People want to feel smart. Calling your opinions and feelings “rational,” as opposed to the “irrational” opinions and feelings of others, is a shortcut to boosting your self-esteem. And it’s certainly not as though this tendency is unique to reactionaries; I think we’re all prone to this sometimes.
Aisling McCrea’s article
Sometimes?
That article makes an interesting read, I don’t think it explains everything or that it was the purpose, but interesting nonetheless.
‘Objectivity’ may not exist in any real terms, but it can be a useful concept like ‘infinity’. ‘Infinity’ can be seen as the limiting case of very big numbers, but it does not have the properties of an ordinary number. However, we can happily talk of a big number ‘going towards infinity’.
In the original tweet ‘having a parent in prison’ is a bias, and ‘not having parent in prison’ is also a bias. If the comments of the journalist with a parent is prison was vetted by an editor without a parent in prison (as I suspect it was) then the two do not ‘cancel each other out’, but they might highlight any really polar differences. But they were two people, each with a particular gender, race, and cultural background: we might do better with a committee of random people. But can we ignore people with particularly six sigma wacko opinions? And why stop at people: should we include all animals, computers, space aliens, gods?
Mathematics and science stop short of every saying we ‘know’ anything. We always stop at ‘here are some useful assumptions that have served us well so far’. This is a good strategy: it works so well that it can give the illusion of infallibility; which is just why people use pseudo-logic and pseudo-science to cloak themselves in the same illusion.
If someone wants to persuade me by argument, they must show some actual effort to null out the biases. And I hope I try to do the same in return.
Of course not. Objectivity is a myth. It’s just a case of warring subjective perspectives. There’s no privileged neutral position from which to claim it is a crock of shit. You invalidate their experience of being oppressed, and they claim it and that’s an end to it. The impression that there is a neutral, objective position, is simply an artifact of (almost by default hierarchical and coercive) social power to privilege arbitrary positions as the neutral default.
FTFY.
And what about flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers and the Infowars pantheon?
Well there we hit a wall, don’t we? Either objectivity is a myth or the world is divided into non-overlapping magisteria of subjects one may render objective judgement on and those where one may not. If the former, then the flat-Earth is not subject to dispute from a default point of view because presuming that one ought to exist is oppressive. This is easily self-consistent, but is hardly palatable to those with a scientific turn of mind.
If the second, the question of where the line between the magisterium of the objective an the magisterium of the subjective is sort of hanging in the air and, especially, the meta-question of if that question itself can be objective.
I’m not playing quasi-Socratic word-games, either. It’s very much a question of social power whether a certain explanation of social phenomena is termed a ‘conspiracy theory’ or not. In the vein of one of my favorite jokes from Yes, Minister, it’s one of those irregular verbs, isn’t it[1]. I have legitimate lived experience, you have your point of view, and they have irrational, easily-disproven delusions.
[1] The deathless original: “I hold confidential press briefings/you leak/he’s been charged under Section 2 of the Official Secrets Act”
So what do I think? Two things: One, objectivity isn’t a myth, but it can only be sensibly practiced from within. While it is true that any journalist, writing about any subject may have biases, these are in effect random. I am for prison reform in America and I have never been in a prison, near a prison, or have had anyone in my extended family incarcerated ever since… uh… WWII, where it wasn’t incarceration so much as murder. And, furthermore, none of that was in any way related to American prisons because, of course, I’m not American. And yet, still, I have a strong in-favor opinion on it. Am I biased? Well… sure. But my biases on this topic are like white noise, sort of. You can’t predict them ahead of time viewing me as a generic individual. A statistician (and one of my degrees is in that, a bit) might mutter something about uncorrelated normally-distributed residuals at this point.
But if someone close to you is affected by some issue, your bias is much more likely to be in one direction rather than another, in the same way you’d find the victims of a recent mugging to be, in aggregate, in favor of tougher sentencing &c. Thus, it is a good thing to recognize this potential bias, but this is only useful is the author herself has thought about this and has, as part of the praxis of fighting one’s own bias, reported this fact. Imposing it from the outside does no good.
The second thing is that matters that one may investigate with fundamentally abstract tools (statistics, measurements, and other hard data) are capable of achieving remarkably high levels of objectivity especially if we employ social as well as technical tools: i.e. not only advanced statistical techniques but also procedures like triple-blinding and adversarial collaboration. To this end, I think the flat-Earth, the anti-vaccination position, and reptilians[1] running things are subject to pretty good objective analysis.
However, when it comes to the experience of individuals and groups… less so. To this end, I do not think that it is possible to tell the archetypical Trump voter that their experience of being oppressed is objectively wrong without it being an expression of social power to call some experiences valid, and others invalid. This is the sense in which the fundamental thesis of this BB post holds: objectivity is a myth.
[1] There are chemicals in the water and they are, to within a first-order approximation, turning the frickin’ frogs gay or at least interfering in amphibian reproduction is complex ways. It’s a pollution issue that’s actually been annoyingly discredited by association.
the Frankfurt School disparaged the Vienna Circle for engaging in “Logical Positivism”.
Ah the subtle point of including the null. I’m a “Logical Non-negativist” personally. 
There is most definitely an objective form reasoning: mathematics.
Now… the limits of application of mathematics to conventional social situations should be all you need to know about the objectivity of conventional social reasoning. 
A special edition of numberphile benefiting the “National Arbor Day Foundation”.
Your position is exactly the same as pretending that “Objectivity” has no value, whatsoever.
I do believe it may just be the case that I can objectively respond, “No, it’s not.”
Advising anyone that they shouldn’t study history, even “sarcastically,” is some anti-intellectual bullshit that needs to die in a fire, ASAP.
objectivity is the convention of using someone elses (subjective) opinion like it’s your own.
Absolutely no one is doing that.
People who pretend that a subjective viewpoint is objective is the only thing being criticised here.
Like the idiots who claim they’re speaking “for science” when they’re really just giving their personal opinion.
Those idiots.
Was talking to one of these dudes at a networking event, he said “I’m not into politics, I just think policy should be based on whatever logic and scientific evidence says is best.” I said “ok but to what end? Isn’t politics about defining what ‘best’ is, what the desired end-state is?” “No man, just follow logic and evidence!” The guy just couldn’t grok that other people might have a different idea than him of what a “best” world looks like.
The view of that guy can also lead to what I call “Accountant Heat Death” where people argue themselves into shutting down a project or a company because activity-death is a guaranteed neutral state with no investment lost and no wages paid.
If the only “logical” value allowed (by subjective people claiming objective standards) is “It’s illogical to lose money” then all action tends toward being labelled illogical.
Heh. Reminds me of Norm MacDonald’s professor of logic joke. A bit long, but I thought the payoff was worth it (partly because I just like the way he talks).
There’s a part of me that wanted it to be twice as long.
This is what is the important point. 
There are a few alas. Some even pretending that objectivity doesn’t exist at all, smdh.
Even the writeup title and original material do this alas, which leads to us all arguing about that instead of having a meaningful conversation about the important point you insightfully hone in on.
Ah yes. The tory approach to history.
source
The ancients tried your radical approach to governance, and they failed.
Assuming that the quote is not apocryphal, why should we pay much heed to how a Scottish aristocrat interprets the “wisdom of the ancients”?
Of course, historical methodologies have improved dramatically since then, and historians have searched for a wider array of evidence, but an attempt to graft objectivity onto history is doomed to be incomplete.
In the physical sciences, objectivity can get rid of noise.
In the soft sciences, objectivity can get rid of humanity.
