
A scientist studying the accuracy of stereotypes - kawera
http://quillette.com/2015/12/04/rebellious-scientist-surprising-truth-about-stereotypes/
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bonobo3000
The bias started out with a good intention - "all people should have the same
rights and opportunities".

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.

~~~
vinhboy
I think this is one of the reasons why its so hard to address racial
inequality in America.

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.

~~~
alistproducer2
The politics are addressing racism is hard. White people don't want to take
responsibility for something that happened before they were born; minorities
won't accept their current problems are their fault.

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.

~~~
rustynails
Slavery was not a white problem, it was a humanity problem of multiple skin
colours, and in some places, still is.

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.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
[http://achewood.com/index.php?date=02062007](http://achewood.com/index.php?date=02062007)

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yummyfajitas
A more academic paper can be found here:
[http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/unbearable%20accuracy%20o...](http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/unbearable%20accuracy%20of%20stereotypes.pdf)

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.

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
Can't check the details since I'm on mobile, but thats quite a bomb they're
dropping here. Thanks for the link!

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api
I suspect that the idea that stereotypes are inaccurate might be a noble lie
to counteract how bad we are at statistics.

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.

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nether
Stereotypes can be accurate but also become false over time. Continued belief
in them can also make them self-fulfilling. It wasn't until relatively
recently that "women are bad at math" was examined and found to be a product
of various cultural mores. Let's not confuse current accuracy of stereotypes
with some permanent classification of behaviors innate in a group.

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jamesrcole
One point that is often overlooked is that, even if a stereotype tends to be
accurate, there's, in many cases, no need to assume that it applies to a
particular person.

That is, rather than making a judgement, you can, and often should, be
agnostic until some definitive evidence comes to hand.

~~~
eximius
That is completely contradictory. If stereotypes tend to be accurate, then
_that is a reason to believe it applies to a person of that group_.

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.

~~~
jamesrcole
_> As long as you do not ...act on this presumed belief_

And how exactly does that differ from what I said? What exactly is "a belief
you don't act on"?

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wslh
As a complementary paper, and something that affects everyone doing business
with other cultures: "Cultural Biases in Economic
[http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/finance/papers/cultbiases120...](http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/finance/papers/cultbiases120804.pdf)

We need to talk about this instead of this.

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vinhboy
There seems to be two points being made in this article

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?

~~~
jschwartzi
Edit: this is an attempt to paraphrase the article's reasoning for moving from
stereotypes to their researcher as a subject.

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.

~~~
benbenolson
That's exactly his point, and honestly, I agree with it.

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.

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Ono-Sendai
“But out of 1145 participants, only ten agreed that the moon landing was a
hoax!” he said. “Of the study’s participants, 97.8% who thought that climate
science was a hoax, did not think that the moon landing also a hoax.”

So what? This doesn't necessarily invalidate the argument.

~~~
medymed
Curiously though, it contributes to falsely exaggerated stereotyping, in the
sense that given the title and abstract I might expect a far greater
percentage (>2.2%) of moon landing disbelievers among climate change
disbelievers until until I take time to read through column 8 of table 3 on a
potentially publicly inaccessible pdf. Will the journalists report these
details? Maybe. Maybe not. Which plays into a larger possible tendency in
social psychology: It's a poor choice to publish negative sterotype about
groups supported by your social justice allies (most of the field,
apparently), but it may be more warmly received to sterotype the political
opposition, easiest with the low hanging fruit of conspiratorial right
wingers.

~~~
afarrell
[http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/22/social-psychology-
is-a-...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/22/social-psychology-is-a-
flamethrower/)

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mamon
My important take from the article: "people apply stereotypes when they have
no other information about a person, but switch them off when they do" \- so
stereotypes are not as bad as previously thought :)

~~~
TulliusCicero
The problem is that people often have important interactions, in some form,
with those that they don't really know at all. Two politically relevant
examples would be police officers arresting someone, or
recruiters/interviewers reading resumes and interviewing people.

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Dr_tldr
I for one will be downvote this link into oblivion, because it's
scientifically proven that information like this can have a negative effect on
women and minorities in tech.

~~~
TulliusCicero
Are you seriously suggesting that we suppress scientific knowledge for the
benefit of political aims?

~~~
recursive
I'm pretty sure it's a troll.

~~~
Dr_tldr
I realize picking up on sarcasm on the internet is tricky, but it's also a bad
sign for society when a ridiculous circular statement is close enough to many
people's genuine beliefs that it's taken seriously.

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chrisbrandow
This sort of thing further reinforces the typical disdain that "hard"
scientists have for "soft" sciences. And it's a shame because these are
important things to understand with rigor.

