a very typical Harvard student would be rich AND white AND smart AND snobbish
Do you really need the AND everywhere? Doesn’t “rich OR white OR smart OR snobbish” make a stereotype as well? And you can see that in this form, adding more characteristics makes the stereotype more probable.
Good point (how about “white AND snobbish AND (rich OR smart)”?)
Actually, we nerds may be making a mistake by literally interpreting a statement like “rich and white and smart and snobbish” as a formula of propositional logic with boolean operators, whereas actually it’s being used as shorthand for “the typical Harvard student has most characteristics in the set [rich, white, smart, snobbish]”.
Is it? Although from a logic point of view such a definition is better, it is my experience what when people say “rich and white and smart and snobbish” they actuall mean AND in the boolean sense. The key is that the definition should be what a generic person (ie not one of us [ie one of “them”]) would think, rather than what actually makes sense/works.
Do you really need the AND everywhere? Doesn’t “rich OR white OR smart OR snobbish” make a stereotype as well? And you can see that in this form, adding more characteristics makes the stereotype more probable.
I meant it in the Boolean sense, and I meant AND, not OR. The conjunction fallacy is evidence of people really finding AND more believable.
Good point (how about “white AND snobbish AND (rich OR smart)”?)
Actually, we nerds may be making a mistake by literally interpreting a statement like “rich and white and smart and snobbish” as a formula of propositional logic with boolean operators, whereas actually it’s being used as shorthand for “the typical Harvard student has most characteristics in the set [rich, white, smart, snobbish]”.
Is it? Although from a logic point of view such a definition is better, it is my experience what when people say “rich and white and smart and snobbish” they actuall mean AND in the boolean sense. The key is that the definition should be what a generic person (ie not one of us [ie one of “them”]) would think, rather than what actually makes sense/works.