I don’t really have an issue with the proposition that there is value in considering different groups experiences, what I do have an issue with is why it seems bound to devolve into a myopic consideration of a very small number of people’s experiences.
I would definitely find it interesting to survey people-in-general too. However, that seems quite difficult. First of all, the site I’m using to survey people mainly has people from USA and Britain. Secondly, most people don’t speak any languages that I speak, so I cannot design the questions for them myself, nor can I interpret their answer myself. It would also be a much bigger project as I would need to put even more effort into understanding their local cultures in order to ask relevant questions.
I had never heard of Standpoint epistemology prior to this post but have encountered plenty of thinking that seems similar to what it espouses. One thing I can not figure out at all how this functionally differs to surveying a specific demographic on an issue. How, exactly, is whatever this is more useful? In fact to me it seems likely to be functionally worse in that for a survey the sample size is small and there is absolutely no control group, as someone else pointed out, we don’t get any sense of what any other group responds with given the same questions.
A control group is mainly relevant if one is interested in differences, e.g. if one wants to know how Caucasian-American problems differ from African-American problems. That may very well be a topic of interest, but I think African-American problems are also interesting in and of themselves.
The necessary sample size to understand something depends heavily on the amount of variance in that thing and the precision to which you want to map out the variance. For instance, if you want to estimate the mean value μ for a variable with standard deviation σ, then typically the accuracy (standard error) of the estimate ^μ will be proportional to σ√N. If σ is low—that is, if there is broad agreement, where there is a lesson that matches with all of the different narratives—then the needed sample size to get a small standard error is also low.
This seemed to happen to a great degree in this survey: while the exact content of the different participants’ responses differed a lot from participant to participant, the updates to my beliefs that seemed to be suggested by their experiences didn’t differ hugely. So I feel relatively safe making those updates. (That said, ideally I should still cover the various biases I mentioned in the end of my post.)
As for “surveying a specific demographic on an issue”, do you mean something like opinion polls? Opinion polls tend to use questions that are more rigid/less open-ended, have lower information content, and focus on more “processed” parts of things (e.g. attitudes to specific policies, which presumably depend on all sorts of odd factors).
I would definitely find it interesting to survey people-in-general too. However, that seems quite difficult. First of all, the site I’m using to survey people mainly has people from USA and Britain. Secondly, most people don’t speak any languages that I speak, so I cannot design the questions for them myself, nor can I interpret their answer myself. It would also be a much bigger project as I would need to put even more effort into understanding their local cultures in order to ask relevant questions.
A control group is mainly relevant if one is interested in differences, e.g. if one wants to know how Caucasian-American problems differ from African-American problems. That may very well be a topic of interest, but I think African-American problems are also interesting in and of themselves.
The necessary sample size to understand something depends heavily on the amount of variance in that thing and the precision to which you want to map out the variance. For instance, if you want to estimate the mean value μ for a variable with standard deviation σ, then typically the accuracy (standard error) of the estimate ^μ will be proportional to σ√N. If σ is low—that is, if there is broad agreement, where there is a lesson that matches with all of the different narratives—then the needed sample size to get a small standard error is also low.
This seemed to happen to a great degree in this survey: while the exact content of the different participants’ responses differed a lot from participant to participant, the updates to my beliefs that seemed to be suggested by their experiences didn’t differ hugely. So I feel relatively safe making those updates. (That said, ideally I should still cover the various biases I mentioned in the end of my post.)
As for “surveying a specific demographic on an issue”, do you mean something like opinion polls? Opinion polls tend to use questions that are more rigid/less open-ended, have lower information content, and focus on more “processed” parts of things (e.g. attitudes to specific policies, which presumably depend on all sorts of odd factors).