My objection is to the idea that everything true and important can be captured in metrics and quantitatively modeled. Then there is the fact that even to the extent that things like macroeconomics can be modeled (which is never at a level of accuracy that would be accepted in any scientific discipline), it still often fails to capture the social/political dynamics of the moment such that the theory matches felt experience. I believe that economics has largely captured power in social science by essentially stealing scientific authority and falsely claiming it as their own. Then they dismiss other fields of social inquiry as soft and unworthy of equal status even though their own insights are often of lesser value than the supposedly soft social sciences.
I'm an acolyte in the church of bounded rationality and the fallibility of institutions that practice science.
I studied journalism as an undergraduate, and my beliefs here are like in journalism. Objectivity is impossible, like a Platonic ideal. But, it's an excellent thing to strive for. "Fuck it, it's impossible" is the wrong answer in my opinion.
Qualitative methods and pure theory scholarship have their place, but most useful qualitative research at least hints at some testable hypotheses. I feel that an underemphasis on generalizability is what happens when disciplines give up. And at worse, theory-based scholarship as it's applied in some social sciences is really no better than really obtusely worded political punditry.
Exact numbers are easy to measure but not the only way to measure something. Data-driven is the new statistics but 10x worse because it has more sources of obfuscation, and bean counters (including super “smart” and analytically minded) obsess narrowly over models. Add ML/AI and you got an order of magnitude again.
There’s an impedance mismatch where we have enormous amounts of useless data and a small amount of useful data. Best we can do is use and create more of the useful data instead of obsessing over P>.99 on something useless that will be misinterpreted anyway.
The problem, in my view, isn’t qualitative per se, but rather unfalsifiability. Ideology is when the solution is always more of the same no matter what the outcome is. Communism/socialism and neoliberalism all fall in this category. I believe this holds true if you go more academic into Keynesianism and say Chicago school - models that have become truisms to their followers.
These two statements are at opposition with one another.
I was a journalist for 20 years, and any entry-level reporter can put together a completely objective story. It happens thousands of times a day. Unless you somehow derive bias in stories like "A woman died when her car hit a brick wall on Main Street."
Saying objectivity is not possible is just an internet-age excuse for mental laziness.
Facts that are included in a story or left out at the journalist's discretion have the power to create very different impressions on people.
For example, in your story, if Main Street is known to house many brothels or abortion clinics, merely mentioning it in the story may have the effect of hardening public opinion towards the victim. If the story were to mention the make and model of the car, and there had been many crashes with that model recently, it might stir up suspicion about that car manufacturer. Almost any detail can be charged in this way.
All good journalists strive to be as objective as possible, part of which means being aware of these kinds of charges, and balancing them against delivering detailed information.
How is objectivity possible? Your writing and the reader’s interpretation of it are entirely dependent on individual sensory input and mental models, which are influenced by cultural differences in upbringing and other environmental sociological factors.
The writing inevitably leans towards “objectivity” in your worldview.
