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Comment by Argorak | Hacker News Reader

Well, a stereotype is not necessarily unfounded. In the region where I come from (around a chemical factory), it wasn't hard do describe populations in a certain town as "chemical workers". You'd probably describe 60% of the population. And a country where only men were allowed into the military for ages also assign and teach those things based on gender.

The problem with stereotypes is that they are a very bad indicators to judge any specific individual now (both because they carry history and bad fit). You might miss important points or assume knowledge that isn't there on a regular basis. Gender stereotypes are especially problematic as they split the whole population into two and assign a lot of attributes purely based on one criterion.

The effects and conditions leading to a certain stereotype are also a fun thing to research.

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I would love to have an in-depth conversation about the origins of stereotypes and how they relate to real-world examples, but HN is too politically correct to make an attempt. Which is sad because HN people are generally intelligent enough to pick stereotypes apart without devolving into ugly banter.

That might sound a bit surprising, but I found that feminist groups can be very pragmatic about this. Meet up in person, make sure there is no one trolling the discussion and that goes very well.

The problem with public discussion is that people don't want to give open flanks for troll arguments.

I can start.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi/10.1371/journal.po...

To wit: men and women vary wildly in their personalities, and it is very likely this is due far more to different (genetic) sexual selection pressures than it is to socialization and acculturation.

But here's the problem with attempting an "in-depth discussion" on this topic: anyone who attempts to bring facts to a feels fight will always lose. Even on supposedly "rational" HN.

So, good luck with that.

The problem with stereotypes is step 2; what you do with it.

How many of us are habitually making decisions based on large masses of people, rather than individuals? We almost all deal with individuals, one after another (sometimes in small groups), all day long.

In that context, the stereotypes we make even based on research are harmful; if you assume the person you're speaking with won't know what a "humvee" is because she's a woman, you'll be wrong 58% of the time, and she'll be insulted. Plus there's a 22% chance the man next to her won't know the word. ...All of this assuming that you're speaking with a random selection of strangers taken from those who took this online vocab quiz; and how likely is that?

That's why people get so worked up about stereotypes; there may be some original kernel of truth underlying them (some of them), but people who then make assumptions while dealing with individuals do a lot of damage in the world.

Stereotypes are a primitive form of decision heuristics. We must use heuristics when dealing with the enormous volume of information that we are required to process on a day to day basis, or we would never get anything done as we evaluate every micro-decision at an atomistic level.

As far as missing out on great opportunities by using heuristics, it happens all the time, and not just with race/sex/age stereotypes. It happens with food, it happens with color, it happens with sounds and temperatures and fabrics and pets. We require heuristics based on generalizations and abstractions to even function in the world.

There is no easy solution to this, but the saving grace of a semi-free society is that if your particular heuristic excludes a great opportunity, it's very likely someone else's heuristic does not.

I see what you did there ;)

> I would love to have an in-depth conversation about the origins of stereotypes and how they relate to real-world examples, but HN is too politically correct to make an attempt.

The problem is the large amount of bad research and evidence that gets thrown around in such a discussion. Tons of biotruth folks come out of the woodwork and there are quite few people who don't argue in good faith whatsoever. That has nothing to do with "politically correct" slant, which HN does NOT have, btw.

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