[whack]

The following sentence from the essay is what I found very concerning:

"If people relied on their stereotypes more or less rationally, they would rely on them to inform judgments when they had little or no definitive information, but ignore them when they had definitive information."

The implication seems to be that as a rational person, in the absence of definitive information, you should discriminate against people on the basis of stereotypes.

[jasode]

Your finger is too quick on the trigger with the word "should" and therefore attributing malice to the author without justification. Are you sure you're not _stereotyping_ authors that have written about "stereotypes" as being closet racists instructing all of us to discriminate?!? That would be so meta.

In any case, in the paragraph immediately before your extracted quote, he wrote: "To deal with the complexity, ..."

He's saying that in absence of information we humans conduct a Bayesian prior. It's a cognitive coping mechanism. The excerpt of text that bothered you is just describing how our brains work. He's not prescribing any of the racist actions you listed. The distinction seems very clear.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fact%E2%80%93value_distinction

[whack]

You have either misread or misunderstood the section I quoted. No, the author didn't just say that "people make decisions on the basis of stereotypes." He literally said that the rational thing for a person to do in the absence of perfect information, is to make decisions on the basis of stereotypes. If you are going to claim that "the rational thing to do is XYZ," that is certainly crossing the line into an endorsement.

[Klockan]

He doesn't say that you should discriminate, just that you probably shouldn't buy a dildo to a guy.