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Truth in stereotypes

aeon.co

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Re: Truth in stereotypes

#31

Post by sevenless »

whack wrote: post #19

Considering the great amount of statistical research the author has done, it's surprising that he's drawn some dreadful conclusions. He seems to be saying that in the face of incomplete/ambiguous information, people should form judgements on other people on the basis of racial/gender/physical stereotypes. The problem with stereotypes isn't that they have no basis in reality. The problem with stereotypes is that they…

But you're cherry-picking stereotypes that are mostly incorrect (and look outright archaic). Whereas Lee Jussim (for example) has found that most stereotypes are mostly accurate.

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.

Re: Truth in stereotypes

#32

Post by adrianN »

0134340 wrote: post #22
sevenless wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Accurate stereotypes are simply group-level information about people. You could call a stereotype a weakly informative prior.

Not all stereotypes are true. People have stereotyped others in the past and some of it had to do with other people being accused of being a witch or possessed if they have a medical condition as epilepsy. In Africa, some albinos may also be accused of witchcraft and killed or their body parts taken. As far as people being accused of the supernatural as I mentioned or as being vampires, there's plenty of wrong stereo…

The article gives a lengthy argument to show that "stereotypes are inaccurate" is inaccurate.

Re: Truth in stereotypes

#33

Post by sevenless »

lomnakkus wrote: post #24
sevenless wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Accurate stereotypes are simply group-level information about people. You could call a stereotype a weakly informative prior.

There's usually much more variation between individuals within a group (say, all white people) than between groups (say, white vs. asian people), nevermind individuals from different groups. Judging individuals based on aggregate statistics about their group would be foolish in the extreme. (Not to mention morally dubious, at best.) Or course it depends on the size of the group, and you can construct artificial group…

> There's usually much more variation between individuals within a group (say, all white people) than between groups (say, white vs. asian people), nevermind individuals from different groups.

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.

Re: Truth in stereotypes

#34

Post by chimprich »

iopq wrote: post #25
pif wrote: post #9

Stereotypes do surely contain a grain of truth, but it's very important not to use any of them when judging individual people.

You may only have moments to get away from a dangerous situation. You don't have time to consider whether running away from a large black man is racist. It may, in fact, save your life some of the time at the cost of being mildly offensive.

Running away from a large man because he is black is strongly offensive if there he is not threatening in any other way. And if he is behaving threateningly, why would you be reassured if he was white? I find this a very odd argument.

Re: Truth in stereotypes

#35

Post by 0134340 »

sevenless wrote: post #13
douche wrote: post #6

Is this surprising? I've always thought, logically, that for a stereotype to become popular and remain so, it's got to be a better quick rule of thumb assessment than an alternative stereotype, ergo there must be some small kernel of truth or statistical disposition underlying it. I remember it was an opinion that got me reamed out once by a rather terrible, but idealistic middle-school teacher.

Let me quote Daniel Kahneman in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" "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 r…

>neglecting valid stereotypes

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.

Re: Truth in stereotypes

#36

Post by dagw »

adrianN wrote: post #5

The accuracy or inaccuracy of stereotypes reminds me of the regulations and ethical debates regarding the use of machine learning for example for creditworthiness. The algorithms often turn out to become "racist", because from the data they have, race is a good predictor. 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 sta…

I'm not convinced that statistics can be racist

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.

Re: Truth in stereotypes

#37

Post by adrianN »

jomamaxx wrote: post #29
adrianN wrote: post #5

The accuracy or inaccuracy of stereotypes reminds me of the regulations and ethical debates regarding the use of machine learning for example for creditworthiness. The algorithms often turn out to become "racist", because from the data they have, race is a good predictor. 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 sta…

The fact that African Americans, on average, might be significantly less likely to be creditworthy - is not racist per-sey, it's just a fact. 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.. C…

All the factors you listed are also just correlated with paying back a loan. You'd be hard pressed to find something truly causal, human brains are pretty complex.

Re: Truth in stereotypes

#38

Post by Klockan »

whack wrote: post #19

Considering the great amount of statistical research the author has done, it's surprising that he's drawn some dreadful conclusions. He seems to be saying that in the face of incomplete/ambiguous information, people should form judgements on other people on the basis of racial/gender/physical stereotypes. The problem with stereotypes isn't that they have no basis in reality. The problem with stereotypes is that they…

If you had to bet on if a random Asian or a random black person would get the highest SAT score, what would you do? You would of course bet on the Asian because the odds are so much better. This is not discrimination. Discrimination would be if you still bet that the Asian would get a higher score even after I informed you that both of them got exactly the same score last time they took the test. That would mean that you somehow think that the Asian guy is better even if I already proved that they are equal.

Re: Truth in stereotypes

#39

Post by 0134340 »

adrianN wrote: post #32
0134340 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all stereotypes are true. People have stereotyped others in the past and some of it had to do with other people being accused of being a witch or possessed if they have a medical condition as epilepsy. In Africa, some albinos may also be accused of witchcraft and killed or their body parts taken. As far as people being accused of the supernatural as I mentioned or as being vampires, there's plenty of wrong stereo…

The article gives a lengthy argument to show that "stereotypes are inaccurate" is inaccurate.

And I just gave a reason why stereotypes can be inaccurate. There's truth in stereotyping and also truth in being cautious about stereotyping because if we want to have a civil society, both frames of thought need moderated.

Edit: Also are we getting the irony that "stereotypes are inaccurate" is a stereotype in itself that has proven at times to be inaccurate?

Re: Truth in stereotypes

#40

Post by whack »

sevenless wrote: post #31
whack wrote: post #19

Considering the great amount of statistical research the author has done, it's surprising that he's drawn some dreadful conclusions. He seems to be saying that in the face of incomplete/ambiguous information, people should form judgements on other people on the basis of racial/gender/physical stereotypes. The problem with stereotypes isn't that they have no basis in reality. The problem with stereotypes is that they…

But you're cherry-picking stereotypes that are mostly incorrect (and look outright archaic). Whereas Lee Jussim (for example) has found that most stereotypes are mostly accurate. 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 rea…

> But you're cherry-picking stereotypes that are mostly incorrect (and look outright archaic). Whereas Lee Jussim (for example) has found that most stereotypes are mostly accurate.

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.

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