Psychohistorian comments on Generalizing From One Example - Less Wrong

259 Post author: Yvain 28 April 2009 10:00PM

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Comment author: Alicorn 28 April 2009 10:43:51PM *  16 points [-]

This reminds me of some of the literature on fallibility of introspection. (If you have time only for one essay, read "The Unreliability of Naïve Introspection" and try the experiment with the playing card.)

As far as generalizing about an entire gender: It's extremely likely that I know a wildly unrepresentative sample of women, but why would you assume that the pickup artists don't? I imagine they meet vast numbers of women, but if they find them all at parties and clubs and bars, they're going to meet the kinds of women who go to parties and clubs and bars, not the ones who spend their time gardening at home or who go to all-women gyms to avoid being hit on or the ones who play D&D with their brothers in the basement. Even if their statements are accurate about that sort of woman (which I am not yet prepared to believe), that doesn't make them applicable to the entire gender, and the stereotype remains wildly inappropriate and offensive. If you're hearing things about men as a group that don't apply to you or any men you know, then chances are you're not hearing from someone who has a really ideal sample. If a female friend of mine complains about her sixth boyfriend in a row being a jerk, I don't conclude that men are jerks, I conclude that she has terrible taste.

Comment author: Psychohistorian 28 April 2009 10:58:25PM 9 points [-]

Not to mention that they're only talking about a specific subsection of a specific subsection, namely the women they are actually successful with. I'm assuming their batting average is well below .500, though I could be wrong. Thus, a small subsection of a small subsection of women conform to those particular stereotypes, or at least that's all you can say from that evidence.

Other examples suffer somewhat similar problems; all men may seem like chauvinistic jerks because chauvinistic jerks are quite noticeable and quite memorable. Thus, women may encounter more jerks because they get around more, rather than because most men are jerks.

Post is overall excellent, but some of those vaguely anecdotal counterexamples may well suffer from skewed reporting due to other biases.

Comment author: Z_M_Davis 29 April 2009 12:39:03AM 6 points [-]

all men may seem like chauvinistic jerks because chauvinistic jerks are quite noticeable and quite memorable. Thus, women may encounter more jerks because they get around more, rather than because most men are jerks

Yes, see also the availability heuristic. P(A|B) does not in general equal P(B|A), but this is not necessarily obvious to human intuition.