the entire Green Movement is based not only on emotion, but a pack of easily-disproved lies (“Climate is cooling I mean warming I mean changing, and we’re all gonna diiiieeeee if we don’t do something!!!”)

Facts don’t need to be propped up by emotion;  they stand proudly on their own.  In fact, it’s probably true to say that the greater the hysteria generated by about some supposed catastrophe, the more likely it is to be complete bullshit.

Dr. Fauci, call your office.

7 comments

  1. My now-12 year old daughter went through a phase of prefacing every sentence with “I feel like I want. . . ” when she was 8 that she was trained into at school becuz “feelings are always valid.”

    I had a talk with the teacher to knock it off and then proceeded trained her right back out of it, so it didn’t last long, but damn was it annoying couple of months.

  2. No shit, right now (at work) I have a CEO townhall playing on the side while perusing the internet of things. The VP of the HSE group just got thru saying that she “FEELS” that the vaccine is the best way to fight covid.

    She doesn’t “know”. She doesn’t bother to present “evidence”. She doesn’t have to explain away alternative treatments. She doesn’t have to bother with the ever changing narrative of the vax preventing covid, nope it just lessens the symptoms, etc. Or that we need booster after booster.

    She just “FEELS” and that’s enough.

  3. Too many of these wimps obsessed with feelings haven’t felt enough fists rapidly applied to their nose for voicing factless opinions

    JQ

  4. I’m sure that when in the Gulag, the lash of the whip impressed upon your feelings markedly. Reading/Rereading the Gulag Archipelago should be required for everyone who falls back upon “feelings”.

  5. This is why I openly scoff at people who parrot the “we need to listen to their stories” garbage. Unfortunately in our post-facts (i.e. post reason) world, it is tempting to respond to people who hedge every position in their feelings to respond with “well I feel…” but that just gives everything away to them rhetorically. In truth, you really can’t reason with these people at all. They are fundamentally incapable of it.

    Ultimately we are watching the unraveling of society due to post-modernity. With no objectivity, what else am I to rely on to form my philosophical foundation? Logic? Too rigid. Facts? Whose facts? The list goes on and on and people land on feelings because they’re just too lazy to think. Matters of morality then ultimately become what feels right (or as the Bible might say “man doing what seems right in his own eyes”) or what is the path of least resistance. Even worse, matters of the law simply become whatever the majority can be convinced is right and when that happens, historically speaking, atrocity almost always follows.

  6. This is probably the reason time-wasters feel put-out by my insensitivity to their needs:
    Them: “How do you feel about…?”
    Me [rudely over-talking with terminal finality]: “My feelings are none of your business! Are we done here?”
    .
    Them: “I feel as though…”
    Me [rudely over-talking with terminal finality]: “Your feelings are none of my business! Are we done here?”
    .
    Wallow in your feelings someplace else.
    Time wasters.

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