It goes both ways (can fail in both ways) because discourse isn't theorem proving. There is no universal set.

No two people share the same experience, therefore discussion is not possible, because one cannot share exactly the viewpoint of the other. That's the extreme on one end.

On the other end, we can only take "rational facts" into account. In order to do this, we must discard completely all personal experience, which is first of all actually impossible between two human beings sharing a discussion, and second of all, will transform both participants into what amounts to deterministic computers who will arrive at precisely the same outcome given the same input.

Now clearly if we are arriving at a shared conclusion between two people discussing a shared input, either extreme is impossible.

Some nuance is required.

You don't have to "put them aside." You have to incorporate them into the reasoning. It's true that some people are petulant and try to end discussion with the "you can't know what it's like" meme, sometimes it's really just what it looks like: a plea to try and understand what it's like to be me, instead of the caricature of me I see being constructed.

Yeah, and that would necessarily be a bad thing if your only priority was pwning people with facts and logic. However, some people care more about things like being kind and getting along with others. Such people have to be willing to stop doing things that hurt others, even if they can't understand why those things are bad.

Eg. It's very hard to explain what gender dysphoria feels like. If a trans person isn't able to do this to your satisfaction, that doesn't mean that you can just go on misgendering them. It means you just have to take their word for it.

I'm not interested in "pwning" anyone. But if someone says "this guy needs to be fired/resign" (which actually, in the rms case I kinda agree with), then they need to be able to articulate things in a manner that's not just "you're not from [some group] so you don't get it". It's just lazy and disrespectful to other people.

there are things you don't know that you can find out by listening to people.

Maybe logic can be useful in the way you want it to be, but first you'll need to figure out how to serialize a person's entire life experience into some sort of sequence of symbols.

> Prioritizing personal experience and saying “you cant know what its like if youre not X” is a bad bad social meme.

But you don't know what it is like, and logic alone cannot help you know what it is like, because the full range of human experience is not expressible is any extant logical system.

hell, you can't even beat SoTA object detection if you don't have tons of actual experience in the form of labelled data.

And object detection is trivial compared to "being a human".

Is it really so hard to believe that you need actual experience in order to really understand how someone experiences the world? Or that your experience might make certain completely true things seem false to you, in a way that would make others experience your view of the world as akin to that of a child?

> So what? It doesn’t advance the discussion at all, its only purpose is to end discussion.

Sometimes that's true, but very often it is not true at all.

Very often, conversations about social/political topics end exactly when someone refuses empathize and instead imposes what they view as "logical" based on their "obvious experience of the world". E.g., "being gay would make me feel bad, and no healthy person wants to feel bad, so therefore gay people must be somehow sick". Completely logical from the priors, but immediately ends the conversation because the speaker assumes their experience of being a human in society is the only valid one.

> If a persons feelings trump logic...

Try replacing "feelings" with "experience". And then consider all those annoying arguments where someone says "but A is of course true and A clearly implies B so B must be true!" Even though you can go out and verify -- with reproducible experiment -- that the earth is in fact really, really not flat. i.e., that B is false.

And look: in this case, logic does not matter! If you can check with experience that B is false, then you don't need to look through the chain of logical deductions that resulted in a derivation that B is true. When people say "logic doesn't matter", what they usually mean is "your conclusion is prime facie false based on how I experience the world"; not "I'm not a blind child, you're a blind child!"

This doesn't mean that there is no room for logic. It just means... when talking about topics that involve how other people experience the world, try walking in other people's shoes.

And if they come to different conclusions that you do when you try to empathize with them, consider that perhaps they're not just dumb children. Perhaps you're not using enough synthetic training data to really understand where they are coming from. Or even that you can't do this task of imagining the other person's experience with purely synthetic training data.

Logic is a bad tool for solving social and political problems. Empathy is a much better tool. Especially empathy grounded in the realization that even empathy isn't quite enough to really understand how other people experience life. Logic can sometimes help you empathize, or explain to yourself why you need to empathize, but logic is just a tool for thinking. And it's not even always the best tool.

Furthermore, realizing this gap exists is not synonymous with claiming that "you can only talk about things you have personal experience". Where in my above post do I say that?

Imagination is powerful, not magical.