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Comment by autodev1 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder... what is the difference between an "experience" vs a "lived experience"?

If I have an experience-- such as walking through the park, this afternoon and picking a blackberry... What is a "lived experience" version of that same experience?

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It's the difference between growing up blind and growing up with a sister who is blind. Only one of those is 'lived' experience with blindness.

“lived experience” was generally first used to differentiate between a person saying “I have experience with x issue” who could be saying “I’ve studied it; I’ve worked with the population” but “lived experience” makes it specific to being an individual’s own life.

It's still used that way. I'm always confused why people criticize this one in particular. The distinction makes perfect sense. There's an enormous amount of stuff that I've read a bunch about or watched a lot of media about or talked about with people, but is nonetheless outside my lived experience.

The idea of having direct first-hand contact with a thing is part of the understanding of the word "experience." Second hand contact or learning is generally some other noun or verb, depending on what we're talking about.

The word "experience" encompasses many kinds of contact, which is why it is often modified in various ways. It is not redundant to say "first-hand experience" or "direct experience". These are commonly used and broadly understood. There is no reason "lived experience" should be any different, and indeed I think it is more of an anti-woke shibboleth to make fun of this than it is a woke shibboleth to use it. Normal people with no skin on either side of that game understand it perfectly well.

My family members have experience with deafness. They've had direct first-hand contact with someone who is deaf in one ear, and have learned how to interact with that person successfully. They are familiar with the challenges of being deaf (in one ear, least), both from having interacted with the person, and because the person in question has explained the challenges they have faced.

I have lived experience with deafness. I've been deaf in one ear for decades now. However well I explain myself to my family members, there is a degree to which their experience will never be the same as mine, despite their first-hand contact with me.

We can either reserve the word "experience" for me, and try to police it so that nobody can say they have experience without being prepared to demonstrate the first-hand nature of their experience, or we can understand that people will use the word to mean "prolonged exposure" or similar, and add a qualifier when important to people like me: e.g. I have lived experience as a deaf person.

Because claiming experience with something when you’ve only studied it is a lie.

No it isn't, it's just a different form of experience. People seem to want the word "experience" to have some narrow single-purpose definition that it just doesn't have in practice. Do you go around telling people saying "direct experience" or "first hand experience" that actually they're being redundant because that's the only kind of experience there is?

Because it's now also used to deflect and ignore the research, like the experience of one person is more important than anything else.

Then that deflection is the thing to criticize.

> I wonder... what is the difference between an "experience" vs a "lived experience"?

It's a shibboleth that indicates adherence to a certain world view. The speaker is communicating that they are a Good Person and thus you should give their experiences greater weight.

As our societies functional literacy has declined we have lost words that gave us nuanced shades of meaning.

"Experience with" meaning, "Have dealt with this personally, first hand" gradually became, "has been near or studied and feels comfortable claiming authority on that basis." So the new compound word "Lived experience" was created to allow us to still use the first definition reliably.

Many times people who have "experience with" a topic have really "studied" it.

> As our societies functional literacy has declined [Citation badly needed]

Words change. That doesn't mean everyone is getting stupider. In fact the more literate people are, the faster words are likely to change, since the more situations they'll be put to use in.

> Citation provided https://www.apmresearchlab.org/10x-adult-literacy#:~:text=by....

Functional literacy means more than simply knowing specific vocabulary words. It includes the shared knowledge to use and understand idioms and cultural references.

Needing to coin a new expression to replace a word we already have a perfectly good word for seems to be a symptom of poor literacy. I suppose the chronic dishonesty and doublespeak involved in corporate jargon could be the source of this phenomenon instead.

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