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Alsadius comments on Politics Discussion Thread January 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: OrphanWilde 02 January 2013 03:31AM

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Comment author: asparisi 04 January 2013 10:48:44PM 2 points [-]

I think you are discounting effects such as confirmation bias, which lead us to notice what we expect and can easily label while leading us to ignore information that contradicts our beliefs. If 99 out of 100 women don't nag and 95 out of 100 men don't nag, given a stereotype that women nag, I would expect people think of the one woman they know that nags, rather than the 5 men they know that do the same.

Frankly, without data to support the claim that:

There is a lot of truth in stereotypes

I would find the claim highly suspect, given even a rudimentary understanding of our psychological framework.

Comment author: Alsadius 05 January 2013 05:39:52AM 2 points [-]

It's a system seriously prone to false positives, of course. But I think the odds of a true stereotype getting established are sufficiently higher than the odds of a false one getting established that it still counts as positive evidence.