Your Feelings Care About Facts Even If They Don't Care Back

Today it was brought to my attention that a doofus Canadian “rapper”, who thrives off edgy controversy, featured Ben Shapiro on a song. The song is called “Facts'' and instantly I was aware of why Ben Shapiro was on this song. This king of interpreting evidence in a subjective way is also known for saying, “facts don’t care about feelings”.

Despite getting a chuckle out of Ben trying to make a WAP bar as if he didn’t brag to the internet that his wife’s coochie stays dry, it was as corny as I expected it to be. Bunch of nonsense like how that Canadian “rapper” is now apparently the #1 independent artist. Most people couldn’t name one of the dude’s songs.

I digress, I wanted to talk about facts.

Facts have a democratic component

Many people believe that “numbers don’t lie”. I’m a marketer, I know how to make numbers combinations of truthful numbers tell lies. I think a lot of office employees are pretty good at manipulating data to hit quarterly objectives. In a less sinister viewpoint, sometimes the numbers are honest, but are simply misinterpreted by the human agents who translate numbers into … fact.

Google, citing Oxford Dictionary, says a fact is defined as:

A thing that is known or proved to be true

To be extra clear I’m not about to come off too off base, here is the definition of “known”. 

recognized, familiar, or within the scope of knowledge

There is a degree of people agreeing that facts are facts that must take place before a fact becomes a fact. My theory is that in this process of filtering information into knowledge, we use lots of feelings to shape facts. Or at least when we go beyond the basic bobo tier of facts there is a lot of emotion and passion that skews what a fact actually means. 

No one’s arguing that Earth’s gravity has a force of -9.8 M/S. That is super measurable. Whether Eminem outsold a lot of rappers is also not up for debate. Let’s expand on the idea of a fact. Is it actually a “fact” that Eminem is the GOAT? There are large communities where the canon of law is that Eminem is the “greatest rapper ever”. To the point where if you don’t like Eminem, some outsiders are confused. A huge thing they point to is record sales. If he sells that many, he has to be the best. This is the agreed upon fact, in their minds. 

They come to this conclusion based on the information that is available to them. People create logic schemes to rationalize facts into something actionable. Then form emotional attachments to the facts they know. It may be clinging to a fact over an aversion to being wrong or it could be that due to some love of Eminem, this fact must be true. Either way, the word “fact” becomes debateable, and we start to care a lot about feelings when we really get into it.

Ben Shapiro cherry picks his facts

Ben does this thing where he bullies young people for money. He relies heavily on semantic arguments (in my opinion the weakest form of argument) and then spits a bunch of facts. Ben is on camera, constantly trying to “own” people. His goal is to win the debate in a spectacular way so that two things happen in the comments. 

1. His fans praise him and call him a debate master.

2. Anyone who knows anything starts calling bullshit.

There is no doubt in my mind that Ben Shapiro knows his history. He can quote all kinds of numbers and stats. More importantly, he knows how to get you to agree to a bunch of binary questions that, when put in a particular order, appear to make you sound like a hypocrite. To a lot of people, especially those who leverage semantics as an argument tool, this is a clear victory. 

The thing is, hypocrisy and conflicted emotions are okay. Everyone’s a hypocrite to some capacity and we all behave in conflicted ways when our emotions get involved. The way we interpret facts, and put those facts together into a narrative, is largely based on emotion. 

It’s easy to quote something that happened as evidence. Where the feelings part comes into play, is what somethings you decide to quote. Another way to frame this idea, your feelings determine what facts you choose to highlight. To discount the correlation between feeling and fact is akin to attributing humanity to a robotic form without the messiness and beauty of life.

At a technical level facts don’t care about your feelings

The real truth is, Ben Shapiro is right. Facts really are just data points in history. You could even say it’s a fact that if I don’t like something, it still is a real thing that happened. My emotions don’t negate the fact’s existence.

What are facts even good for then? A bunch of facts on a data sheet all by themselves are useless. Their purpose is to be interpreted by people, leveraging a mix of objective and subjective realities, to drive ideas forward. 

Facts are very useful. They are objective measurement points. When you create SMART goals, whether or not you hit an objective is factually measurable. The outcome is the outcome. Your feelings don’t matter. 

That’s still kind of useless by itself. What you are supposed to do next is apply an analysis on the facts and extract new information. Why didn’t you win? What made you excel this quarter? Or, how do we actually deal with Israel and Palestine?

Facts are often used as evidence for arguments. Sometimes the same fact can be used to promote the “pro” and “con” of the same idea. Look at the ridiculous amateur hour that was the stats breakdown of homicide rates during the BLM protests.

Anyway, everytime I see someone going off on how facts don’t care about your feelings my brain goes off on this rant. Stats are complex, so much so that people get degrees in statistical analysis. That’s a whole department at a company. It’s just weird to me how much people belittle the role feelings play in facts.

Live Long and Prosper Everyone