The problem is not considering them arbitrary or not. We are sure to derive expressions from reality in some way, I'm sure that many languages have different versions of saying that something is so boring it puts someone "to sleep", no matter if speech is not hypnotic, the human experience will relate the boredom with sleep.

The problem is when from that we derive, with little justification and with the by now widely recognized horrible standards of social science, that in those rationalizations lie very important hidden truths about our society and psychology.

Many things boil down to an implicit association test of some sort, and that's now considered basically junk science.

There's a pipeline in which basically anything that can be considered a social issue in some way can get picked up by someone in the social sciences whose biases it confirms and given a justification, and since it has a political backing and is powered by preconceived bias and academia it goes through and actually has a negative effect on the world.

The stupid Stanford prison experiment. Facilitated communication. Power posing. Trigger warnings. Learning styles. Priming. All bullshit. All popular. All part of "the science".

And people wonder why there's a problem of institutional trust.