Hmm. Sarah, are you quite sure you’d like to live in a world where people judged each other offhand based on accurate probability distributions—as opposed to a world where people judged each other “fairly” and kept a “blank slate”? If you’d prefer the latter world, then your post is not your true rejection of the idea of stereotypes.
A world where people judged each other accurately—it might sometimes be unpleasant, yes, but I don’t think I’d have the right to request people not to do it.
“Keep a blank slate” is a way of being charitable, and, yes, sometimes it may be good to be charitable, not just rational. But even before that I think that a sizable chunk of real-life stereotyping is not rational.
If they added appropriate error bars and willingness to update to the probability distributions, it might not be so awful.
And when I say “error bars”, I don’t just mean allowing for experimental error, I mean allowing for the possibility that the thinking which led to the probability distribution was motivated by the desire to maintain or expand a stereotype.
Hmm. Sarah, are you quite sure you’d like to live in a world where people judged each other offhand based on accurate probability distributions—as opposed to a world where people judged each other “fairly” and kept a “blank slate”? If you’d prefer the latter world, then your post is not your true rejection of the idea of stereotypes.
A world where people judged each other accurately—it might sometimes be unpleasant, yes, but I don’t think I’d have the right to request people not to do it.
“Keep a blank slate” is a way of being charitable, and, yes, sometimes it may be good to be charitable, not just rational. But even before that I think that a sizable chunk of real-life stereotyping is not rational.
If they added appropriate error bars and willingness to update to the probability distributions, it might not be so awful.
And when I say “error bars”, I don’t just mean allowing for experimental error, I mean allowing for the possibility that the thinking which led to the probability distribution was motivated by the desire to maintain or expand a stereotype.