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NancyLebovitz comments on Rationality Quotes November 2012 - Less Wrong
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Ta-Nehisi Coates
Given that Coates is complaining about a pundit who disdains polls in favor of personal impressions (or worse, secondhand accounts thereof), it seems like a better conclusion would be "there is an objective world; and your feelings about how the world is, are not the world itself; you actually have to go and measure in a systematic fashion if you want to know what the world is like". I'm not sure why he concludes that the objective world is not real. Besides, if there's no objective world, then the notion of some attempts to represent that world being more or less flawed, seems incoherent...
P.S. You've got the hyphen in Coates' name placed wrong; it should be "Ta-Nehisi Coates".
I think he means that none of the stuff in a mind is going to be a perfect representation, but if that's what he meant, then there were probably better ways of saying it.
In any case, the location of the hyphen in his name is about as objective as you can get, and I've corrected it.
Yes, to be fair, that seems like a reasonable charitable interpretation. Coates' writing (that I've seen linked from here, anyway) is consistently insightful and clear-headed, so I was actually somewhat surprised to read a "there is no reality" line from him.
Perhaps the real rationality takeaway here is that sometimes the people who talk about the "objective world" and "looking at reality" and so forth are the ones who are engaging in woo and irrational nonsense, which baits their opponents into this strange arguing-against-objective-reality position. The lesson, then, is that we should look at how people actually derive their beliefs, not how objective they claim they're being.