Why “Lived Experience” Is a Poor Basis for Knowledge
By: Craig Carroll
Tags: Society, Culture, Experience, Knowledge

Recently, the term “lived experience” has become popular as a way of knowing or understanding things. This idea actually conflates two things. First is the understanding that we all operate in the world together and therefore need common frames of reference to interact and communicate with each other. The second thing is that individual experiences often contradict the common frames of reference and should be given consideration when dealing with individuals. Both of these things are true, but they are not the same thing.

Violent crime is very uncommon in the developed world. This is an understanding that most of us share. If we did not, we would not gather in groups with strangers such as at sporting events, and we would not go places that we can’t ensure are safe such as parks or the beach. This matters very little to someone who has been a victim of a violent crime, and it is wildly inappropriate to tell them to shake off the trauma of their experience because it rarely happens. That victim will certainly feel like violent crime has a high rate of occurrence, and in their life it will have.

That does not mean that violent crime has a high rate of occurrence in the city, state, province, country, etc. in which that person lives, and to operate as if it does would be quite unnecessarily disruptive. Yes, to always operate as if the worst case will occur will help prevent it from happening or mitigate its impact, but that will have other costs like never getting an education, severely decreased opportunities for earning a living, being completely antisocial, and living in a remote bunker on top of a mountain.

Thus, when dealing with any scale beyond the individual, individual experience does not apply. This also works the same in reverse. Men are stronger than women on average, but try to fight Gina Carano or Ronda Rousey and the vast majority of men will find out how irrelevant that fact is at the individual level. This was understood by everyone before what seems like last month (when “lived experience” was called anecdotal evidence).

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There’s a related concept that sometimes gets used of “personal truth.” It’s a rejection of objective truth and reality. Subjectivity obviously has its place. Hot and cold are relative terms. Red dwarf stars are cold compared to the average star, but they’ll still burn me to ash long before I get close enough to touch one.

Here’s a phenomenon I like to use to illustrate why “lived experience” and “personal truth” are bad ideas on which to base one’s understanding of the world. We perceive the temperature of water very differently based on the circumstances. If you’re outside in sub-zero winter weather without proper clothing, you’re going to get very cold. If you then go inside and step into a bath that someone has drawn for you with 80°F (27°C) water, that water is going to feel painfully hot. In contrast, if you’re working hard outside in a desert in summer when it’s 120° (49°C)and then jump in the ocean that’s 80°F, it’s going to feel freezing. You might even start to shiver after a few minutes.

Knowing this, how dangerous is it to drink water that someone tells you is hot, but not too hot? How about if your hand is frostbitten and someone has gotten a bowl of water to submerge your hand in. Do you drink that water or plunge your hand in without testing? Of course not. We don’t even like to jump into a pool without dipping a toe in first, and we know that the pool is neither boiling nor frozen before we do. We don’t care about the “lived experience” of the person in the pool, and if you take the “personal truth” of the person that brewed your coffee as reality, be prepared for a burned mouth or a disappointing lukewarm brew. What about delicate things like baking bread or maintaining aquarium temperature? How do we manage that knowing that our bodies are very subjective when it comes to water temperature?

We make an objective measurement. This is science, and it’s the best way to understand the world. Humans are subjective water heat detectors. A thermometer isn’t. Mercury expands the same amount under the same temperature of water every time. This is how we get rid of our own subjectivity to better understand things.

Similarly to the scalding (or tepid) coffee, if you base your life on the “lived experience” of a person who was mugged last week, you’re going to have a much worse life watching thousands of other people happily carrying on as if that possibility were as remote as it objectively is instead of the imminent threat you’ve been told it is.

Lastly, why is it called “lived experience” and not just experience? Is there some way to experience something other than living it? Did I not get the telepathy memo?