Truth in stereotypes
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On the left, because they perceive these stereotype validating social studies as supporting racists, deny that stereotypes have any truth in them often against overwhelming evidence.
One side is not more rational than the other. For both, truth has become a casualty to goals. This is a very bad place to be in for the following reasons:
1) If instead of truth standing on its own, you are willing to suppress it to support an agenda (even if it is good), you remove your ability to morally object when someone with a different agenda suppresses a truth you would rather not see suppressed. You are in essence guilty of doing the same thing as the church did to Galileo.
2) It is ultimately counterproductive to your goal. Your suppression of the truth will be used against you by your opponents to good effect. People hate being treated like children with facts suppressed to support an agenda. Once, people realize what is going on, they have a natural urge to support the opposite of the agenda. Think about how atheists use the history of the church suppressing Galileo to persuade people of the danger of religion.
So, if the evidence supports that many stereotypes are generally true, let us accept that what the evidence says. However, that does not mean that we are automatically racists, sexists, etc. As the article says "In situations where one has abundant, vividly clear information about an individual, the stereotype becomes completely irrelevant". By getting to know people as individuals and not just as exemplars of a group can we truly overcome injustice. In addition, by acknowledging the truth in stereotypes we can then work to remedy underlying causes for some of the negative stereotypes.
I don't think that existence of correct stereotypes poses a great risk for ideology of the left, unlike global warming, which actually is a risk for completely free market ideology, because there is no way free markets can deal with externalities. It's only if you accept naturalistic fallacy (that stereotyping is natural, therefore ethical) you get these problems.
I think left has ideological problem (and thus bias), but somewhere else. Left cannot very well deal with people who perceive risk differently. Which is actually kinda connected to the existence of stereotypes.
Research indicates that in the United States, the correlation between violent crime rates and percentages of US state populations that are Black and Hispanic is 0.81. Controlling for poverty, education, and unemployment only reduces this to 0.78. [1]
Wouldn't this unusually high correlation be useful in making your budgeting decision?
> guilty of doing the same thing as the church did to Galileo
The Church didn't oppress Galileo because of his work in astronomy. He got that for being an ass to the Pope (and a part of a political problem). Also, Galileo was only somewhat right, but for the wrong reasons (i.e. data supporting his statements wasn't there for many years).
http://lesswrong.com/lw/lq6/the_galileo_affair_who_was_on_th...
"Racist" has been a career-ender and guarantee of social ostracism since the 1980s, at least. It is perhaps the most powerful meme that has ever been invented.
> It is perhaps the most powerful meme that has ever been invented.
"Heretic", "heathen", "infidel", "unpatriotic", "traitor", "communist", "un-American"...
Religious and nationalist political correctness is so pervasive it's hard to even recognize it as a form of PC.
There's a bit more at risk than being fired, too. How about being willing to criticize Islam in public?
Islamists being willing to kill for their religion is its own thing, and doesn't (or, at least, didn't) have much to do with the western intellectual environment.
I remember it was an opinion that got me reamed out once by a rather terrible, but idealistic middle-school teacher.
"The social norm against stereotyping, including the opposition to profiling, has been highly beneficial in creating a more civilized and more equal society. It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is not scientifically defensible. Reliance on the affect heuristic is common in politically charged arguments. The positions we favor have no cost and those we oppose have no benefits. We should be able to do better."
–Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate, in Thinking, Fast and Slow, chapter 16
That's where the problem arises. Some stereotypes aren't based on truth but of individuals or groups fearing what they don't know. As I mentioned before in the thread, many stereotypes, especially those perceived as supernatural and being shunned or killed because of real medical issues, were outright false and started and perpetuated because man fears what it doesn't know. Epileptics were stereotyped as possessed, people who floated after death were stereotyped as witches, those with large canines stereotyped as vampires, albino Africans stereotyped also as witches and so on. Some stereotypes are started because of bias, not truths. The main issue with stereotyping is not because of benign stereotypes you keep to yourself or inner circle but when you act upon false stereotypes or mention your stereotype in a large public forum as the internet and it turns out to be untrue for those individuals. When you hear people say that it's impolite to use stereotypes, this is typically what they're talking about. Most people know enough to know that it's rude to use general stereotypes in a general (public) forum.
We all inevitably stereotype, even the most liberal can't claim otherwise. But history has never shown anything less bleak and painful when one stereotype is carried loudly and by a growing mass of hysteria. It's not worth it, imo, to debate so much of the validity of a stereotype, particularly when it involves lots of lives as you risk dehumanisation.
> particularly when it involves lots of lives as you risk dehumanisation.
The article stated:
> If people relied on their stereotypes more or less rationally, they would rely on them to inform judgments when they had little or no definitive information, but ignore them when they had definitive information. And it turns out this is just what most people do.
The idea that stereotyping is dehumanising, or used is some way to deny others, or put them in a box is specifically what the article says people don't do.
Instead, the article claims, people use stereotypes to improve the odds when there is no other information. To call that dehumanising is a pretty long bow to draw IMHO.
I'm still somewhat ambivalent on that, because I'm not convinced that statistics can be racist. But people pointed out to me that the way these statistics are collected might not be free of bias. Also, for example race being a good predictor of creditworthiness might in itself be just an effect of racism (eg. because black people aren't hired at well paying jobs) and using that statistics exacerbates the problem. Those are pretty good points, but I still find it weird that we forbid businesses to use all the information they have available to make business decisions.
Every rule in society can be formulated as a constraint on businesses. Typically, minimum wage prevents companies from making business decisions that would otherwise be profitable. Banning script money as a payment for wages also prevents them from making these decisions. This stems from the fact that the society view the common good as more important than the business interest of some of its members.
In that sense, making decisions based on data is an action like any other, and is subject to common scrutiny.
Your point about minimum wages is a bit misleading. These laws are almost always framed as restrictions on employers but it is worthwhile thinking about them as prohibitions on individuals also. They prohibit individuals from taking jobs that they otherwise would be happy to take. For low-skilled workers (including teenagers) the value of a job isn't just the hourly wage, although $7/hour is better than $0/hour also.
On the other hand, if the alternative is no help at all, I can't blame the proponents of those measures.
This really depends on whether you view racism as a moral failing, in which case the answer is "obviously not" or as a type of bug in a social (or social/technical) system, in which case the answer is "of course".
But denying someone credit on the basis of their race is probably racist.
Why? Because having 'black skin' does not make you less credit worthy. It's a correlating factor.
In fact - the 'dangers of stereotypes' are exactly that: making prejudiced decisions based on race etc..
Creditworthiness should be established on the basis of your job, job type, income, education, history of making payments etc..
There's no way on earth it's moral or fair to deny credit because someone is black - in the same way it's ruthlessly unfair to convict someone of a crime because they are black and 'theoretically more likely to have committed crime'.
I'd argue that this is the basis for the systematic racism that exists in the system, and that we have to get over.
And I'm not a pro-PC guy - by far. I'm not even very cool with affirmative action. But we need to treat people as individuals, not stereotypes.
Far, far more so than skin colour :) which is absolutely not causal.
I agree with your point theoretically, but pragmatically ... not so much :)
How do we know that?
Are you really asking that question?
In reality 'African American' or 'Black' should not be though of as a 'race' - rather, as an 'ethnic group' - which is a collection of behaviours, ideals, attitudes etc..
Tell me, what 'race' is Barack Obama?
What 'race' is someone from Sudan wherein people look a mix of 'Middle Eastern' and 'African/Black'?
What 'race' are most Mexicans who have both Aboriginal and European backgrounds?
Genetically, obviously there are some differences beyond skin colour, but it's pretty impossible to pin down 'race' when talking about genes.
The dude doing your credit score is not going a gene test. He's looking at the colour of your skin.
It's insane to think that has anything to do with anything.
If anything 'ethnic group' would be a better correlation, but that's an impossible thing to determine in America.
It's also racist, and I don't mean this in a 'PC' left-wing sense. I mean it in the most basic sense. Which is why it's illegal.
Does the existence of gray disprove the notion that black and white are colors?
Black and White are colours.
People who we commonly describe as 'Black' are not the colour 'Black'.
Tell me - which Black person on planet earth is the 'definitive Black' which equates to '100%' Black.
Barack Obama is 'mostly Black' on one side, 'mostly White' on the other. But his father was from Kenya. Does this make his father 100% Black? Because there are much darker skinned people in West Africa.
Forget colour, it's confusing you. It's a metaphor we use, that is really quite useful colloquially, but not useful beyond that.
There is no such thing as 'perfectly Black' or 'White' genetically. It's just an array of genes. That's it.
There is strong correlation with some genes and some cultures. That's it.
Statistics don't exist in a vacuum, nor are they a part of nature. Every piece of statistics is the result of a person or a group of people grabbing a subset of some data, applying a collection of mathematical transformations to that data and interpreting the results. Every step of the process, from what data you chose to look and how you chose to collect that data, to what transformations you choose to apply, to how you choose to interpret the numbers that come out of those transformations is a choice a person has to make and as such is very much subject to conscious and subconscious biases.
That said, when stereotypes are wrong - they are very wrong, right from the article:
"2. Older people are generally more __________ and less __________ than adolescents. A. Conscientious; open to new experiences B. Neurotic; agreeable"
Old people are WAY more 'conscientious' than young people.
Old people vote, they plan, they don't overspend, they're rarely loud and unruly, their finances are predictable, their homes are often more clean and orderly, they usually are responsible for caring for others - kids and grandkids.
Young people are 'virtue signallers' and ostensibly have 'big hearts' and 'thumbs up' upworthy rubbish - but old people are far more tangibly conscientious. My elderly uncles and aunts are boring and a little curmudgeon, but the spend several weeks a year in Guatemala helping to build homes for poor people. The don't post it on social media. A young person who did this once would put that on their resume forever.
You know how deals with reality: 'insurers'. They have the real data. And it's the reason if you're under 25 it's sometimes impossible to rent a car.
The prejudice is correct :)
Most Americans don't have stereotypes about, say, Mongolians, because most Americans have had zero contact with Mongolians. Maybe something about Genghis Khan? But go to, say, Beijing, and people there will probably have all kinds of stereotypes about Mongolians.
Stereotypes may or may not have a basis in reality: they can simply be a unsubstantiated prejudice (group A says goup B is dangerous and criminal; group B is actually very friendly to outsiders). They are frequently rooted in a history of social conflict (slavery, colonialism, &c). They lie within a specific social context/relationship (group A sees group B as lazy, group B sees group A as arrogant and overbearing). They are about social categories that don't have analytical basis outside the social context (national or racial groups).
The bigger problem is that they form an ecological fallacy—the assumption that something that may be true about the group is true about the individual.
After what happened with both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union misrepresenting scientific research to 'support' their policies, I suspect a lot of researchers want to avoid their own work being used for the same purposes.
All you need to do is ask an expat Canadian how much they enjoy repeatedly being asked "What part of the States are you from?". After a few dozen people make the same assumption about you, it can become aggravating. Never the less, it's a reasonable question to ask. 90% of people who sound like Americans (roughly speaking) come from the USA.
The more common a stereotype is, the more infuriating it is to be an outlier. So it's considerate to bear that in mind, even if the stereotype is valid.
Or in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States#...
But we have the same effect, anyway. Take a look at the underlying scientific research regarding some politically-charged issues and you'll realise that many of the things all right-thinking people know are poorly-supported, or aren't supported, or simply aren't true at all.
Most people don't want truth: they want to feel good.
The problem with stereotypes isn't that they have no basis in reality. The problem with stereotypes is that they are just as inaccurate as they are accurate. The problem with stereotypes is that they stunt the potential of tens/hundreds of millions of people.
Do we really want to live in a world where women are denied managerial/executive jobs, because of stereotypes that they can't control their emotions?
One where African Americans are rejected from job applications, because of whatever derogatory stereotypes people hold against them?
One where Jews are routinely judged as being immoral and obsessed with money?
One where Southerners are socially shunned for being uncultured racist bigots?
One where women refuse to date engineers because they're socially incompetent boring dorks?
One that bans Gays from being teachers because they're likely to be child molesters?
If you're someone who thinks that making life-changing judgements about individuals on the basis of stereotypes is perfectly fine, the early/mid 1900s are right up your alley. Thankfully, most of us have come to recognize how damaging and morally repugnant such a system is. I would hate to be judged and discriminated against on the basis of stereotypes, and hence, I refrain from doing the same to others. Ultimately, that's the courtesy that we as a society have decided we should extend to one another.
It looks like "He seems...people should..." is overlaying a prescription that Lee Jussim didn't write anywhere in the essay.
Instead, he explicitly wrote the opposite: "Nothing in this essay should dissuade anyone from continuing efforts to combat discrimination."
"If people relied on their stereotypes more or less rationally, they would rely on them to inform judgments when they had little or no definitive information, but ignore them when they had definitive information."
The implication seems to be that as a rational person, in the absence of definitive information, you should discriminate against people on the basis of stereotypes.
In any case, in the paragraph immediately before your extracted quote, he wrote: "To deal with the complexity, ..."
He's saying that in absence of information we humans conduct a Bayesian prior. It's a cognitive coping mechanism. The excerpt of text that bothered you is just describing how our brains work. He's not prescribing any of the racist actions you listed. The distinction seems very clear.[1]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact%E2%80%93value_distinction
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/unbearable%20accuracy%20o...
Interestingly, stereotypes based on political party membership are consistently inaccurate.
As the Kahneman quote I posted elsewhere shows, the reality is that resistance to reasoning using certain valid stereotypes is an ethical position, based on a desire to build a better society. It has costs in terms of sub-optimal decision making. In a democratic society, we should acknowledge this, rather than falsely and naively claiming that stereotypes are false.
> I would hate to be judged and discriminated against on the basis of stereotypes, and hence, I refrain from doing the same to others.
Other people are not obliged to make bad decisions because of your feelings. They should make the ethical decisions they feel are right.
Statistical models are quantitative reasoning based on stereotypes. Every time you get a credit report or an insurance policy, that's based on nothing but stereotypes: just legally permissible ones, built into mathematical models. 25 year old men who buy red cars have a certain accident rate, therefore you're going to be charged for that rate.
So your position is that if the stereotypes about Women/Blacks/Jews/Southerners/Gays were mostly accurate, it would be ok to discriminate against those groups on the basis of those stereotypes?
In my previous post, I never claimed that stereotypes were false. I stated that discrimination on the basis of stereotypes were damaging to society, and morally repugnant.
My feelings are not relevant, but the fact that you seem to be in favor of stereotypes, because you belong to a group that won't be strongly affected by it, is not relevant either. In order to form a defensible moral position, you have to look at it from the perspective of someone who doesn't know which group he will belong to (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance). And it's hard to imagine any external rational person forming the conclusion that he would like to live in a society that I described earlier.
Either I missed where the poster listed their group, or you're stereotyping people that don't consider stereotyping abhorrent as people who aren't affected by stereotyping.
It would be interesting to know if people are good at guessing the uncertainty of a stereotype and if they approximate a Bayesian integration of information.
It is the case for visual, spacial and sensorimotor information. I wouldn't be surprised if it was also the case for social information.
...one where women and engineers are considered to be two separate categories?
I have a strong desire for a world in which people are judged on their merits and character and not on their race, religion, age or any other superficial trait. I don't want a person's superficial traits to color their perception of them.
It does seem absurd to try and force the public to close their eyes to the truth of stereotypes and pretend they don't exist. However it seems equally absurd to label and draw conclusions about an individual based on their membership in a group.
I don't mind stereotypes being acknowledged and even being researched and analyzed . . . so long as it done with the understanding that not all individuals will display the characteristics associated with their group and each individual is given an opportunity to be judged on their merits as an individual rather than prejudged based on their membership in a particular group.
> If people relied on their stereotypes more or less rationally, they would rely on them to inform judgments when they had little or no definitive information, but ignore them when they had definitive information. And it turns out this is just what most people do.
So what we do with stereotypes is help us get to a better answer sans any other information, then disregard it completely when more information comes to hand. That seems like the perfect use for imperfect information.
For example, it is a stereotype that in the US, white people vote Republican. Is this an accurate stereotype?
On one level, it is - in recent elections around 55-60% of white voters voted Republican, so it is certainly true to say that most white people vote Republican.
On another level, given a random white voter from the US, there is only a 55-60% chance that they voted Republican, which is not much better than guessing. So it's not particularly accurate to say that white people vote Republican.
I expect that most stereotypes fall into this class - they are accurate in aggregate, but not particularly informative when dealing with individuals. And surely this is the problem with stereotypes? We take a characteristic which is true in aggregate for a group (white people vote Republican, black people listen to hip hop, old people are less open to new experiences) and assume that those characteristics are true of individual members of that group.
Edit: Also are we getting the irony that "stereotypes are inaccurate" is a stereotype in itself that has proven at times to be inaccurate?
Or course it depends on the size of the group, and you can construct artificial groupings to make the above false, but let's just say that all the 'standard' groups are covered: ethnicity, skin colour, gender, sexuality, etc. etc.
These are still groups. I (a male) am much less likely to mug anyone (let's say 1 in a million chance this year) than certain individual women. Within the group of men and within the group of women, the "mugging probability" varies from almost zero to almost one.
This is statistically illiterate. Let's say you have two sets of random variables X and Y, both from Normal distributions with standard deviation 2, where the mean of X is 0 and the mean of Y is 1. Knowing whether a measurement comes from X or Y will still allow you to make more accurate predictions, even though the within-group variance is larger than the between-group variance. For very large groups, this applies much more so. If you have high-dimensional multivariate data, it is possible to assign individuals to clusters very accurately even if all individual measurements overlap substantially.
See for example http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12879450
> Not to mention morally dubious, at best.
This is the real issue: the use of certain stereotypes is a political and ethical debate, and those against using stereotypes should stop pretending there are no costs in terms of sub-optimal decision making. There are defensible ethical reasons for being against some types of discrimination based on valid stereotypes.
This is exactly what the article suggests people do, and finds that they do in real life.
"If people relied on their stereotypes more or less rationally, they would rely on them to inform judgments when they had little or no definitive information, but ignore them when they had definitive information. And it turns out this is just what most people do."
Of course this raises the question of the difference between stereotypes and generalizations. I did some searching but didn't find anything I would call authoritative and I don't think I could define them myself in any meaningful terms.