When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic.

From How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity.

Logic and empiricism goes a certain ways towards an agreed reality but ultimately you have to go beyond facts and evidence to the goals, motivations, biases, prejudices, assumptions, and live experiences of others.  You can ignore it as ignoble but you then materially limit you capacity to reach agreement.  You are imposing your own normative view (decisions based only on facts and evidence) on others actual preferred mode of decision making (heuristics, assumptions, probability estimations under uncertainty, etc.)  Both approaches are potentially flawed but being cognizant and respectful of others always ends up being the better approach in the aggregated long term.

The Mandarin Class shows a disposition to asymmetric empiricism (sharing only some facts) and towards centralized authoritarianism which always ends up being destructive.