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Viliam_Bur comments on November 2014 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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Progressives hold that stereotypes promote arbitrary, random and generally false beliefs about groups of people. But then why do these stereotypes remain stable across generations? And why don't people ever get their stereotypes mixed up?
For example, if some said that he didn't mind having registered sex offenders as neighbors because their presence wouldn't hurt property values and his community's reputation, you wouldn't praise this guy for his lack of stereotypical thinking. Instead you would question his judgment.
Ironically progressives don't have a problem at all with promoting stereotypes which put rich people and businessmen in a bad light. The popularity of Ayn Rand's alternative humanism pisses them off because she got some market share in reversing these stereotypes, and again in defiance of progressives' central planning to reshape the human mind like clay,.
Not defending the progressives in general here, but there are two very simple explanations for your question.
1) Some stereotypes don't remain stable across generations.
For example, I heard that in the past, pink was considered a "boy color" and blue was considered a "girl color"; or that it was believed that black people would be bad at sport. So, some stereotypes change and some don't; and we would need a meta review to find out whether there is something special about those unchanging stereotypes, or whether it just means that if you flip a coin two or three times, sometimes you will get the same result repeatedly.
2) If a stereotype already exists, it is more easy to keep believing in the existing one (confirmation bias) than to invent a new one.
(Disclaimer: None of this is meant as a general proof that all stereotypes are incorrect. It's only an explanation of how a stereotype that happens to be wrong could remain stable across generations.)
Except as you've just pointed out:
Identifying a mechanism pushing towards outcome X is not inconsistent with observing that sometimes the outcome not-X happens.