(While we're at it, have you considered whether you might actually be a man made of straw?)
(While we're at it, have you considered whether you might actually be a man made of straw?)
I'm assuming this is a genuine question, so I'll answer with my genuine understanding. Invalidating someone's lived experience is the process by which someone more or less says, "that didn't happen to you", or "your interpretation of events that happened to you is wrong." Before we start to find edge cases like "they clearly left the door unlocked and believed it to be locked," no that's not what invalidating lived experiences pertains to. Invalidating lived experience pertains to social knowledge and interpretations usually of harmful events. Or in other words, overwriting someone's framing of the harmful events that happened to them. Broad categories include, "no, that wasn't racism/sexism/bigotry that you experienced", or "no that really wasn't abusive." You might think of it as a certain kind of gaslighting.
Could there be a better name for it? Maybe? Signifiers are often detached from what they signify- it doesn't matter much to me at this point that this is the case. Let me be clear. I'm not here to discuss that this is or isn't a problem in discourse. Moving from, obtuse wording to, not-actually-a-problem is a kettle logic I don't wish to engage in.
It is a linguistic tactic that attempts to bypass debate through appeal to emotion. "You can't tell me I don't feel this way!" Correct, you feel that way, but your feelings don't magically turn assertions into fact. The objection of "invalidating lived experience" is the notion that one's feeling are facts when they are not. They are subjective impressions unsuitable as the sole grounds for action.
The mechanism behind invalidating lived experience is fundamentally a reality construction mechanism. It's goal is to construct a reality, namely by the person doing the invalidating. The reality being constructed is absent bigotry and abuse as a way of avoiding the task of confronting them directly. In short it says, "My reality is objectively true and yours is not" when the person doing the constructing hasn't the same personal encounters as the person being invalidated.
[0] https://www.wired.com/story/mind-games-the-tortured-lives-of...
> Skepticism is a rational and healthy habit.
Agreed. Veiled-skepticism is, however in the case of invalidating lived experience, a powerful gaslighting tool. Discerning between the two is an additional hurdle targets of bigotry and abuse see layered on top of them.
There's no bright line between the two. Someone claims some experiences, and someone else disputes the claims. Bigotry isn't necessarily a factor, or, there might be disagreement on whether it is. "Invalidating lived experience" seems like a thought-stopping cliche, rather than any sort of argument at all. It is a fancy way of saying "you're wrong, and I'm right!" or "you're not allowed to say that I'm wrong."
As an aside, the inability to draw a clear line between abuse and other topics isn't so much of a problem for me. It is a form of Sorites paradox that we deal with in other topics all the time.
Personally, I am liable to refrain from such discussions because they are universally fruitless, but not because of delicacy.
> I feel like I have something to learn from asking, is this something that has happened to you?
As a member of a group subject to bigotry, I see exaggerated stories deliberately weaponized, and legitimate critical thought silenced with thought-terminating cliches that include the one under discussion.
I also see folks boast "I listen to People of X!", but only paying attention to the most lurid stories, totally ignoring those who report the absence of bigotry. They're motivated by something other than the search for objective truth.
I encourage skepticism and independence of thought for all. Your curiosity should include the possibility that they're experiencing something you've never considered, but also the possibility that they're really mistaken, or exaggerating for any number of reasons.
> frontman1988 7 days ago | on: On Aging Alone
> 40 is the prime age for men. You can easily get a younger gf from
> Thailand/Vietnam/Philippines with minimum effort. And you never know
> you might find true love (if it exists) as well.
> reply
or > frontman1988 16 hours ago | on: Can growth
> continue?
> The solution to tackling declining population can be by generating
> Genetically modified babies. This new race of humans will be smarter
> and stronger than the current lot due to eugenics. CRISPR will make it
> possible and it's already happening in China. The west needs to look at
> it instead of ramping up immigration and importing instability from
> third world countries.
> reply
I mean, the person you're responding to hasn't taken the time to understand the base concept of "cultural appropriation", or relative disparity of experience: > MockObject 3 months ago | parent | context |
> prev | next [–] | on: The Casio employee
> behind the “Sleng Teng” riddim ...
> This speaks to a fatal flaw with the concept of cultural appropriation.
> Ok, so a "white" person can't "speak for Native Americans", but
> a Native American can? Can any, or just certain ones? Who wins if they
> disagree?
> reply
I'm not really sure why they would show more ability to empathize here with you than they do in other threads!What's funny here is that these people would be probated or in the case of frontman1988, banned, on SomethingAwful these days. How times have changed!
> MockObject 4 months ago | on: Being black in tech is exhausting
> I am a minority, and I am furious that my advancement is besmirched
> with the asterisk of the possibility of affirmative action. But I am
> powerless and unheard.Could the element of "personal experiences" be the cause? Limiting proof points to established facts rather than subjective experience helps tremendously. Someone claiming whatever has a much more powerful voice (and is less likely to be silenced as a vocal one-off) when citing research. Similar to how academic papers don't reference the author exclusively, but rather peer papers.
Everyone has a unique and relevant perspective - lived reality is reality! But with so much noise, its far easier to dismiss individual voices than reporting on the aggregated voices of others. This filters out confounding variables and roots the hypothesis in fact (e.g. Consider an individual reporting of a nearby road keeping them awake at night. It could be they have an uncomfortable mattress, a light on in the room, or any other factor. Only when other neighbors report the same issue is the proposed cause worth a serious look).
Obviously this is more difficult in lower incident / harder to measure areas - e.g. bias, harassment, etc. Don't have a good answer here other than the burden of hard proof is unfortunately on the accuser, which leads to so many of the troubles society is grappling with today. Things like police bodycams seem to help, but resolving all disputes based on 'lived experience' doesn't seem like the best outcome.
Invalidating lived experience is overwhelmingly used to describe a pattern of behavior which occurs in the realm of bias, harassment, and interpersonal conflict, not arriving at scientific or universal truths through debate.
This is much more about "Your Dad didn't hit you. That never happened," than "In my experience the Earth is flat." The suggested change in behavior also isn't "You're never wrong." It's merely the suggestion to get genuinely curious, and pausing to listen before framing someone's experience. Maybe the body cam shows otherwise, great. Getting curious tends to have a humanizing effect - the body cam evidence can wait 15 minutes.
It's essentially a new form of religious anti-intellectualism, but without identifying itself as such.
In the past, you might not have been allowed to say "no, God didn't appear to you in a vision" or "no, this event wasn't evidence of divine intervention". Today you're allowed to question someone's anecdote about religious experience, but you're not allowed to question their experience of victimization under a certain set of classes.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
I'm assuming you're a genuine person and not a weird 8-foot-tall android robot, so I'll bless you with the same provisional magnanimity. Here's my answer in all its glory:
I am very tired of this line, to be perfectly honest. If you think it's not a genuine question, just say so; if you don’t think that, then I don’t need to hear about what you don’t think. Insincere insinuative rhetorical tricks at the start of a comment make me feel that you're not being genuine.
In future, you can just check the question mark at the end of the line. Think of it as a ‘checksum for questions’, if you will, or a bitmask.
> overwriting someone's framing of the harmful events that happened to them
This is a very artful smooshing-together of "question someone's feelings" and "question the external events which [avowedly] caused them to feel that way". I have to say, I was nearly persuaded by the end of it.
I obviously agree, as anyone would, that questioning someone's feelings is absurd (outside extremely specific edge cases, as you acknowledge, like malingering). I obviously do not agree that questioning the events claimed to have caused them to feel those feelings is in any way unreasonable.
My general impression is that this is slangified verbiage used by people who want to be imprecise about the very straightforward concepts they are discussing, in order not to be pinned down on the dividing line between feelings and facts in these examples. As a wise man said, the great enemy of clear language is insincerity (not necessarily on your part, personally). I think we're unlikely even to have a productive discussion about this, much less to agree, but I figured I had to post some sort of response.
> Signifiers are often detached from what they signify
Signifiers are always detached from what they signify, or else they wouldn't be much use as a signifier.