OBJECTIVITY — Real Life

From the perspective of scientific visualization, the idea that machines allow us to see true has long been outmoded. In everyday discourse, however, there is a continuing tendency to characterize the objective as that which speaks for itself without the interference of human perception, interpretation, judgment, and so on.

The word objective is sometimes taken to be synonymous with quantitative, but it isn’t. Instead it means seeing beyond our personal biases and prejudices and toward the truth of a problem.43 Pure objectivity is desirable but unattainable in this world. When we make a forecast, we have a choice from among many different methods. Some of these might

True objectivity can never be achieved—even the scientific objectivity of Holmes isn’t ever complete—but we need to understand just how far we stray in order to approximate a holistic view of any given situation.

There could no longer be a purely “objective” view of the world that took into account the whole picture. Science was always particular to a specific observer and had to acknowledge our subjective outlook as humans. We could not speak of reality without speaking of ourselves.

The goal of objectivity is not to give equal time between truth and falsehood—it is to facilitate the truth.

OBJECTIVISM. This is what market researchers, pollsters, and social scientists do. They observe behavior, design surveys, and collect data on people. This is a great way to understand the trends among populations of people, but it’s a terrible way to see an individual person. If you adopt this detached, dispassionate, and objective stance, it’s har