Why “Being Objective” Is Not What You Think It Is

People say “let’s be objective” as if it were a simple switch you can flip.

In reality, being objective is less a heroic mental move and more a practical agreement about how we look at a system: what we measure, what we ignore, and how honest we are about our own filters.

Physics has spent centuries trying to be objective.
It still carries a few scars from that attempt.

Measurement before opinion

In physics, you don’t start with:

“I feel like this object is fast.”

You start with:

what exactly you want to measure,
how you will measure it,
what tools you will use,
how much error those tools introduce.

Only then do you talk about “fast” or “slow”.

In everyday life, we often reverse this:

we jump to “good”, “bad”, “lazy”, “smart”,
and only later ask what we were actually observing.

Being objective is less “turning off feelings” and more “agreeing on measurements”.

Your filters are part of the experiment

Every instrument in physics has a known bias or limitation:

some telescopes distort colours,
some sensors are less accurate at certain ranges,
some setups are more sensitive to noise.

You compensate for that by:

calibrating,
writing down error margins,
using multiple instruments.

Humans also have filters:

past experiences,
culture,
mood,
personal hopes and fears.

Pretending those filters don’t exist does not make you objective.
It just makes your bias invisible.

The everyday myth of “pure rationality”

We like to imagine a version of ourselves that:

sees everything clearly,
is never affected by emotion,
always chooses the most logical option.

From a physics viewpoint, this is like imagining a measurement done in a perfect vacuum with no friction, no noise and no limits on accuracy.

Interesting for thought experiments.
Less useful for describing real experiments in real labs.

In normal life, “pure rationality” is a nice story.
What you actually have is better described as “reasoning with known imperfections”.

Felix’s version of “being objective”

Next time you want to “be objective”, try this instead:

Clarify what you are measuring.
- behaviour?
- outcome?
- effort?
- system conditions?
Name your filters.
- “Given my history with this topic, I am inclined to see X.”
- “Today I am tired / stressed, this might colour how I see it.”
Invite another view as a second instrument.
- not to replace yours, but to check if you are reading the same thing.

Objectivity is not the absence of perspective.
It is the practice of noticing that you have one,
and still trying to look at the system as cleanly as you can.

Physics does this all the time.
Humans can borrow that habit without losing our humanity.