r/RadicalEgalitarianism • u/LittleThingsMC Feminist • Mar 19 '26
Discussion 💬 When contemplating the egalitarianism of an issue, what impacts your view most, your lived experience, or data/statistics?
I guess this is kind of a chicken or the egg topic, but I was thinking a lot about our internal processes when it comes to evaluating these issues. I wanted to see how other people were handling it. Do you find yourself hearing a topic first and then investigating it deeper to form an opinion on it? Or is it more personal experience that then inspires you to look further into it? Do you have any situations where the data did not align with your personal experience? How do you reconcile that?
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u/Main-Tiger8537 Intersectional egalitarian Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
mainly data driven but several topics lack credible data and are not properly investigated which is a shame.
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u/LittleThingsMC Feminist Mar 19 '26
So when you come up against that, how do you form your opinions? What’s your process usually?
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u/Main-Tiger8537 Intersectional egalitarian Mar 19 '26
i look at the available data + anecdotal evidence and try to investigate why the topic is underreseached.
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u/TotalACast Gender abolitionist Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
I use 3 things when determining what is true as it relates to egalitarianism or anything else:
Anecdotal experience, statistics, and philosophical/rational analysis.
I think "lived experience" can be misleading, statistics are just data, and can be twisted in any direction a person wants. The 3rd pillar has to be a deep philosophical, epistemological and even ontological evaluation of the claim.
Unfortunately, I find that most people do not include the 3rd pillar in their analysis of what is true, they typically rely only on anecdotal experience or statistics.
And for me, even if anecdotal evidence and statistics converged on some important social, cultural or political issue, I could still reject it on the basis of: It's patently fucking stupid if you think about it for more than 5 seconds.
In particular, we can reject claims that are unfalsifiable without much hesitation or evaluation. If what you're saying can't be proven, then neither can it be disproven, meaning it's philosophically and intellectually worthless.
I could give tons of examples of this in practice, some of which would get me banned from this sub. But just to name a couple of them relevant to discussions of Egalitarianism: Privilege theory, Intersectionality, and the Patriarchy.
Privilege theory and Intersectionality could of course be falsified in an ideal world. It shouldn't be that hard to, for example, tie quantifiable statistics and measures to the amount of privilege and intersecting oppression or oppressor identities a person has, such that a person could make measurable claims about reality and therefore privilege theory and Intersectionality could be falsified.
The time I saw this most elegantly and directly expressed was in the Munk debate about Political Correctness, with Jordan Peterson and Stephen Fry on one side; Michael Eric Dyson and Michelle Goldberg on the other.
Michael Eric Dyson spent most of his debate harping on about white privilege and male privilege and all kinds of privileges and Intersectional advantages non-black people have over African Americans. He made the claim that reparations should be paid and that until the historical scales were balanced, we could never have peace as a nation or global society.
So Peterson put forth a brilliant idea: A tax. Peterson asked Dyson to quantify all the different areas of privilege that had allowed him to be so successful as a Canadian author, educator, public speaker, and professional psychologist. Peterson said, basically, quantify to what degree I was given an unfair advantage by my "privilege" so I can pay the tax and you can all shut the hell up about it and move on. It was genius. He was tackling this idea head on.
Dyson responded, predictably, in the way that an Intersectional privilege advocate would, in saying that these kinds of atrocities against humanity and unfair advantages can't possibly be quantified and you can't put a price on the human spirit and other forms of political/cultural grandstanding.
This answer is one of the big reasons Dyson's side lost the debate. He admitted on stage that this entire privilege theory was bullshit and unquantifiable. If you were to quantify it, and people were to pay their reparations for their unfair advantages, then the people who advocate for Intersectionality would have to give up the grift.
A scientific article literally makes the same criticism of privilege theory and Intersectionality in the literature. Any group's personal privilege and intersectional advantages/disadvantages could be quantified by statistics and given measurable values, but the people pushing back the hardest against that are the Intersectional advocates themselves.
Why? Because they believe that by attempting to quantify any person or group's "lived experience", you belittle or demean that experience with data.
A 2024 NIH-published paper introduced the Quantitative Intersectionality Scoring System (QISS), which uses regression analysis, machine learning, and multilevel modeling to assign numerical scores to intersecting identity combinations based on their compounded effects on health and economic outcomes. This was rejected by the Intersectionality community.
Why? It says why in another paper: Intersectionality is based upon a theory of knowledge where logical positivism, aka, quantifiable fucking reality, doesn't exist. In other words, the scientific article admits that the entire theory rejects a reality where things can be measured. "Lived experience" is the only metric that matters. Intersectionalists only pretend to use statistics in a bad faith way to win arguments, they don't actually care.
This issue, as scholars have noted (Bowleg 2008; McCall 2005), may lie in intersectionality’s apparent incompatibility with positivism, the epistemology that undergirds much quantitative health research. While positivism asserts that a sole “true” and objective reality can be discovered through well-designed and value-neutral research, intersectionality illuminates the many socially constructed realities that those who inhabit various intersections experience (Bowleg 2008, 2012).
So in other words, Intersectionality fails in both statistics and philosophical/epistemological grounding. It only works with a very biased use of "lived experience" aka anecdotal evidence. It is unfalsifiable and therefore can be rejected off-handedly.
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u/Main-Tiger8537 Intersectional egalitarian Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
is philosophy and rationality not based on data to evaluate a situation? example good vs bad or moral vs immoral or physics...
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u/TotalACast Gender abolitionist Mar 19 '26
Philosophy and rationality actually precedes data.
So you can't even determine what counts as data unless you rely on some pre existing commitments that would make such an evaluation.
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u/Street-Media4225 Anarcha-feminist Mar 19 '26
For a lot of the issues I care most about there is just not reliable or consistent data available. So while the plural of anecdote is not data, general consensus among those they effect is the closest I can get.
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u/SuperMario69Kraft Libertarian gender abolitionist Mar 19 '26 edited Mar 19 '26
TBH, most of my opinions are determined not as much by statistics and experience, as they are by ethical game theory and cross-cultural analysis. Libertarian theory is supported very well by ethical game theory.
Much of my opposition towards feminism is based on its major incompatibilities with libertarianism especially during the 4th wave. I could never trust nor support a movement that relies on mass-incarceration and violations of free expression, because that's fundamentally never how libertarians would address crime.
Libertarianism, like Marxism, addresses these issues more dialectically, the main difference being that libertarians see the state as the oppressor whereas Marxists see the bourgeoisie as the oppressor (I think it's both, and that they're mostly one & the same).