> Sure. And facts are extremely hard things to find. With all the money we spend on science, we have a relatively small number of them. What individuals have is mainly opinions about facts.
I don't think talking about "opinions" is interesting. That word lumps so many things together that it doesn't mean anything useful. People have facts, logic, assumptions and priorities. The last two aren't objective. You can prove or disprove an assumption but it's commonly expensive to do it, and until somebody does, it remains something that reasonable people can disagree about.
But the real trouble is priorities. Should we imprison an innocent man or let ten guilty people go free? The answer to that question has objective consequences but they aren't uniformly distributed, so those more likely to be victims of criminals who go unpunished and those more likely to be innocent people falsely convicted will rationally prioritize different things without either of them being wrong in any objective sense. But that's politics. People have to come to terms with each other without attacking each other or we end up in a civil war.
> I strongly believe it is less understanding. As a member of various dominant groups, my understanding of things like race and gender was very coarse. That's because I didn't have to pay any attention to those things; they almost always worked in my favor. When that's not the case, people are forced to pay more attention.
But now you're talking about generalities when we're dealing with individuals. Using the color of someone's skin to make stereotypical assumptions about them is the thing we're supposed to be doing away with. You can't tell by looking at someone how much thought they've put into something.
And even if the stereotype is often correct, perspective is still a different axis than quantity. It is useful to know when and to what degree proposals will create a backlash and resentment that may do more harm than good, especially when there are less adversarial paths to the same result.
None of which addresses the original point in the article, which is that many of the statistics driving headlines (women are paid 77 cents on the dollar, one in six women are sexually assaulted) are misleading or false, and people have been unjustifiably attacked for pointing that out.
> I agree with that, but don't see its relevance to the discussion. Could you say more?
The context of the discussion is that people are attacking speakers for saying true things inconvenient to the attackers' causes, even to the point of trying (and sometimes succeeding) to destroy their careers and reputations. Your counterargument seems to be that people have no obligation to listen to the speaker; but the speakers' complaint is not that they're being ignored, it's that they're being unjustifiably attacked.