wait... facts care about your feelings & feelings care about facts??

July 17th, 2015. A momentous day for the internet because that's the day this video was published. "Bruce Caitlyn Jenner? I'll call him Caitlyn Jenner because that's his-" "No, it's her. You're not being polite to the pronouns. Disrespectable. " "Okay, forget about the disrespect. Facts don't care about your feelings. " This catchphrase has spread all across the internet. Our rational, truth-seeking warrior, Benny Boy, has become an inspiration for all 15-year-olds who think edgy equals smart. There have actually been so many funny memes that have come out of this catchphrase. One of my personal favorites. "But, but, MAGA MAN! " said the libtard. "Orange Man has done some pretty unrad things. Here's a list. I cut him off. " The libtard is clearly delusional after being cucked for the fifth time this week. I grab the list out of his hands and crumple it into a paper ball and then eat it. I stare into his eyes the whole time and he is too petrified to look away. "I move my mouth up to his ears and whisper, 'Shut up, libtard. '" It almost makes me forgive Ben Shapiro for his contributions to the alt-right pipeline. Is what I would say if I was brain-rotted. The way y'all be giggling at memes of literal fascists and proceed to ignore or downplay the severe harms of their actions, you are falling for their facade. Yeah, I'm giggling at that meme of Elon jumping up and down too, but after I giggle, I lock back in and look for ways to organize in my community. Anyways! Mini rant aside, I think this infamous catchphrase of "facts don't care about your feelings" lends itself to some philosophically interesting questions. What is the relation between fact and feeling? What is knowledge made up of? Since what we know affects what we do, then does fact or feeling play a bigger role in action? While Ben Shapiro popularized this catchy saying about privileging fact over feeling, he's far from the first to think something like this. Historically, the Western philosophical tradition has seen fact and feeling as distinct categories. Obviously, there are exceptions built into this, but I'm just pointing out a large trend that has shaped a lot of Western thought. Facts are thought to be objective features of the world that we access with reason. Feelings are non-rational. They get in the way of our reasoning. This follows from Western philosophy's dualist tradition, which very broadly is the view that the mind and the body are distinct in some way. So facts associated with what the mind seeks out is distinct from feelings, which are associated with the body. Kant once wrote that inclinations such as love or sympathy are so far from having moral worth that it must be the "universal wish of every rational being to be altogether free of them. " Plato envisioned the soul as having three parts: appetite, spirit, and reason, and reason was to be the guiding force. So it makes sense why facts don't care about feelings became so iconic. This catchphrase exists within this historical context that gives it intuitive appeal. But more contemporary philosophers have challenged this strict divide between fact and feeling. For example, there are various cognitive views of emotion, which see emotions as involving thoughts, beliefs, judgments, things that we associate with the mind. Emotions are candidates for rationality. It is unreasonable to be angry with someone who is blameless, to envy someone who is wretched, or to be outraged about something that is unproblematic. Feminist epistemologists have also played a big role in showing how facts are affected by our experiences, which involve feelings. In general, I think it is rare for a philosopher today to conceive a fact and feeling as having zero interaction with each other. Moreover, not every culture accepted a dichotomy between reason and feelings. For example, ancient Confucians thought that every person had a xin, which translates directly to heart. But scholars have also translated it to heartmind or heart-mind with a dash, because if you read how Confucians use the term xin, it clearly referred to something in humans that combined feelings and cognitive activities. Okay, so facts do actually care about your feelings, but there's still a lot we have to work through. Like, what do each of these words actually mean? Oh, I actually have to answer that. I thought it was a rhetorical question. Okay. The philosophy of facts is a complicated field, but I'll give it a shot. Are the properties and relations which go to make up facts abstract, repeatable, universals, or bare specific, non-repeatable properties and relations tropes? If they are abstract universals, are these such that they are always exemplified as friends of Aristotelian universals claim, or not as friends of Platonic universals claim? And are they qualitative only (the property of being round), or also substantial a man)? Are there facts which are formally complex, for example, negative or conditional facts? What is the relation between facts on the one hand and concrete events, processes, and states on the other hand? Uh, let's keep it simpler than that. A lot of epistemologists, which are people who study knowledge, have assumed that there is one objective stable reality that we are exposed to. So everyone is exposed to the same set of facts, and we can all equally access those facts using

reason. Thus, if we allow feelings to poison the purity of reason, then we end up with people who deny facts about climate change, out of fear, or reject vaccine science out of confirmation bias. We certainly want to prevent the formation of bad beliefs where people ignore an overwhelming set of facts. But there is a difference between fact and evidence. Evidence is made up of facts. But which ones? How do we figure out which facts are relevant? There's an infinite number of facts I could consider at any given time. I'm recording a YouTube video. 2 plus 2 equals 4. Paris is the capital of France. Martin was robbed in the slushynoobz boxing match (comment who's your bias). If someone asked me about the French Revolution, how do I know that Paris is the capital of France is a relevant fact, but the slushynoobz boxing match isn't? This shows that first, to turn facts into good evidence, we can't just know facts in isolation, but also know how they relate to each other in a web of knowledge. Now this example with the French Revolution is pretty obvious, but it can be a lot trickier. When the government says, "take out the bike lanes, it'll reduce traffic," and people push back, there's disagreement here about how facts relate to each other. The government sees the fact "bike lanes share road space with cars" as somehow causing another fact. "There is bad traffic in Toronto. " Lobbyists see that same fact, "bike lanes share road space with cars," but don't see it as causing the fact of bad traffic. Instead, some other fact, like "incentives to drive over other forms of transportation," sits in that relation. In the late 19th to 20th century America, eugenicists had access to the same fact as everyone else, that racial minorities statistically had lower educational capacities than their white counterparts. But they related that fact to other facts about evolution and genetics. Sure, in isolation, these facts are true, but the racist bias of white Americans and the lack of experience of being systemically marginalized led to the relating of these facts incorrectly. When presented with this fact about lower educational capacities in racial minority groups, how come so many white Americans did not consider facts about the generational effects of slavery, of segregating racial minorities into the least funded neighborhoods, of government sanctioned punishments when they tried to practice their culture or religion? This leads us into the second point about how facts become evidence. What and how facts become salient or apparent to us? Remember those things that look like word searches, but they'd be titled "The first three words you see will define your future. " Well, just as how different words appear to different people and those things, depending on their life history, their desires, whether they start from reading left to right or right to left, different features of the world pop out to different people. Our experiences obviously play a role in this. Someone who is conscious about their body image might notice that one of their co-workers, Betsy, only ate salad for lunch for the past few days, and Sana had a Chipotle bowl, but how is she still so slim? Whereas others might not even remember what they had for lunch yesterday. In her paper "Making Strange What Had Appeared Familiar," Terri Elliott gives an example of how an able-bodied and physically disabled person see the same building entrance. "Person A approaches a building and enters it unproblematically. As she approaches, she sees something perfectly familiar, which if asked, she might call the entrance. Person X approaches the same building and sees a great stack of stairs and the glaring lack of a ramp for his wheelchair. " Due to Person A and Person X's different engagement with the world, they interact with facts about the world differently. In a society that is often blind to disabled needs, Person A doesn't think twice about the stairs. The fact that you need functioning legs to use stairs doesn't pop out to A. However, Person X's experience in his body makes the set of stairs evidentially salient. This gives him access to a fact that Person A doesn't have. The more perspectives we have of the world, the better we get at noticing facts and understanding their relevance to different scenarios. That's why you gotta start reading the news, son! Or is it sun? Because this channel is oliSUNvia. Well, sunnies, I've got the news platform for you. Ground News. Ground News is an app and website that gathers related articles from more than 50,000 sources across the world and political spectrum in one place, so you can compare how different outlets cover the same story. I found this comparison feature really good because it shows you what I've been talking about. People differ in how they interpret facts and what facts they even notice. For example, in this story about Trump's tariffs, there have been 363 new sources on this story, god damn. But you can access them all with this one website and app. Then, if you check under the bias distribution heading, you can see 30% of sources were left, 44% were center, and 26% were right. By looking at their bias comparison tool, you get a summary of the difference in the facts covered by each side. Now, if

you're like me, you might be skeptical about how these sources are categorized. I don't believe something can genuinely be centrist. But what calmed my skepticism was reading through their methodology page, which transparently describes their rating and distribution system. Under the center rating, they explicitly say "this rating does not necessarily represent balance or neutrality. A center rating does not imply that the position is best or most valid. " I now even have the Ground News browser extension, so when I click on any new source, even if I didn't search for it within Ground News, I get a summary of that bias distribution. Having Ground News compile all these sources in one place has been super helpful for critical thinking, so why don't you visit ground. news/olisunvia or scan my QR code to subscribe today. You can sign up now to get 40% off the same Vantage Plan that I use. That's ground. news/olisunvia or scan the QR code. On to analyzing our next term. Why does it matter whether facts care about feelings? Can't they just casually like each other or be plain old colleagues that do the [awkward head nod] when they pass each other? Well, depending on how much care facts has for feelings, that affects how we make judgments or decisions. When I'm going to sleep at night and I suddenly feel terror fill my body because I've got the feeling that zombies are going to raid my bedroom, do I listen to those feelings and buy a gun? Probably not the best choice to make. It might be better to consult the facts that zombies don't actually exist, and also the fact that I can't buy a gun because I'm Canadian. However, imagine you're a woman in the 1950s, your male boss has been touching your thighs under the table during meetings, he's made some passing remarks about your body, he follows you to your car every day after work even when you tell him you just want to be alone. You really hate these moments. They make you feel very uncomfortable, sometimes scared, but at this point in time there is no such thing as the concept of sexual harassment. As such, you don't know how to understand all these facts, the fact that he touches your thigh without consent, makes sexual comments about you. You have these facts, but you don't see how they're related to your discomfort. After all, when you told one of your co-workers about it, she said it sounds just like flirting. And what's so wrong with flirting? You also can't see how these facts share similar features until you have the concept of sexual harassment to group those facts together. Carmita Wood was a woman who was being sexually harassed at work but didn't have the concept to explain and understand her experience. "The stress of the furtive molestations and her efforts to keep the scientist at a distance while maintaining cordial relations with his wife, whom she liked, brought on a host of physical symptoms. Wood developed chronic back and neck pains, her right thumb tingled and grew numb. She requested a transfer to another department and when it didn't come through, she quit. Upon her return, she applied for unemployment insurance. When the claims investigator asked why she had left her job after eight years, Wood was at a loss to describe the hateful episodes. She was ashamed and embarrassed. Under prodding -- the blank of the form needed to be filled in -- she answered that her reasons had been personal. Her claim for unemployment benefits was denied. " This case about sexual harassment shows that, yes, facts are 100% important for acquiring knowledge, for making good judgments, etc. But facts are not sufficient. We also need concepts to help us understand how facts relate to each other. And as the case of sexual harassment shows, sometimes feelings are really effective at producing concepts. It was only through women taking their feelings of discomfort, anger, and fear seriously, of trusting that something was there, and then sharing those feelings with each other, that we ended up with this concept of sexual harassment. So facts and feelings certainly do not exist on opposite poles that never touch. They interact with each other. We need them both for knowledge. With that, we move on to our final term, your feelings. About: Ahem. Um, what about me? Olivia: Oh, right. Um, okay. Let's analyze "about. " [here we go again] So "about" means to be *about* things. So the facts, not caring, is *about* feelings. Yeah. Mmm, this is not working. Let me try a different approach. Okay. Starting from the 1500s. [ABORT MISSION] Someone asks you what a feeling is. You might be inclined to say a bodily state, or in general, something internal to me. Feeling angry means my cheeks heat up. Feeling like something is wrong makes my body tense up, but this seems like an incomplete explanation. Most feelings we have are directed at objects in the world. If I feel joy from eating a delicious meal, my joy is directed at the meal and not the serotonin inside me. Moreover, feelings aren't just immediate reactions to an object or event. They can last a while and shape our

attention. For instance, if I feel angry, it's not just this immediate reaction that goes away. I am now on the lookout for things that will further trigger the anger. It extends my attention in an angry manner. So again, feelings impact what facts we think are relevant in the world. Michael Brady explains it like this. Let's say you're going for a stroll and out of nowhere, a lion leaps out at you. [awkward pause... ] Rawr XD In theory, you could gain the belief that the lion is dangerous by rationally reflecting on the properties of the lion, reasoning to the fact that the lion's sharp teeth and claws explain its dangerousness, and then voila, your belief that the lion is dangerous is justified solely by these facts about the lion's properties. But in real life, what probably happens is this. A lion leaps out at you. RAWR (dangerous /srs) I felt weird doing that again. Immediately, fear takes over you. That fear leads to a belief that the lion is dangerous. Then, because feelings shape our attention for an extended time, the fear leads us to pay attention to the fact that the lion has sharp teeth and claws, which justify the belief that the lion is dangerous. So even though it is the facts about the lion that justify the belief that the lion is dangerous, the feeling of fear is what leads us to those facts. That's why when I'm watching a lion be playful on my phone, I'm not feeling fear, and so I'm not paying attention to its claws and its teeth that could tear me apart. Instead, I'm thinking about its cute toe beans~~ If dangerous, why fluffy? With this understanding of fact and feeling, we now see the oversimplification of saying something like, "Facts don't care about your feelings. " I recognize that Ben Shapiro couldn't give a super detailed explanation of his position on the relation between fact and feeling. As a pro-internet debater, the only thing you can do really is to say catchy slogans really fast so that no one thinks too hard about what you've said. But I still think it's worth taking this catchphrase as a representation of what people tend to believe about knowledge, where facts are privileged over feelings, as if they are enemies or in conflict with each other. It's not just right-wingers who hold this belief. I just recently saw a video from a leftist creator who used the same idea. Instead of basing your beliefs around evidence, what has happened instead is that truth has become competitive to where you have your conclusion and you must justify your actions in order to arrive at that conclusion, which often is highly destructive in nature. For example, consider the Ku Klux Klan. A hundred years ago, their beliefs were a lot more relevant than they are today, and that was because, to some degree, there was a bit of standing in the scientific community regarding white supremacy based off of the limitations and misunderstandings of biology and evolution. Eventually, however, due to more evidence arising and more research being done, those beliefs were disproven. So when you have a political movement that no longer has any factual standing to establish itself upon, what do you do? You turn to emotions. Hey, so it's me in the future and I just realized that there have been a bunch of videos and articles about this topic with a similar title too, so that's fun to see after I've already filmed the video. Hopefully, I still will say something interesting and different here. By the way, this is not a diss towards the creator. He overall did a great job of framing various political issues and I found his video interesting. I just think there's more to the story of how and why people sometimes hold beliefs contrary to evidence. Not everyone is a dumb, brainwashed Trump glazer, nor is everyone intentionally trying to be malicious. Based on human psychology and our particular experiences and how knowledge is formed, we can access evidence differently from one another. But, yes, sometimes people are just bigoted. In general, I see leftists using the "facts don't care about your feelings" catchphrase as a "gotcha" tactic. Like, you stupid right-wingers, you claim to only care about facts but have the least factually based beliefs. And of course, there is some truth to that. It's not like facts are not important in their own sense. It is 100% alarming to see, for example, people still denying the existence of residential schools in Canada when it is so well-documented and testified to. Sometimes it is fair to say, "Hey, I don't care if you feel no empathy about this issue. " That does not change, that it is true. You have to accept the facts that residential schools were real. Ultimately, facts are necessary for knowledge, but we can't pretend like they don't care about feelings. Hopefully this video provides a new perspective on how people come to hold various beliefs, including bad ones. There's a whole book on this topic if you're interested called "Bad Beliefs, Why They Happen to Good the same facts. We don't all interpret facts the same way. This gives us an imperative to listen more to people who experience marginalized ways of living. So the next time someone says, "Haha, facts don't care about your feelings," you can tell them, "Actually, facts and feelings influence each other quite a bit. Feelings can play a role in what facts you recognize, what facts you take

as evidence, and they can help us build concepts that organize facts. " Or you could tell them to f off. [*disintegrates*] If you found this video tolerable, I'd appreciate your support over at Patreon. I do everything myself besides editing. You can even see my messy research notes on my videos on Patreon to get an insight into how long this shit takes me when I have to balance it with grad school and teaching. I also am starting to give short video explanations of various texts and articles I read on Patreon because I have to read a lot, so why not spread that knowledge? Anyways, thank you so much for watching, let's keep talking, and I hope to see you soon. Bye!