| But you're cherry-picking stereotypes that are mostly incorrect (and look outright archaic). Whereas Lee Jussim (for example) has found that most stereotypes are mostly accurate. http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~jussim/unbearable%20accuracy%20o... Interestingly, stereotypes based on political party membership are consistently inaccurate. As the Kahneman quote I posted elsewhere shows, the reality is that resistance to reasoning using certain valid stereotypes is an ethical position, based on a desire to build a better society. It has costs in terms of sub-optimal decision making. In a democratic society, we should acknowledge this, rather than falsely and naively claiming that stereotypes are false. > I would hate to be judged and discriminated against on the basis of stereotypes, and hence, I refrain from doing the same to others. Other people are not obliged to make bad decisions because of your feelings. They should make the ethical decisions they feel are right. Statistical models are quantitative reasoning based on stereotypes. Every time you get a credit report or an insurance policy, that's based on nothing but stereotypes: just legally permissible ones, built into mathematical models. 25 year old men who buy red cars have a certain accident rate, therefore you're going to be charged for that rate. |
So your position is that if the stereotypes about Women/Blacks/Jews/Southerners/Gays were mostly accurate, it would be ok to discriminate against those groups on the basis of those stereotypes?
In my previous post, I never claimed that stereotypes were false. I stated that discrimination on the basis of stereotypes were damaging to society, and morally repugnant.
My feelings are not relevant, but the fact that you seem to be in favor of stereotypes, because you belong to a group that won't be strongly affected by it, is not relevant either. In order to form a defensible moral position, you have to look at it from the perspective of someone who doesn't know which group he will belong to (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veil_of_ignorance). And it's hard to imagine any external rational person forming the conclusion that he would like to live in a society that I described earlier.