Stereotypes II
Meta-stereotypes are not to be trusted. This is two years old, but recently tweet-linked by Justine Tunney, and well-worth recalling. The meat and potatoes:
… stereotypes are not inaccurate. There are many different ways to test for the accuracy of stereotypes, because there are many different types or aspects of accuracy. However, one type is quite simple — the correspondence of stereotype beliefs with criteria. If I believe 60% of adult women are over 5′ 4″ tall, and 56% voted for the Democrat in the last Presidential election, and that 35% of all adult women have college degrees, how well do my beliefs correspond to the actual probabilities? One can do this sort of thing for many different types of groups.
And lots of scientists have. And you know what they found? That stereotype accuracy — the correspondence of stereotype beliefs with criteria — is one of the largest relationships in all of social psychology. The correlations of stereotypes with criteria range from .4 to over .9, and average almost .8 for cultural stereotypes (the correlation of beliefs that are widely shared with criteria) and.5 for personal stereotypes (the correlation of one individual’s stereotypes with criteria, averaged over lots of individuals). The average effect in social psychology is about .20. Stereotypes are more valid than most social psychological hypotheses.
It’s not as if this is new, or in general outline even two years old. It’s roughly as old as human culture, in fact. Generalization is what pragmatic intelligence is for (which means it’s what intelligence in general has been kept around for). Regardless of where we find ourselves culturally right now, this is a point of common sense that simply can’t be forgotten forever.
So the war on stereotypes is actual a war on intelligence itself.
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admin Reply:
August 27th, 2014 at 2:00 pm
“We had to destroy the mind in order to defend it (from evil thoughts).”
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I am seeing potential t-shirt slogans in my head.
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Antisthenes Reply:
August 27th, 2014 at 4:31 pm
“Stereotypes are for niggers.”
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Progs are perfectly happy to use stereotypes. They even enjoy manufacturing stereotypes out of whole cloth. They’re just concerned about people using the “wrong” stereotypes. Some who self identify as prog do try to be genuinely principled, they’re victims of prog ideology. Progs are first and foremost about acquiring power, everything they do or say is just a means to that end. When you have enough brainpower backing you, consistency isn’t a requirement because it can be rationalized away (why do smart people believe dumb things, because they’re better at rationalizing).
Progressivism is an alliance between the power hungry and a virulent meme. However when it affects their interests either one will defect against the other. Thus their weakness is that they’re cannibals. This is why using trolls to set them against each other is so entertaining.
Branching from this, given rationalizations and virulent memes, practicing strict mental hygiene ought to be high on our concerns list (since we don’t have a natural mental immune system, except acquired mental infections defending their territory, we have to develop our own at the conscious level).
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Posted on August 27th, 2014 at 3:57 pm | QuoteSteve Sailer just did a related post about the need for “political diversity” in social sciences
It’s been too taboo to study stereotypes since around 1976
http://www.unz.com/isteve/haidt-political-diversity-will-improve-social-psychological-science/
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Posted on August 27th, 2014 at 4:19 pm | QuoteStereotypes are so nonexistent that my anti-stereotype prog relatives in the San Francisco Bay area drive 45 miles each way per day to their jobs so that their sons can go to “good schools.” And they’re really nice people, very “anti-racist.” Going back to Sailer, he’s written extensively on this; the coastal California real estate bubble is based on anti-racist progs making sure their kids don’t go to school with too many lower-IQ minorities.
I doubt there’s been another mass rationalization on this scale in human history.
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Posted on August 27th, 2014 at 4:46 pm | QuoteRelevant:
http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/unbearable%20accuracy%20of%20stereotypes.pdf
http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/tetlock/vita/philip%20tetlock/phil%20tetlock/1999-2000/2000%20the%20psychology%20of%20the%20unthinkable….pdf
http://philosophy.rutgers.edu/dmdocuments/Gendler%20(2011)%20On%20the%20Epistemic%20Costs%20of%20Implicit%20Bias%20May%202011%20Phil%20Studies.pdf
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Posted on August 28th, 2014 at 4:42 am | Quote[…] The validity of sterotypes. […]
Posted on September 3rd, 2014 at 5:01 am | Quote