The issue of stereotypes can be broken into two parts - i) How they are formed and ii) How they are used.
Bad stereotypes(not negative stereotypes) are either formed on poor sources of knowledge (think memes or online cherry picked content) or are used to enact broad institutional policies(eg. if women are disallowed from holding the post of a CEO).
Its always good to discuss stereotypes and cross check them with data. And specific stereotypes can always be debated. But rejecting the very concept of stereotypes is impractical, and probably insane. Censorship and shaming, as usual, are not appropriate solutions to counter harmful effects of stereotypes
It seems wrong to characterize believing what a person says about themselves or what they are planning to do as stereotyping. Clearly, it is stereotyping to make predictions about what sort of personality or character a person has based on immutable characteristics, but is it stereotyping to do so based on things people have chosen? This is so broad that I am hard pressed to think of something that doesn’t count as a stereotype. I’m sure there must be some, but still, this Venn diagram has too much intersection.
I don't think this quibble undermines the basic argument presented in the article, but perhaps it makes it seem less persuasive because the author is trying a bit too hard and lost perspective.
This does seem like a key difference. What about stereotypes of political or religious groups? You can choose to join or leave these groups. Maybe they’re somewhere in between immutable traits and declarations of one’s intentions?
Something that comes to mind of the "stereotyping based on choices" sort is "Vegans will always tell you about how they are vegan, and how great it is". Being vegan isn't an immutable feature, but there is strong correlation between making the choice and wanting to tell everyone about it. Another example might be how people who quit smoking are hyper keen to tell smokers to quit (I am not personally aware of that one, but it is what I am told.)
I think you are right that if an individual tells you they are going to do X, thinking they are going to do X is not stereotyping; the reason there is that you are making judgements about the individual based on individual features (specifically telling you X) and not based on some group they are part of, whether due to immutable features or choices. Stereotyping seems to require applying statistical evaluations from the group to the individuals in that group.
Yet another brilliant post. You have quickly turned into one of my favorite writers and one of the few writers I read immediately when the email shows up in my inbox.
I think the best argument against stereotypes would be that individuals may not be given a fair chance due to beliefs about a group they belong to. Let’s say a football coach believes white guys aren’t fast enough to play positions like cornerback which require exceptional speed. He’s correct that most cornerbacks are black, but an individual white cornerback may not get a chance despite being qualified and this seems unfair.
You addressed this in Part C, and I don’t personally agree with this argument. However, I do think it’s the best one opponents could offer.
Excellent article, including the references. And interesting point.
As far as I can reconstruct it, the argument against statistical evidence seems to proceed as follows:
P1: Employing statistical evidence is useful for an agent, as it, like the consideration of evidence more generally, reduces the risk of misjudging a situation.
P2: Employing statistical evidence imposes a cost upon individuals who deviate from the statistical measure (e.g., mean, median, mode / majority frequency), as when a gifted athlete from a generally non-athletic population is disregarded or must bear the expense of demonstrating their exception to the rule.
P3: There exist particular groups towards whose members we bear a moral duty of not imposing additional costs.
C1: Therefore, it is morally impermissible to act upon (certain) statistical evidence when interacting with members of these specified groups.
P4: Most people can't actually comply with a rule like C1 because they are idiots, bad people, ...
C2: Therefore, it is wrong for most people to form doxastic states based on statistical evidence
-----
P1 > The desirability of such superior accuracy, however, is contingent upon the agent’s moral disposition. In a good actor, higher accuracy is desirable, enabling them to act more effectively, whether toward maximizing utility, fulfilling duties, or cultivating virtue. Conversely, higher accuracy becomes undesirable in a bad actor, such as a terrorist, as it merely enhances the effective execution of a destructive goal, like optimizing a bomb's placement.
P3 > tbd. But even if accurate, C1 does not seem to follow. For if an individual points a firearm at you, you should think that they are likely to intend to shoot (if there is statistical evidence that the vast majority of people who point guns at others intend to shoot them).
Your defense of stereotypes assumes that they emerge innocently from empirical observation. But this ignores the strategic possibility that any game theorist would recognize: if stereotypes are treated as reliable by default, then agents with greater power and control over public narratives have every incentive to manufacture and propagate false, harmful, and self-fulfilling stereotypes.
In other words, the very system of trust in stereotypes amplifies the power of symbolic manipulation and degrades accuracy in the long run. Stereotypes suffer from Reverse Tinkerbell Effect: the more people accept stereotypes as useful and reliable, the less useful and reliable they become. The Nash equilibrium, in this case, calls for quasi-systematic skepticism—not benevolent naiveté. Being skeptical of stereotypes, therefore, is not just prudent; it is rational and moral.
I disagree with the post. You clearly don't mention what the problem is with most critics of stereotypes. It's like someone would have argued in 1860 "I'm against slavery", and another responded "There's nothing wrong with working in agriculture." Yeah true, but that's not the issue.
The big problem are wrong or exaggerated stereotypes that are negative. And there are many of them. What people in the Middle East think about Jews, anti-market/anti-corporation views, the belief that only women can be victims of domestic violence, STEM nerds are autistic creeps, etc. Right now the U.S. is extremely polarized because of false and negative stereotypes of political ideologies (right-wing and left-wing) or parties (Republicans and Democrats). They each falsely accuse each other of the worst possible things, and this division has the potential to destroy the country.
Stereotypes are bad and shoud be fought against. I think everyone agrees with it (you could have called your last book "Progressive stereotypes and why they're wrong"), but anti-wokists somehow pretend to defend stereotypes to own the libs. But no, stereotypes are bad, and we should reduce them.
Honestly at this point I think the U.S. should make it illegal for politicians to have social media accounts, negative campaigning should be illegal too ("My opponent wants to raise taxes because he thinks that will help the budget and will not have negative effects on the private economy, but I disagree and here's why" is okay, but "My oppponent is a communist who hates every productive member of society and wants to tax the shit out of them!!!" not). If not, the negative stereotypes in politics could destroy the country.
Stereotypes are great. All of the “bad” stereotypes you cite are bad because they are *false*.
But true stereotypes are awesome.
Consider Steve Sailers famous 2003 article saying that the Iraq war was a bad idea because Arabs were inbred cousin fucking low iq trash, and therefore nation building there is impossible. Had Americans correctly stereotyped Arabs they could have avoided the entire war on terror. Similarly, Europe could have avoided letting that trash immigrate and ruin their countries.
Stereotyping blacks could have avoided BLM, affirmative action, and woke.
Well yeah, if stereotypes are false then they're bad. So at least we agree that *these stereotypes* are bad, right? (Curious to see what stereotypes I mentioned you think are "false". It's not false that STEM nerds are on average less socially skilled, or that most serious domestic violence is committed against women, maybe you meant stereotypes about Jews or markets?)
Your examples though show again the harm of stereotypes. I was against the Iraq War (well retroactively, I was too young to have an opinion back then) and against BLM, but you don't have to have such negative stereotypes about Arabs and blacks to oppose these things, and having these negative stereotypes about them could lead to harm in many other ways. In fact, stereotypes could be used to discredit your own anti-woke views: Studies show that conservatives in the U.S. today have on average lower IQ than liberals, this could be used to say that all opposition to wokeness are just dumb racists (would be false, of course).
"don't have to have such negative stereotypes about Arabs and blacks to oppose these things"
I disagree. I've been watching this play out my whole life and I don't think it's possible to oppose evil with extremely broken mental models that ignore foundational facts.
If you look at say BLM you essentially get a lot of people going "I know blacks and whites are supposed have equal outcomes, because they have equal genetics, therefore SOMETHING must be holding the back." The something one generation is systematic racism or implicit bias or micro aggressions or whatever. In ten or twenty years when everyone forgets how stupid BLM was there will be a new set of reasons all claiming to be "the something". Because "the something" just has to be there, it's a logical outgrowth of the belief in physical equality.
I know you'ld like to go to some earlier "something" out of a Thomas Sowell book (culture culture something something). That explanation just didn't have legs. It became "victim blaming" and anyway if whites caused bad black culture then its still white peoples fault.
People want results. When a particular "something" inevitably doesn't get results people move on. You couldn't get more of a Sowell consensus then 80s Reaganism on the problem with blacks.
But you know, Eastside High School is still a shithole after the events of that movie. It's ranked 311/316 in New Jersey. Here is the top cultural output (platinum song) it produced in 2016:
So when "culture" inevitably fails to bring about equality, people move onto something else. It's just not defensible.
I could go down a long list.
The invasion of Iraq was a good idea because we would bring Democracy to the Middle East just like we did with Germany and Japan, and if you don't think Arabs are capable of Democracy then you're racist.
Similarly we should let infinity brown immigrants into America because they are just like us and they will inevitably assimilate just like Germans or Irish did. And so many of them are refugees seeking asylum so it's only humane to do.
I'm pretty skeptical on the so called liberal higher IQ. This is only if you take whites only. If you include all races, liberals are dumber than conservatives. Simon elaborates on this and you can find other sources below.
"this could be used to say that all opposition to wokeness are just dumb racists"
I think the bullet you need to bite is that the only way to resist wokeness is to be racist. To not care about people calling you racist. To view your own ethnic interests and nature as legitimate. It's what literally every other race does. Once you do this you can engage in some kind of realpolitik bargaining.
What's happened is that a minority of whites, liberals, has allied with browns to harness political and cultural power. To get away with this exercise of force they've deployed intense social pressure towards whites sense of guilt. Only when you overcome this sense of guilt can you fight back.
The only real way to overcome this sense of guilt it to recognize that the current unequal state of things is roughly NATURAL. That is not an aberration that requires some kind of "fix". That nobody and nothing is responsible for it beyond evolution.
Absent this, there is no constant logical way to fight back. Yes, every 10-20 years people will get so fed up by the disastrous results of the latest "equality" measures that they try to shunt them to the side and ignore them as best they can for awhile. But they tend to "remain on the books" and the institutions and young people internalize them some more and they come back each generation even worse. Without a real explanation for inequality it just keeps re-occuring.
This makes Cofnas half right. The part where he is wrong is that if you know these things but you are still a coward who's afraid of being called racist or can't handle social pressure none of it matters.
First, the IQ gap between conservatives and liberals actually shows that the conservative average IQ is about 2 points higher. Cofnas is talking about the data on whites only. White conservatives have average IQs 8.5 points lower than white liberals. But this is unsurprising. Smart white conservatives are allied with white rabble, and smart white liberals are allied with black rabble, so of course when you compare whites with whites, the liberal IQ is higher because the white rabble on the conservative side bring down the white conservative average.
Tying smart conservatives to Qanon is as unfair as tying smart liberals to Hotep theory. The popular perception that conservatives are dumb arises from the fact that the mainstream (liberal) media loves to write stories on Qanon and almost totally ignores Hotep.
Given that the all-races conservative IQ is higher than the all-races liberal IQ, It is not clear why Cofnas thinks that the white liberal-conservative IQ gap is such a problem for conservatives. Cofnas correctly points out that you need lots of smart people to staff the media outlets and think tanks that a successful movement needs. But if liberals are trying to staff their institutions with black liberals and other nonwhite liberals who on average have IQs 2 points lower than the white conservatives who staff conservative institutions, wouldn’t that be an advantage for conservatives?
There’s also the distinction between social conservatism and economic conservatism. GSS data shows that people with libertarian economic beliefs (economically conservative) tend to have higher IQs.
[T[he observed relationship between intelligence and conservatism largely depends on how conservatism is operationalized. Social conservatism correlates with lower cognitive ability test scores, but economic conservatism correlates with higher scores (Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, & Haidt, 2012; Kemmelmeier 2008).
You have an agenda. You are really fond of strawman arguments.
There are statistical facts. And there are stereotypes. Some stereotypes are based on statistical facts. Some statistical facts haven’t made their way into the popular consciousness. Some stereotypes are not supported by statistical facts. So we are dealing a typical Venn diagram of intersection here.
You say a statistical fact A is a stereotype A’. Then you list the evils of stereotypes in general. Then you declare the statistical fact A evil and wrong.
What’s your IQ, if you don’t mind me asking?
Do you consider yourself more masculine with low agreeability or more feminine for that matter?
Why did you write such a long drivel while saying very little? Are you trying to impress some woman?
Humans are much better at understanding averages than variance. Stereotypes are a sort of average for a group, but they don’t tell you how much variance there is within the group.
For example, men and women differ substantially in grip strength with little overlap in the distributions. So a random man is very likely to have more grip strength than a random woman. Men and women also differ in personality, but with substantial overlap in the distributions. A random woman has only a 60% chance of scoring higher in neuroticism than a random man.
I think it’s important to distinguish cases like this. The variance tells me how strongly I should hold on to my stereotype (or prior) in the face of new information. (This is implied by Bayesian updating, but I think the principle applies even if you’re not a Bayesian.) Rather than say “Don’t use stereotypes” perhaps we should say “Don’t forget about the variance too.”
Regarding the section on whether stereotypes can be oppressive, I don't think it's sufficient to merely point to evidence that individuating information has much greater effects on our judgement of people than stereotypes. Principally, because the stereotypes stop evidence gathering early (e.g. not calling a man for an interview based on his name), and secondarily due to the well documented halo effect- we are more likely to interpret individual information in a way consistent with our preexisting stereotypes.
I think most progressive people genuinely believe that stereotypes are generally false or exaggerated in the extreme. In my experience, these people genuinely believe that stereotypes are self fulfilling prophecies and in their absence, differences would be much smaller or non-existent. To be fair to these people, there are examples of genuinely erroneous, stereotypes like thinking, illegal immigrants are more likely to be involved in non-immigration related crimes or past generation’s belief that gay people were more likely to be paedophiles. There are certainly quite a few mechanisms in real life which could lead to inaccurate associations like the fact that your access to most of what goes on in society is highly indirect and reliant on anecdotes and media reporting, and your evolutionary instincts are not adapted to a society of our scale. In actual practice, of course, progressive people hugely overestimate how often stereotypes tend to be in accurate. Like you said, it’s ironically, an example of an inaccurate stereotype itself. But that’s the underlying reasoning and indeed people only retreat to other arguments once you demonstrate that they are mistaken in thinking stereotypes tend to be erroneous. It’s a case of people adopting bad policies because they started with bad assumptions. Indeed, if you start from the same assumptions, they do, you’ll come to the same conclusions. Classic case of garbage in garbage out.
One problem with stereotypes is that people who are atypical for their group will get subject to the same misjudgments over and over again for their whole lives. A negative stereotype is a tax borne by all members of a group for life.
Even if a stereotype is accurate for a person chosen at random from a group, individuals don’t revert to group stereotype at random every day. Rather, individual attributes tend to persist in the individual over their life.
A second problem is that pretty much all people think of themselves more as individuals than as a group members. It is dignity-eroding to a person to realize other people simply put them in a box. Trying to collectively avoid stereotyping is a compact conscientious humans form among ourselves to preserve dignity.
Extremely interesting post but it fails to offer quite a crucial story about how we come to reject stereotypes. I think most of us look back on the past and see there were stereotypes which we view as wrong both morally and empirically. Ie the stereotype that enslaved people are not deserving of rights because they have less developed consciousness and sense of self. I think this was a stereotype believed about many enslaved people in the past.
Was this just empirically correct? No! How did we come to reject it then? There was a moralistic and empirical rejection of the stereotype which over time enough people agreed with. We need to have some level of awareness that stereotypes, while they can reflect empirical truths, can just as often be indicative of irrational prejudice - 'just so' stories which justify the way things are and suit the people who benefit.
This post does not leave any room for future versions of us to look back and judge our stereotypes as wrong in a similar way to how we now look back on the past.
The issue of stereotypes can be broken into two parts - i) How they are formed and ii) How they are used.
Bad stereotypes(not negative stereotypes) are either formed on poor sources of knowledge (think memes or online cherry picked content) or are used to enact broad institutional policies(eg. if women are disallowed from holding the post of a CEO).
Its always good to discuss stereotypes and cross check them with data. And specific stereotypes can always be debated. But rejecting the very concept of stereotypes is impractical, and probably insane. Censorship and shaming, as usual, are not appropriate solutions to counter harmful effects of stereotypes
Excellent article, but I have a quibble.
It seems wrong to characterize believing what a person says about themselves or what they are planning to do as stereotyping. Clearly, it is stereotyping to make predictions about what sort of personality or character a person has based on immutable characteristics, but is it stereotyping to do so based on things people have chosen? This is so broad that I am hard pressed to think of something that doesn’t count as a stereotype. I’m sure there must be some, but still, this Venn diagram has too much intersection.
I don't think this quibble undermines the basic argument presented in the article, but perhaps it makes it seem less persuasive because the author is trying a bit too hard and lost perspective.
This does seem like a key difference. What about stereotypes of political or religious groups? You can choose to join or leave these groups. Maybe they’re somewhere in between immutable traits and declarations of one’s intentions?
Something that comes to mind of the "stereotyping based on choices" sort is "Vegans will always tell you about how they are vegan, and how great it is". Being vegan isn't an immutable feature, but there is strong correlation between making the choice and wanting to tell everyone about it. Another example might be how people who quit smoking are hyper keen to tell smokers to quit (I am not personally aware of that one, but it is what I am told.)
I think you are right that if an individual tells you they are going to do X, thinking they are going to do X is not stereotyping; the reason there is that you are making judgements about the individual based on individual features (specifically telling you X) and not based on some group they are part of, whether due to immutable features or choices. Stereotyping seems to require applying statistical evaluations from the group to the individuals in that group.
Yet another brilliant post. You have quickly turned into one of my favorite writers and one of the few writers I read immediately when the email shows up in my inbox.
I think the best argument against stereotypes would be that individuals may not be given a fair chance due to beliefs about a group they belong to. Let’s say a football coach believes white guys aren’t fast enough to play positions like cornerback which require exceptional speed. He’s correct that most cornerbacks are black, but an individual white cornerback may not get a chance despite being qualified and this seems unfair.
You addressed this in Part C, and I don’t personally agree with this argument. However, I do think it’s the best one opponents could offer.
Clearly you have excellent judgement.
Excellent article, including the references. And interesting point.
As far as I can reconstruct it, the argument against statistical evidence seems to proceed as follows:
P1: Employing statistical evidence is useful for an agent, as it, like the consideration of evidence more generally, reduces the risk of misjudging a situation.
P2: Employing statistical evidence imposes a cost upon individuals who deviate from the statistical measure (e.g., mean, median, mode / majority frequency), as when a gifted athlete from a generally non-athletic population is disregarded or must bear the expense of demonstrating their exception to the rule.
P3: There exist particular groups towards whose members we bear a moral duty of not imposing additional costs.
C1: Therefore, it is morally impermissible to act upon (certain) statistical evidence when interacting with members of these specified groups.
P4: Most people can't actually comply with a rule like C1 because they are idiots, bad people, ...
C2: Therefore, it is wrong for most people to form doxastic states based on statistical evidence
-----
P1 > The desirability of such superior accuracy, however, is contingent upon the agent’s moral disposition. In a good actor, higher accuracy is desirable, enabling them to act more effectively, whether toward maximizing utility, fulfilling duties, or cultivating virtue. Conversely, higher accuracy becomes undesirable in a bad actor, such as a terrorist, as it merely enhances the effective execution of a destructive goal, like optimizing a bomb's placement.
P3 > tbd. But even if accurate, C1 does not seem to follow. For if an individual points a firearm at you, you should think that they are likely to intend to shoot (if there is statistical evidence that the vast majority of people who point guns at others intend to shoot them).
Your defense of stereotypes assumes that they emerge innocently from empirical observation. But this ignores the strategic possibility that any game theorist would recognize: if stereotypes are treated as reliable by default, then agents with greater power and control over public narratives have every incentive to manufacture and propagate false, harmful, and self-fulfilling stereotypes.
In other words, the very system of trust in stereotypes amplifies the power of symbolic manipulation and degrades accuracy in the long run. Stereotypes suffer from Reverse Tinkerbell Effect: the more people accept stereotypes as useful and reliable, the less useful and reliable they become. The Nash equilibrium, in this case, calls for quasi-systematic skepticism—not benevolent naiveté. Being skeptical of stereotypes, therefore, is not just prudent; it is rational and moral.
I disagree with the post. You clearly don't mention what the problem is with most critics of stereotypes. It's like someone would have argued in 1860 "I'm against slavery", and another responded "There's nothing wrong with working in agriculture." Yeah true, but that's not the issue.
The big problem are wrong or exaggerated stereotypes that are negative. And there are many of them. What people in the Middle East think about Jews, anti-market/anti-corporation views, the belief that only women can be victims of domestic violence, STEM nerds are autistic creeps, etc. Right now the U.S. is extremely polarized because of false and negative stereotypes of political ideologies (right-wing and left-wing) or parties (Republicans and Democrats). They each falsely accuse each other of the worst possible things, and this division has the potential to destroy the country.
Stereotypes are bad and shoud be fought against. I think everyone agrees with it (you could have called your last book "Progressive stereotypes and why they're wrong"), but anti-wokists somehow pretend to defend stereotypes to own the libs. But no, stereotypes are bad, and we should reduce them.
Honestly at this point I think the U.S. should make it illegal for politicians to have social media accounts, negative campaigning should be illegal too ("My opponent wants to raise taxes because he thinks that will help the budget and will not have negative effects on the private economy, but I disagree and here's why" is okay, but "My oppponent is a communist who hates every productive member of society and wants to tax the shit out of them!!!" not). If not, the negative stereotypes in politics could destroy the country.
Stereotypes are great. All of the “bad” stereotypes you cite are bad because they are *false*.
But true stereotypes are awesome.
Consider Steve Sailers famous 2003 article saying that the Iraq war was a bad idea because Arabs were inbred cousin fucking low iq trash, and therefore nation building there is impossible. Had Americans correctly stereotyped Arabs they could have avoided the entire war on terror. Similarly, Europe could have avoided letting that trash immigrate and ruin their countries.
Stereotyping blacks could have avoided BLM, affirmative action, and woke.
Etc
Well yeah, if stereotypes are false then they're bad. So at least we agree that *these stereotypes* are bad, right? (Curious to see what stereotypes I mentioned you think are "false". It's not false that STEM nerds are on average less socially skilled, or that most serious domestic violence is committed against women, maybe you meant stereotypes about Jews or markets?)
Your examples though show again the harm of stereotypes. I was against the Iraq War (well retroactively, I was too young to have an opinion back then) and against BLM, but you don't have to have such negative stereotypes about Arabs and blacks to oppose these things, and having these negative stereotypes about them could lead to harm in many other ways. In fact, stereotypes could be used to discredit your own anti-woke views: Studies show that conservatives in the U.S. today have on average lower IQ than liberals, this could be used to say that all opposition to wokeness are just dumb racists (would be false, of course).
"don't have to have such negative stereotypes about Arabs and blacks to oppose these things"
I disagree. I've been watching this play out my whole life and I don't think it's possible to oppose evil with extremely broken mental models that ignore foundational facts.
If you look at say BLM you essentially get a lot of people going "I know blacks and whites are supposed have equal outcomes, because they have equal genetics, therefore SOMETHING must be holding the back." The something one generation is systematic racism or implicit bias or micro aggressions or whatever. In ten or twenty years when everyone forgets how stupid BLM was there will be a new set of reasons all claiming to be "the something". Because "the something" just has to be there, it's a logical outgrowth of the belief in physical equality.
I know you'ld like to go to some earlier "something" out of a Thomas Sowell book (culture culture something something). That explanation just didn't have legs. It became "victim blaming" and anyway if whites caused bad black culture then its still white peoples fault.
People want results. When a particular "something" inevitably doesn't get results people move on. You couldn't get more of a Sowell consensus then 80s Reaganism on the problem with blacks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_on_Me_(film)
But you know, Eastside High School is still a shithole after the events of that movie. It's ranked 311/316 in New Jersey. Here is the top cultural output (platinum song) it produced in 2016:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbARTyio_0Q
So when "culture" inevitably fails to bring about equality, people move onto something else. It's just not defensible.
I could go down a long list.
The invasion of Iraq was a good idea because we would bring Democracy to the Middle East just like we did with Germany and Japan, and if you don't think Arabs are capable of Democracy then you're racist.
Similarly we should let infinity brown immigrants into America because they are just like us and they will inevitably assimilate just like Germans or Irish did. And so many of them are refugees seeking asylum so it's only humane to do.
I'm pretty skeptical on the so called liberal higher IQ. This is only if you take whites only. If you include all races, liberals are dumber than conservatives. Simon elaborates on this and you can find other sources below.
"this could be used to say that all opposition to wokeness are just dumb racists"
I think the bullet you need to bite is that the only way to resist wokeness is to be racist. To not care about people calling you racist. To view your own ethnic interests and nature as legitimate. It's what literally every other race does. Once you do this you can engage in some kind of realpolitik bargaining.
What's happened is that a minority of whites, liberals, has allied with browns to harness political and cultural power. To get away with this exercise of force they've deployed intense social pressure towards whites sense of guilt. Only when you overcome this sense of guilt can you fight back.
The only real way to overcome this sense of guilt it to recognize that the current unequal state of things is roughly NATURAL. That is not an aberration that requires some kind of "fix". That nobody and nothing is responsible for it beyond evolution.
Absent this, there is no constant logical way to fight back. Yes, every 10-20 years people will get so fed up by the disastrous results of the latest "equality" measures that they try to shunt them to the side and ignore them as best they can for awhile. But they tend to "remain on the books" and the institutions and young people internalize them some more and they come back each generation even worse. Without a real explanation for inequality it just keeps re-occuring.
This makes Cofnas half right. The part where he is wrong is that if you know these things but you are still a coward who's afraid of being called racist or can't handle social pressure none of it matters.
https://simonlaird.substack.com/p/yes-the-right-has-enough-smart-people
First, the IQ gap between conservatives and liberals actually shows that the conservative average IQ is about 2 points higher. Cofnas is talking about the data on whites only. White conservatives have average IQs 8.5 points lower than white liberals. But this is unsurprising. Smart white conservatives are allied with white rabble, and smart white liberals are allied with black rabble, so of course when you compare whites with whites, the liberal IQ is higher because the white rabble on the conservative side bring down the white conservative average.
Tying smart conservatives to Qanon is as unfair as tying smart liberals to Hotep theory. The popular perception that conservatives are dumb arises from the fact that the mainstream (liberal) media loves to write stories on Qanon and almost totally ignores Hotep.
Given that the all-races conservative IQ is higher than the all-races liberal IQ, It is not clear why Cofnas thinks that the white liberal-conservative IQ gap is such a problem for conservatives. Cofnas correctly points out that you need lots of smart people to staff the media outlets and think tanks that a successful movement needs. But if liberals are trying to staff their institutions with black liberals and other nonwhite liberals who on average have IQs 2 points lower than the white conservatives who staff conservative institutions, wouldn’t that be an advantage for conservatives?
There’s also the distinction between social conservatism and economic conservatism. GSS data shows that people with libertarian economic beliefs (economically conservative) tend to have higher IQs.
[T[he observed relationship between intelligence and conservatism largely depends on how conservatism is operationalized. Social conservatism correlates with lower cognitive ability test scores, but economic conservatism correlates with higher scores (Iyer, Koleva, Graham, Ditto, & Haidt, 2012; Kemmelmeier 2008).
You have an agenda. You are really fond of strawman arguments.
There are statistical facts. And there are stereotypes. Some stereotypes are based on statistical facts. Some statistical facts haven’t made their way into the popular consciousness. Some stereotypes are not supported by statistical facts. So we are dealing a typical Venn diagram of intersection here.
You say a statistical fact A is a stereotype A’. Then you list the evils of stereotypes in general. Then you declare the statistical fact A evil and wrong.
What’s your IQ, if you don’t mind me asking?
Do you consider yourself more masculine with low agreeability or more feminine for that matter?
Why did you write such a long drivel while saying very little? Are you trying to impress some woman?
Humans are much better at understanding averages than variance. Stereotypes are a sort of average for a group, but they don’t tell you how much variance there is within the group.
For example, men and women differ substantially in grip strength with little overlap in the distributions. So a random man is very likely to have more grip strength than a random woman. Men and women also differ in personality, but with substantial overlap in the distributions. A random woman has only a 60% chance of scoring higher in neuroticism than a random man.
I think it’s important to distinguish cases like this. The variance tells me how strongly I should hold on to my stereotype (or prior) in the face of new information. (This is implied by Bayesian updating, but I think the principle applies even if you’re not a Bayesian.) Rather than say “Don’t use stereotypes” perhaps we should say “Don’t forget about the variance too.”
Regarding the section on whether stereotypes can be oppressive, I don't think it's sufficient to merely point to evidence that individuating information has much greater effects on our judgement of people than stereotypes. Principally, because the stereotypes stop evidence gathering early (e.g. not calling a man for an interview based on his name), and secondarily due to the well documented halo effect- we are more likely to interpret individual information in a way consistent with our preexisting stereotypes.
I think most progressive people genuinely believe that stereotypes are generally false or exaggerated in the extreme. In my experience, these people genuinely believe that stereotypes are self fulfilling prophecies and in their absence, differences would be much smaller or non-existent. To be fair to these people, there are examples of genuinely erroneous, stereotypes like thinking, illegal immigrants are more likely to be involved in non-immigration related crimes or past generation’s belief that gay people were more likely to be paedophiles. There are certainly quite a few mechanisms in real life which could lead to inaccurate associations like the fact that your access to most of what goes on in society is highly indirect and reliant on anecdotes and media reporting, and your evolutionary instincts are not adapted to a society of our scale. In actual practice, of course, progressive people hugely overestimate how often stereotypes tend to be in accurate. Like you said, it’s ironically, an example of an inaccurate stereotype itself. But that’s the underlying reasoning and indeed people only retreat to other arguments once you demonstrate that they are mistaken in thinking stereotypes tend to be erroneous. It’s a case of people adopting bad policies because they started with bad assumptions. Indeed, if you start from the same assumptions, they do, you’ll come to the same conclusions. Classic case of garbage in garbage out.
One problem with stereotypes is that people who are atypical for their group will get subject to the same misjudgments over and over again for their whole lives. A negative stereotype is a tax borne by all members of a group for life.
Even if a stereotype is accurate for a person chosen at random from a group, individuals don’t revert to group stereotype at random every day. Rather, individual attributes tend to persist in the individual over their life.
A second problem is that pretty much all people think of themselves more as individuals than as a group members. It is dignity-eroding to a person to realize other people simply put them in a box. Trying to collectively avoid stereotyping is a compact conscientious humans form among ourselves to preserve dignity.
Extremely interesting post but it fails to offer quite a crucial story about how we come to reject stereotypes. I think most of us look back on the past and see there were stereotypes which we view as wrong both morally and empirically. Ie the stereotype that enslaved people are not deserving of rights because they have less developed consciousness and sense of self. I think this was a stereotype believed about many enslaved people in the past.
Was this just empirically correct? No! How did we come to reject it then? There was a moralistic and empirical rejection of the stereotype which over time enough people agreed with. We need to have some level of awareness that stereotypes, while they can reflect empirical truths, can just as often be indicative of irrational prejudice - 'just so' stories which justify the way things are and suit the people who benefit.
This post does not leave any room for future versions of us to look back and judge our stereotypes as wrong in a similar way to how we now look back on the past.
I’ve often thought the same thing. Though stereotypes can suck for the individuals who fall outside them and are thus routinely misjudged.
Great insight. Great text.