So, how does the “psychology has proved that stereotypes are
accurate” crowd contend with the fact that a number of common
stereotypes are contradictory? Or that plenty of humans have multiple
identites that may have contradictory stereotypes applied to them? Or
that different cultures have different stereotypes, which again, may be
contradictory?
This, was also thinking of Jussim.
"Women are more likely than man to be in social jobs" is almost painfully obvious. Or even "jews are wealthier". He really sticks with totally milquetoast takes.
And then somehow you have wannabe psychologists pretending that *therefore* it means women are just too emotional to vote, or that the likelihood of you blowing yourself up if muslim is high.
> "Women are more likely than man to be in social jobs" is almost painfully obvious.
Depends on how you define "social jobs". I read some of the primary literature, and someone who stays at home and paints is apparently in a people-oriented job, while someone who hangs out with their buddies fixing cars at the garage is apparently in a thing-oriented job. Think about how backward that is.
Some of our stereotypes around "men's jobs" and "women's jobs" have leaked into how researchers define "thing-oriented" and "people-oriented" jobs. Knitting and dress-making and going to the craft store end up being defined as "social" because we associate them with women, even though anybody who wasn't steeped in our stereotypes would instantly recognize that they're not.
Cordelia Fine [wrote some interesting stuff about this](https://books.google.ca/books?id=Ie8lDQAAQBAJ&pg=PT85#v=onepage&q&f=false) in *Testosterone Rex*.
Suddenly I'm reminded of [Grace Hopper telling *Cosmopolitan* in the '60s](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programming-used-to-be-womens-work-718061/) that computer programming was a good career for young women: With all the experience that planning dinners gives for organizing and scheduling resources, women are naturals at programming.
or the thing I noticed a whole lot doing tech support in the '90s, where the office admin lady also became the sysadmin because it's just "admin" after all and so I was dealing with them
I hope every one of them used a year shoved into that role to get a new job doing it at 3x the pay
and fundamentally, the skills are the same: 1. basic joined-up thinking 2. keep shit organised and functional 3. wiping whiny brats' arses
Putting even that aside... Better I don't start complaining about the morons making up social categories/traits, and then tarring everything ***that pleases them*** with the same brush.
Pretty sure Jussim’s *Social Perception and Social Reality* was the first book I attempted to really dive into, and he’s a pretty good locus for reading about stereotype accuracy stuff - even if he’s misleading or straight up wrong. My favourite easy example is an article he wrote for PsychologyToday, arguing that due to a (n alleged) error in how tests scores were weighted by a paper arguing that stereotype threat is a problem in education, that in fact the original authors’ conclusions should have gone the *opposite* way - and that their data supported stereotype accuracy. This was a (really egregious) statical error on Jussim’s own part, and while the weighting was fudge should not have been used to completely throw out the original conclusions: that’s especially a problem because in that article Jussim was writing for a popular audience who likely wouldn’t have been able to spot Jussim’s own error, and simply would have followed his strident tone.
The study was conducted on whichever American undergrads decided
to show up for a candy bar.
The allegations involving the Principal Investigator and
inappropriate off-campus conduct were investigated by the University and
found to be inconclusive, okay, so you can just back off
already, geez, it’s like a man can’t even use the student body as a
dating pool any longer, cancel culture at it’s worst I say
Maybe it's just me but I never really got the point of aphorism as a genre. I remember reading the entirety of La Rochefoucauld's *maximes* and I didn't feel like I had actually *learned* anything beyond the most mundane ideas - that we are flawed but social animals, prone to hypocrisy and self-delusion? Did this rather mundane truth need to be stated with so many variations? And the fact that they come into so easily digestible wordbites makes it easy to gulp them one after the other, so to speak, just to see if there's a bit more to the original point; and at the end you're left with a slightly uneasy feeling akin to the emptiness after completing some addictive minigame. It seems to me that aphorisms and their success are a prime example of mistaking eloquence for intelligence, *bons mots* for actual insights; and that their fans have cargo-culted "brevity is the soul of wit" to the point of meaninglessness.
/u/noactuallyitspoptart you're the cultured one round these parts (at least the cultured one who actually shows up on here), what's your take about this
I had an answer I was formulating here, but I’m still trying to work out how not to turn it into an essay.
Suffice to say that it involves the reception rather than the original intent of the author, whether or not a particular aphorism imparts genuine wisdom across the ages. Marcus Aurelius, for example, didn’t write his for publication, in spite of the fact that they wound up there anyway. The “fans” as you rightly put them make that mistake more than they don’t.
Koans are interesting in this respect, in that they (often) attempt to capture a pre-cognitive motivation towards thinking, rather than laying out how that thinking should or could go.
Thinks to look up to guide your own way of thinking about how to consider the history of the aphorism include: “commonplace books”; histories of the development of haiku; the Early Modern to Enlightenment Periods and how they dealt - on a social level - with *bon mots* on an everyday level; the Victorian period and comic figures satirised as having all too many clever words; the post-war atomic age and the function of propaganda in driving the obsession with sloganeering, not to mention the role of Pop-Art (ha. ha.) in mainstreaming that way of looking at things.
Draw your own conclusions I guess, and ask any more specific questions if you’d like, I’ll have an answer somewhere.
There’s another bit that’s worth saying. To my knowledge in Modern English there was a phase (typified by *Tristram Shandy*) of satirising the extent to which people would go to say some inherited aphorism in order to feel clever. Make of that what you will in your researches.
I would say that reading La Rochefaucauld’s maxims cover to cover has limited value; a person has only so many ideas that they tend to hammer again and again. Books of quotations from various authors can be enjoyable toilet reading, and occasionally one will come to mind when you’re trying to make a difficult decision and supply you with the necessary conviction.
I’m pretty sure that if you were to do a linear regression on top of
IQ and parental wealth you would get a model that is a better predictor
than IQ alone.
However, “IQ is the single greatest predictor of life outcomes out of
those that justify my racist and eugenicist views.” doesn’t quite have
the same ring to it.
That is true - that IQ and wealth combined predicts better than just IQ alone, but IQ is a better predictor of success than wealth in most societies. You're missing conscientiousness there, that's an important predictor too.
s/predict/correlate/g
It's not that surprising that a metric tailor-made to correlate with what psychologists think of as success, does in fact correlate with success - it's way more surprising that it doesn't do that great of a job at it. "But it's the most replicable finding of psychology" isn't that much a praise of IQ than a faint damning of psychology as a whole.
I think this person is soon going to be both banned from here and themotte, a rare honour. (I saw some themotte post history which is too nasty even for themotte (E: well, didn't see it now, either it was deleted or I looked at the wrong motter ;) It had to do with sexism).
Nope. In order to claim that something is a good predictor, you have to either convincingly show that it is independent from the distribution of the outcome (no reverse causality, no selection bias, etc) or that you are controlling for all possible channels through which this dependency happens, such that the conditional predictor satisfies independence. Any test meant to measure innate ability proved laughably bad at the former, and nobody can seriously claim to be even able to observe, let alone control for, the confounders. [In this very interesting paper](https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/KearneyLevine_IncomeInequalityUpwardMobility_ConferenceDraft.pdf), you can see that not only parental income, not only residential segregation, but even the income inequality of the county you group up in influences your AFTQ score. A measure of innate ability of reliable that changes with the Gini lol.
Yes, but if you are measuring success as income, then your causal graph is a mere cycle, since (by definition) income create wealth and (in 99% of cases) wealth creates income. Once you have a cycle, you can throw anything in it, and by sheer interpolation it might look significant. Learn some fucking econometrics.
So post a refutation of the claim that stereotypes are most often true.
If they were invalid, as in, had no predictive value, why do they even exist ? Isn't stereotyping is just the logical consequence of abstract thinking?
Well I’m pretty sure I’ve written about it before, including in this thread, and at greater length elsewhere. Mostly I don’t feel particularly obliged to explain in any greater detail just for you after having a gander at your post history: don’t take that personally, I’m just making the judgement that in this case my stereotype of somebody who *has* that post history isn’t likely to be swayed by my saying what I have to say once again. The broader issue is that if you define a concept widely enough then it should be trivially easy to find a high replication rate that suits your purposes.
Of course, the major function in public science of the “stereotypes are true” literature is to argue that contested stereotypes (as in “stereotype threat” as it applies to IQ, race etc.) are actually accurate, which is by making such broad generalisations *about* stereotypes simply talks at cross-purposes with the “stereotype threat” literature, which aims at more specific and parsimonious cases where stereotypes are indeed false and potentially harmful.
I don’t know, I’ve not done enough research to decide one way or another, my role is to point out that the stereotype accuracy research is given more credit than it deserves or that its advocates claim
Point is I’m smart enough to call bullshit when I see bullshit: I’m not advocating either way on the literature except to point out when psychologists - be they Lee Jussim or anybody else - rather play the game in their own favour, and then make a big media career out of doing so
My MSc in philosophy of science was focused on economics, where I wrote a dissertation about how a faulty and nonetheless influential result got half way around the world advocating austerity (at the wrong time for austerity) before anybody bothered to check for faults
So I’m more interested in questioning the likes of Jussim making strident claims for his own sub-field than I am interested in whether his putative opponents are more right
This culture war shit bores me.
In a way, Jussim did exactly the same thing you did.
For culture war reasons, politically minded 'scientists' decided to advocate that stereotypes are not true - which got so much traction people really believe it, even though there was prior research suggesting they are often true.
So, how does the “psychology has proved that stereotypes are accurate” crowd contend with the fact that a number of common stereotypes are contradictory? Or that plenty of humans have multiple identites that may have contradictory stereotypes applied to them? Or that different cultures have different stereotypes, which again, may be contradictory?
Reliable Results in Psychology, a Complete List:
…
The study was conducted on whichever American undergrads decided to show up for a candy bar.
The allegations involving the Principal Investigator and inappropriate off-campus conduct were investigated by the University and found to be inconclusive, okay, so you can just back off already, geez, it’s like a man can’t even use the student body as a dating pool any longer, cancel culture at it’s worst I say
I first became aware of this gentleman when he said that Ozymandias is a bad poem because it is impossible to simultaneously frown and sneer
Somehow he had never seen the face of someone who looked at his posts
Well, the stereotype is that racists are stupid.
Gottem.
[deleted]
I’m pretty sure that if you were to do a linear regression on top of IQ and parental wealth you would get a model that is a better predictor than IQ alone.
However, “IQ is the single greatest predictor of life outcomes out of those that justify my racist and eugenicist views.” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.
[deleted]
Millions of hack 1980s comedians breathe a collective sigh of relief.
Stereotypes are not accurate at all.
PG is about two blog posts away from going mask off anyways.