A scientist studying the accuracy of stereotypes
quillette.com
quillette.com
But the official, carefully constructed non-offensive party line reasoning behind it in the US seems to be something like "all people of all types ever are the same", which is just not true. Any one deviating from the party line is automatically labelled bigot, and anyone defending these people is lumped into the same bucket.
Its NOT wrong to make generalizations about people. Our brains are pattern finding machines - we generalize all the time. It IS wrong to use them as justification to treat certain people differently - because a statistic computed on a population of millions doesn't really tell you anything about a specific person. So it makes sense to discard the generalization prior - i.e be unbiased and not view someone through stereotypes.
Its a hard problem - tolerating honesty but not bigotry, someones right to be offended vs. the offenders right to speak their mind etc etc. But right now US culture is very biased towards not being offensive, at the cost of truth - at the least, this kind of attitude does not belong in research. Research needs to be about truth.
Jonathan Haidt (who is himself left-wing) wrote an interesting paper on this: http://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/09/14/bbs-paper-on-lack-of-...
No one one wants to specifically categorize certain problems as being endemic to one racial group because it sounds racist.
But I feel like that would make tackling the problem a lot easier, therefore benefiting that group.
You can't tackle a problem you aren't even willing to talk straight about. The current system is something like attempting to make an ostrich walk while its head is forced in the sand.
Neither group is wrong for feeling the way they do, but the hard truth is accepting these positions is the only starting point to undoing hundreds of years of assholery.
No one should be held accountable for their ancestors actions. I certainly don't look at anyone Who is Japanese and think "Pearl Harbour", it's just not sensible.
For instance, blacks, hispanics, and poor whites are largely over-represented in the prison population. The reasons for this are many, but are largely endemic to the system, rather than being endemic to these groups. Inequality of education and opportunity is, in my opinion, the primary factor; followed closely by the War on Drugs. But other factors include inequality in how law enforcement treats suspects in these groups and inequality in legal defense.
Solutions to some of this are fairly straightforward. Educational opportunities should be improved for the underserved. Real legal defense should be provided for those who cannot afford it.* Law enforcement needs to be overhauled and demilitarized.
The problem is there is no political will among people who matter to make these changes.
I think maybe you are talking about cultural issues of particular groups that contribute to problems. There is the concept of "acting white" which does hold down certain ethnic groups in some areas, particularly education. I do think those problems should be addressed, but I also think they are addressed, just not at city, state, or national level. I see these problems addressed largely in support groups within and without communities. My college, and many universities have programs tailored to provide help for underserved groups and addressing these kind of issues falls under their aegis. (A matter of pride, the program developed at my college served as the template for all such programs in colleges and universities across California.)
But even so, I think addressing the larger issues will not only solve many of the issues that are specific to particular groups, it will also provide the moral grounds to avoid accusations of racism when addressing those issues directly.
*In my county, the public defenders are private. They are paid per case and are therefore incentivized to take on as many cases as possible. The quickest way to deal with a case is to encourage their client to take a plea deal regardless of the merits of their defense. In other counties, the public defenders are holding public offices and are incentivized, therefore, to win cases to further their careers. However, often these defenders are given case loads so large they can literally only spend seconds or minutes on any individual case.
I think they play a bigger role in perpetuating these problems than you may think. Or at least, they offer a good way for us to attack these problems.
It's called statistics and Bayes rule.
This is another thing that makes stereotypes tricky - it takes a little bit of statistical insight to see how they can be both right in some sense but completely wrong in the other, but statistics is very unintuitive, and math doesn't grab headlines. So that kind of argument is difficult to use with non-nerds, but ultimately i think its the only accurate one.
That brings up another good point in that its really a perfect opportunity for media outlets that like to turn controversy into clicks. Its very controversial and very broadly applicable.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/12/17/statistical-literacy-am...
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/unbearable%20accuracy%20o...
There is a difference between looking for patterns in people and stereotypes. For example, walking down a dark lane at night in Kings Cross (Australia) is dangerous with any person you meet. Seeing a black person in Pitt St is unlikely to be dangerous. A person wearing tracksuit pants and a backward cap walking in an agitated manner may represent a threat. A woman in a dress might or might not be a CEO. Now, how does a stereotype of skin colour, gender, sexuality, etc help anyone?
I agree that the US is particularly biased and that truth is the victim. I went to code.org with my young son who asked "are boys not welcome?" The link on the title page said "why girls should be in IT". Political Correctness - another word for prejudice. The idiot who approved it didn't give a crap about the message to young boys, they're just a casualty of war.
The problem is the axiom of "all people of all types ever are the same", as you pointed out. It's false. Our inherent advantages and disadvantages are as varied multi-dimensional as human individuality itself. A proper axiom from which to base a philosophy upon would be that every individual is inherently different, with advantages and disadvantages determined by nature. Given this truism, it can only be asked of a human society that all these different people be provided an equal playing field. This playing field does not guarantee equal outcome and does not provide preference - It does not aid the inherently disadvantaged, nor does it cripple the inherently advantaged.
The trick, of course, is in implementing a "level playing field" given some of the generational feedback loops which exist. That the wealthy tend to stay wealthy and the poor tend to stay poor, generation after generation, shows that there is some "unlevel" part of the American playing field. What we should expect in an ideal "level playing field" would be that children born in any socioeconomic situation would have an equal likelihood of ending up in any other socioeconomic situation as their outcome. Perhaps slightly bias this towards moving "up" the economic ladder to keep pace with the ideal of incentive and capitalism, but the point remains.
Many of the liberal bias coming out of the soft sciences would be sharply curtailed if we started a discussion about the fundamental axioms. A fair society is one that acknowledges the inherent differences in humanity and still provides equal rights for all.
With this said, I really don't think the US has done a bad job at creating something close.
One of the more surprising findings is that ethnic and gender stereotypes are a lot more accurate than social psychology papers (see table 10.4). I haven't double checked the meta-paper that derived the first column, but if true, this is a scathing indictment of social psychology.
Let's say we have a stereotype "blue people are quick to anger." Even if there is truth in it, what it really says is that the median for the phenotypic trait "quick to anger" is somewhat higher for blue people.
That does not mean that a given blue person is quick to anger since the whole population is not the median. It also doesn't mean that white or black or red people are not quick to anger, etc.
People tend to take statistical generalizations about wholes and apply them like facts to the parts. In the case of people it results in great injustice. Given the above imaginary stereotype, does it follow that blue people should be barred from becoming police or caring for children?
So I wonder if we haven't made the whole thing taboo and constructed a kind of elaborate ruse to pretend group differences don't exist to correct for this.
We have lots of hacks to correct for irrationality. Inflationary currency for instance is a hack to correct for our psychological association of bigger nominal prices with actual progress. Religion is full of hacks to short circuit undesirable social behaviors too. I have also suspected for years that God might be a hack to create a "virtual alpha" to placate our need for an alpha male and allow the emergence of the rule of law.
That is, rather than making a judgement, you can, and often should, be agnostic until some definitive evidence comes to hand.
As the article states, people (rightly) abandon these when dealing with a specific person, but mathematically speaking, a Bayesian approach would assume the stereotype until evidence to the contrary (with varying degrees of conviction depending on the prior). As long as you do not have a ridiculously strong or weighted prior and don't act on this presumed belief before confirmation, it is a useful thing.
And how exactly does that differ from what I said? What exactly is "a belief you don't act on"?
We need to talk about this instead of this.
1) stereotypes are accurate and we should study them
2) political bias in social psychology
I am not sure why the author is jumbling them together in one article.
What exactly is his point? That liberals are less like to study stereotypes therefore we have a gap in that important research area?
Because people will shut down interesting research which doesn't conform to the stated position of the social justice movement. This happens even if the research is high-quality and relatively unbiased. The research on stereotyping is a good example because the research doesn't attempt to cast stereotypes in a bad light, therefore it must be bad research.
An addition that I would make is a large point that he made by mentioning the paper with the faulty statistical data-- there are a lot of research papers being published that are conforming to the social justice movement, but aren't well backed, yet still accepted because of their motivation. The field is being diluted by this bad research that's trying to "change the world," instead of searching for objective truth.
So what? This doesn't necessarily invalidate the argument.