Objective
Adj. : expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations
Subjective
Adj. : modified or affected by personal views, experience, or background
Definitions taken from Merriam-Webster dictionary.
Using these definitions, we can determine that things like personal experience are not objective, and therefore unreliable sources of truth. Testimonials are not accepted as objective evidence, ever. So this raises the question: Why do we accept witness testimony in a court of law!? Why is it that if two or three people - who can obviously conspire against a defendant - say that a thing happened, we just believe them? Why is witness testimony even mentioned in a courtroom? Sure, they could be under oath, but that doesn't stop people from lying or just being flat out wrong about how something happened.
If the world were run by scientists, this wouldn't be acceptable. Why do we accept bad sources for something so momentous as prison or even death? The scientific community accepts no less than rigorously tested, repeatable experiments, which lead to solid, indisputable facts. And they require this for even the most mundane of things, like the mating rituals of houseflies or the speed at which spiders blink. So why does the legal community accept rubbish testimony when lives are literally on the line?
On a different note, why are subjective things held in such high regard by society? Why do YouTube testimonials, reaction videos, movie critiques, etc. get the attention they do? Why do people care what others think about things? Surely anyone who thinks about it for any length of time would know that movie reviews don't determine whether you will enjoy a movie, and testimonials from 'saved' Christian teens won't make Muslims stop believing in Allah. So why do we place any value on subjectivity beyond matters in which facts are unimportant, such as what color you like?
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This is called circumstantial evidence and is oftentimes the only piece of evidence available. While it is sometimes proven to be faulty, an enormous amount of cases are correct. The reason for this is because the circumstantial evidence must be profound enough to convince 12 people on a jury BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT. And this is why it has been mostly successful. Prosecutors have developed a fairly accurate weather gauge of testimonial evidence and will oftentimes postpone an arrest until more definitive evidence can be found.
As far as your other note: people often seek validation of their own thoughts by the opinions of like-minded individuals. Its a way of reinforcing ones delusion.
"On a different note, why are subjective things held in such high regard by society? Why do YouTube testimonials, reaction videos, movie critiques, etc. get the attention they do? Why do people care what others think about things?"
We're emotional beings and can often be far more affected by an emotional appeal that a rational one. For instance: More and more research is coming out showing meditation's effectiveness and this research has lead me to want to learn more about it. Sam Harris wrote a very reasonable book on meditation from a secular perspective and I found it dry and uninspiring. Reading other books on meditation that appealed to my emotions, as well as watching YouTube videos of people who have experimented with meditation, were the things that actually moved me to implement a meditation routine for myself.
Why was reading the research on meditation's effectiveness not enough for me? I'm not sure. It seems evident that pure reason is rarely enough to sway a human, though perhaps you're an exception.
Yep, we are truly emotional beings. The emotional brain is faster and much more powerful than the rational brain. It takes a great amount of training to suppress the initial emotion and instead react rationally, especially in surprise emergency situations. There is a reason a majority of people will run whichever direction they were already going if they found themselves in a situation where a fast moving car was about to collide with them or, worse then running in same direction, freeze. Even if almost all the people that end up in that situation would say, oh I would never freeze or just run blindly forward in such a situation.
There is a reason a vast majority of all sales tactics, (advertising best example here,) all revolve around the emotional response instead of the rational one. When is the last time you saw a tv ad for a car, (or anything really,) that just had a black text on white screen listing all the engineering advantages a car has over its competitors, with no sound. Such an ad would very cheap to make, and you could fit all the points you want to make in 5 seconds, cutting down on air time cost significantly.
Even someone like me who really works to try to be as rational as possible, I know I am ruled and my decision making is heavily influenced by my emotions nearly all the time. Lots of folks have called me very rational as well. More then a few can get quite annoyed by it too ;)
@Logic
Interesting you bring up the flee/freeze response. I find it intruiging that it's usually termed the flight/fight response: freeze is left out of the equation, even though it's far more common than fight. I've often wondered why. Is it because we like to think of ourselves as "doers"? (Wo)men of action? I've puzzled over it for years- the missing freeze.
"So this raises the question: Why do we accept witness testimony in a court of law!?"
Attitudes are starting to change in regards to the veracity of eyewitness testimony. Professor Richard Dawkins has discussed 'false memories based on an experience during a debate, where both he and 1 other in a debate retained an identical but false memory of an occurrence during the debate. As he has since pointed out, what would be the likelihood of a jury doubting the testimony of two fairly prominent individuals, one of them a Professor at Oxford in good standing? Yet the video of the debate showed clearly they had both retained separate identical but false memories of the event. How many people have gone to their deaths or spent their lives in prison based on false memories?
There's a YouTube video somewhere of him discussing it. So when theists offer anecdotal claims from unknown sources in a thread for objective evidence it's odd they later insisted they'd supplied objective evidence and accused me of ignoring it.
Theists don't seem to know what objective means. Also when JoC kept asking what evidence I'd accept that a deity was real, I responded every time with the same answer. Demonstrate objective evidence commensurate to the claim.
Short of creating pointless hypothetical examples, which was clearly what he wanted, I'm not sure what more any reasonable person could want. Yet he and other theists have implied bias when I stated it was not for me to give details of what evidence their claim should offer.
There was a 60 minutes episode 4 years or so ago, that talked about witness testimony and basically how terribly inaccurate it is for use in a court of law.
Probably one of the more profound episodes (to me anyways) that I have seen. They had a bit on forgiveness too in the same episode.
In short, the human brain is terrible at having accurate highly detailed memory, especially in cases of short emergency encounters. And the memories are easily influenced with false data as time goes on. This is true really, no matter how hard we try to remember all the details correctly.