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Sure, “facts don’t care about your feelings,” but nor do they matter without them. Today’s facts wouldn’t exist without the initial sparks of feeling — a desperate need or kindled curiosity to solve a human problem with abstraction and logic; and we evolve our facts similarly.

We don’t contest pedantic facts like “ice is cold.” Feelings only care about facts that instrumentally alter our worldview and those are the ones we fight over. That struggle is good as it leads to updated — and sometimes new — facts to build on while others are scrapped.

That’s not to say facts are merely subjective, of course. But facts are derived, used, and evolve in the furnace of conflicting feelings more than by dispassionate, objective calculation. We don’t serve facts; facts serve us (but we ignore them at our peril).

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