Stereotypes Are Poisoning American Politics | Hacker News Reader

Stereotypes Are Poisoning American Politics

bloomberg.com

49 pointsapsec11221 comments

Fallacies of composition are a norm on online forums, while all problems are treated as scale invariant - in online discussions, if someone find a negative counter-example, it will typically be employed to invalidate the whole thesis regardless of its actual significance.

I partly blame the popularity of the Action News format for dumbing people down, but the epistemological roots of this social trend run much deeper. Alas, demonstrating this to people seems to require a week of prior reading.

> blaming an entire ill-defined group for the failings of its individuals

The failings of individuals bring down whole groups, and vice versa. I mean in the end if you belong to a disadvantaged group, due to network effects, it makes everything harder to do. Want to make money? You can't because your group does not have money. These problems compound. Want to raise capital for your startup? Love money? Everyone is broke. There is none. Success of the individual depends on the community and vice versa. The relationship is complicated and interwoven. In any group there are a small number of people that affect any group positively or negatively in disproportionate ways. Companies worry about these problems, of the weakest links in the organization.

Don't get me wrong, as a maxim you should judge people individually, but reality does not work that way. It's much more complicated than that. Even if individuals judge individuals fairly, it does not mean that individuals will get treated fairly no matter what they do.

Well that sounds like the sort of problem that actually needs solving, unlike a lot of what people are chasing money for these days.

Want to make money? You can't because your group does not have money.

So join a different group. Or just trade something of value to an individual from a different group in return for money.

This idea that people are tied to their group, and that group interests exist, is simply nonsense. I have no interest in increasing the wealth, population or influence of my own group, I only have interest in increasing my wealth, the number of my descendents and my influence. And if the best way to do that is to abandon my group and work with another group (or none at all), so be it.

I think devoply overstated their case in saying you can't make money if your group doesn't have it, but it does make it harder, and occasionally impossible. In the worst case, you face an effective catch-22 because your group doesn't provide the resources you need but joining groups that have them takes those same resources.

Also, in practice, people tend to identify with the groups they belong to, so rationally or not, they are more reluctant to leave groups than you are.

What group with resources do you think it actually takes equivalent resources to join?

In any case I'm disagreeing with devoply's use of "can't". If he wrote this I wouldn't have disagreed: "Want to make money? You choose not to because your group does not have money and you prefer not to join or associate with a group that does."

I agree that many people have feelings tying them to a particular group and are unwilling to leave their group. That's a matter of willingness, not ability.

I agree that there are many situations where joining a group gives you access to more resources than it costs. My point is that, in some cases, you might not have the resources to pay the costs, even if you could recoup them later.

For example, it might cost only a small amount of gas money to attend a group that provides mentorship. If you don't have that money, you can't attend, even if that mentorship would lead to a job that gives you a huge return on your time and gas money.

You can't just 'join a different group'. You have to understand a group's culture to join it, and you can't do that as an outsider.

Joining as a full fledged member might be difficult and time consuming, but it can be done. And in the short run you can still gain many benefits by interacting as an outsider.

I'm not Indian and in India I'll rarely be mistaken for an Indian (though it has happened in the US a few times). I haven't 'joined' this group. But looking at my whatsapp right now, 4 of my 5 most recently contacted people are Indian. Via trade (I work for an Indian company) and 1-on-1 relationships I gain most of the benefits of group membership.

There is nothing tying you to whatever you think of as your group except your own choices. If you can provide value to individuals in other groups they will provide value to you in return.

I understand that this concept of 'group interests' and group-centric politics is pretty popular among the alt right these days. But this idea ignores basic game theory. It is simply not in my interest to help what you think is my group to succeed.

It's ironic that a piece essentially advocating pedantry would then go on to make subjective judgements about outliers versus national averages.

Poverty is higher among Appalachians than the national average, but not by much -- Kentucky has a poverty rate of 18.5% and West Virginia 17.9%, compared to a national average of 14.7%. The typical Appalachian isn't poor...

I don't know dude, define "typical." Kentucky and West Virginia have the 5th and 7th highest poverty rates.

I think the more important point is that Appalachian is kinda short hand for rural people from that region, who are poor in considerably higher numbers. Pittsburgh and Birmingham are Appalachian, but politicians aren't referring to the Pittsburgh Google office when talking about Appalachia...

(I agree w you, but If we're being pedantic, it's possible to be "the worst" and still not that much different from average...)

The headline implies that somehow stereotypes weren't important in American politics until recently.

Yep. There is a difference between a stereotype and a generalization. Stereotypes are often bound to a kernel of truth, but the problem is that the scale is exaggerated so greatly, taken seriously, and held for so long that it begins to distort the worldview of the person who holds a stereotype. What's the old saying: "In the province of the mind ideas are either true or become true".

The article has a valid point, and yes, it is sensible to talk about stereotypes in the wake of an election and how it can unhelpfully distort the way you think about people.

However, it is always relevant, it isn't destroying US politics (whatever that means); stereotypes are cartoonist approximations and are sort of an easy trap to fall into, and their scope is as broad as civilization.

> One insight was that "the countries now at the bottom are distinctive not just in being the poorest but also in having failed to grow." That's true, but it yields no more information than the initial misleading aggregation: It's like saying, "Those at the bottom are distinctive not just in being at the bottom but also in being at the bottom."

"Poorest" relates to wealth, while "failing to grow" relates to wealth's derivative, and there's no logical relation between a quantity and its derivative.

The author is probably implying that being somewhat developed makes it easier to continue developing even faster, like an exponential. I agree though - that point is rather clumsily made, and my reading of it requires some good will.

The article goes downhill from there, and my good will ran out once I got to the "insight" that 99.99% of Muslims aren't terrorists, as if socio-political norms of tens of millions of Islamists aren't deeply problematic as long as they're not literally blowing themselves up. If you think I'm being hyperbolic, allow me to ruin your day by pointing to some unsettling polls: http://www.pewforum.org/2013/04/30/the-worlds-muslims-religi...

Amongst the reassuring results from those surveys: 60% of all Egyptian Muslims think the punishment for leaving the faith ought to be death. 35% of all Indonesian Muslims think adulterers should be stoned. Of course there is a good point here that the article was trying to allude to: barbarism of this type is in some ways a self-fulfilling cultural prophecy. But one has to wonder how coy we really ought to be about the differences that exist in the here and now, especially considering these attitudes matter to the men and women living in those societies today.

Put things in italics to quote them on HN. Almost nobody uses a > delimiter here and you're being downvoted because people are mistaking the pull quote for your own argument.

I see > delimiters to quote the article all the time, here, actually, and I don't see a problem with it

Why would you ever italicize something to quote it? Italics are for emphasis. Either use real quote marks or the > block quoting convention, which, as pmarreck notes, lots of people do use here.

My two cents, which is a vast over-estimate of their value, in a discussion of internet pedantry.

Italics used for quotations isn't just a HN thing: http://www.gsbe.co.uk/grammar-italics.html#italics:%20length...

When you only have one typographic differentiator as we do on HN, you use it for contrast. This is the most effective presentation for blocks of text on HN. Quote marks are frequently overlooked, or I would still be using them.

Frequently overlooked?

How can you miss those? Perhaps I read slowly...

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