Hacker News Reader

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.

> 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.

> 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

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.

I find the guideline described in the article to be quite good. If the decision is important (as for hiring), you should get as much information as you can.

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.

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.

There's a lot of variability between people taking the SAT twice. So if you initially expect that A will score higher than B, then learn they were selected for having received the same score on one round of the test, your guess for A on another round of testing should still be a bit higher than for B.

>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.

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."

The following sentence from the essay is what I found very concerning:

"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.

He doesn't say that you should discriminate, just that you probably shouldn't buy a dildo to a guy.

Your finger is too quick on the trigger with the word "should" and therefore attributing malice to the author without justification. Are you sure you're not _stereotyping_ authors that have written about "stereotypes" as being closet racists instructing all of us to discriminate?!? That would be so meta.

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

You have either misread or misunderstood the section I quoted. No, the author didn't just say that "people make decisions on the basis of stereotypes." He literally said that the rational thing for a person to do in the absence of perfect information, is to make decisions on the basis of stereotypes. If you are going to claim that "the rational thing to do is XYZ," that is certainly crossing the line into an endorsement.

> One where women refuse to date engineers because they're socially incompetent boring dorks?

...one where women and engineers are considered to be two separate categories?

No, (s)he is saying that women are socially incompetent boring dorks and thus refuses to date engineers of both genders.

Oh, you're right. My bad!

You just described the reality I live in. Where do you live? I want to move there.