I don’t ignore those that preface their statements with “as an X”, but I do carefully consider whether or not their view is potentially coloured by self-interest. The physicists who are aware of their own funding difficulty are just one input to science funding debates and decision making process. It might be reasonably expected that they would favour an outcome where their research was funded at the expense of someone else’s, in-part because it was “their research” and important to them. The mother who asserts that diapers are overpriced is not the sole source of truth/information in that assertion. She may be just an input to the larger debate of how much, we as a society, intervene in the economics of child-rearing. She’s way more affected than I am. Should that add or subtract weight from her view?
I’m a commuting cyclist and add my voice to the debate on road safety and cycling facilities through our local advocacy group. I’m conflicted. No question. I hate it, but try to understand, when others see our concerns (that motorists keep running us down) as trivial and as mostly our own fault; that it’s a result of our “lifestyle choices”.
Sidebar. There was a story round these parts where one group of people were upset that another group of people had shot all the moose, such that there were no more moose left for them to shoot. “As a moose non-hunter” my view that no-one should shoot the moose at all may well be met with “Why should we listen to you? You don’t even shoot moose”.
You know, I initially felt really bad about that one, when I re-read it immediately after I posted it, because of how much I used the word “we.”
I felt like I was imposing my views on others who had not chosen me to speak for them.
I’m glad to see that, rather than being offended by my presumption, people are chiming in that this is, indeed, a good summary of how they think about consent.
I’ll still try to speak more for myself in the future, but it makes me feel much better to know that I wasn’t quite as presumptuous as I thought I might have been.
