tom thinks:

Stereotypes
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date 2001-04-28:13:39

Humans
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responses Humans are weird.

This isn't an original observation, but just how weird they are keeps looming larger. The more I learn about them, the weirder they look.

It's as if people have five to ten stereotypes that they use to parse all of reality. Some of the stereotypes can be quite elaborate, but in the end they're stereotypes, not concepts.

The difference between a stereotype and a concept is that a concept is mutable--it is reformed every time a new instance is encountered, and may be subject to alteration, broadening, subdivision, etc. A stereotype is fixed: the facts must be altered to fit it, not the other way around. A person with a concept of SWAN that is defined as "big white bird" will have to do some mental work when she encounters a black swan or a big white goose. A person with a stereotypical image of a swan won't recognized a black swan as a swan, and would never consider that a swan might be seen as in some ways similar to a goose.

Stereotypes are concepts for lazy people.

Most people are lazy.

I think this explains a huge amount about humanity. Most people divide the world up according to a very small number of stereotypes. Those stereotypes are experienced as natural kinds--it is simply inconceivable that the world would be divided up in any other way. Furthermore, each stereotype consists of a bundle of characteristics--someone's stereotype for a man might be big, hairy, coarse and loud, say. Anyone who has some of these characteristics and not others is simply not recognized as a "man" in the relevant sense, in the same way that a lame duck president is not a "real" president, despite nominally fulfilling the definition.

When faced with an anomaly most people's response is to reach for a bigger hammer--they're gonna bash those facts into place if it's the last thing they do! Recently I've seen people accused of being man-hating collectivists for calling themselves feminists, because the person doing the accusing has a stereotype of "feminist" that is just "man-hating collectivist." And I'm sure there are man-hating collectivists out there who do call themselves feminists--men are pretty easy to hate, and collectivism is still a tiresomely popular doctrine. But anyone forming the concept FEMINIST, even if he first encounters almost exclusively man-hating collectivists bearing that title, will be forced to modify his concept to subsume what all people who use that name have in common, or abandon the concept if no such commonality can be found.

My first encounters with feminism, as young and insecure male, were pretty negative, although I remember reading one good article in the student newspaper when I was in first year about the impossible standards of beauty that pornography placed on women (this was before the days of the Web, where every imaginable shape and size can be shown to be someone's idea of the erotic ideal.) It was thoughtful and obviously written by someone who felt a good deal of pity for the men who were being mislead by images of "the perfect airbrushed thigh". Over the years I encountered more women and eventually a few men who called themselves feminists, and came to realize that although many of them didn't have a clue what feminism is, there is a concept there. FEMINISM subsumes all doctrines that explicitly recognize that women's experiences have been massively neglected for millennia, and that as this historical condition changes we need to pay women's experiences special attention. I've deliberately stated this as broadly as possible, and in non-political terms, because there are a huge range of activities, from scholarship to politics, that feminism touches upon, and in my view the central similarity of feminist approaches is to ask: is there anything unique to the experiences of women that we should take into account here? Christians ask, "What would Jesus do?" Feminists ask, "How would this look to a woman?" or "What did the women experience?"

But I've concluded that most people don't do this. They build up a stereotype of "feminism" from their early encounters, and then spend the rest of their lives throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They react with hostility and aggression at the very mention of feminism, and unsurprisingly they get some pretty strident responses. In this case, their own behavior elicits facts that reinforce their stereotypes.

I don't think objectivists are worse in this regard than most people, but hanging around with them makes the phenomenon far more noticeable because their stereotypes are so weird. Most people solidify their stereotypes in their mid-to-late teens, which is when the stereotypical objectivist first "discovers" Rand. And Rand's "romantic realist" form of writing is little more than a collection of stereotypes made to lurch around the stage like the stick figures they are. The good men are humorless, tall, slim athletes who smoke heavily. The good women are humorless, sexually voracious submissives who smoke heavily. The bad men and women are humorless, flacid, short, flabby non-smokers.

Beyond her fiction, Rand provides stereotypes for the analysis of current and historical events: "second-handers" and "whim-worshiping muscle-mystics", robber-barons as the pinnacle of civilization, Kant and his followers as the root of all evil, environmentalists as the enemies of humanity, feminists as the enemies of humanity, unions as the enemies of humanity... Rand's stereotypes are almost always negative.

But while objectivist stereotypes are no more realistic than mainstream ones, they are no less, either. In the mainstream we see stereotypes of women as more cooperative and less confrontational than men, stereotypes of men as braver than women, stereotypes of non-European cultures as kinder and gentler than European ones, stereotypes of Canada as a more environmentally responsible nation than the United States, and so on. All of these are complete nonsense, false to fact in the most trivial way. But they are what people have been told they should believe, and they've accepted them and don't know how to change them.

It must be very strange to be human, and not have any choice as to what to believe, to be locked in to patterns of response that are not open to change, and to be unable to integrate a huge range of facts because there just isn't any way to incorporate them into your understanding without first beating them to a pulp with that big hammer.

This is why the struggle for the ideological high ground is so fiercely fought: if an organization or institution can just get the right stereotype set in the minds of people, it is becomes free to do almost anything, because if people see it through the lens of a positive stereotype, they will obliterate any fact that contradicts that stereotype. Thus, clients of astrologers or stock-market advisors will make excuses for advice that fails, because the failures can't be real because if they were they would contradict the stereotype of the wise advisor.

A person who is stereotyped as friendly and open can get away with all kinds of dishonest behavior, and people will shrug it off because, "He's not really like that." You better believe he's really like that--what isn't like that is your stereotype of him.

This is why first impressions are so dreadfully important--people are lazy. When they meet someone, they want to fit them in to one of a small number of stereotypical pigeonholes. "Slut", "stud", "brain", "party boy/girl", "go-getter", "lazy", "prig", "likeable"... Understanding this, it's possible to craft impressions that use the common, socially-accepted stereotypes to manipulate people's views of you.

This is how social expectations suppress individualism, and I don't see any way out of it except to follow Orwell's dictate that "We sell our souls in public and buy them back in private." That is, I think doing field-work amongst humans requires that one find a stereotype that is a subset of one's actual personality, and try to learn to restrict oneself to that stereotype during interactions with humans. Then, when amongst your own kind, wipe away the stain that leaves and live as yourself. This is not an ideal solution, but I'm at a loss to know what else to suggest.

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date	2001-04-28:13:39
Humans respond responses	Humans are weird. This isn't an original observation, but just how weird they are keeps looming larger. The more I learn about them, the weirder they look. It's as if people have five to ten stereotypes that they use to parse all of reality. Some of the stereotypes can be quite elaborate, but in the end they're stereotypes, not concepts. The difference between a stereotype and a concept is that a concept is mutable--it is reformed every time a new instance is encountered, and may be subject to alteration, broadening, subdivision, etc. A stereotype is fixed: the facts must be altered to fit it, not the other way around. A person with a concept of SWAN that is defined as "big white bird" will have to do some mental work when she encounters a black swan or a big white goose. A person with a stereotypical image of a swan won't recognized a black swan as a swan, and would never consider that a swan might be seen as in some ways similar to a goose. Stereotypes are concepts for lazy people. Most people are lazy. I think this explains a huge amount about humanity. Most people divide the world up according to a very small number of stereotypes. Those stereotypes are experienced as natural kinds--it is simply inconceivable that the world would be divided up in any other way. Furthermore, each stereotype consists of a bundle of characteristics--someone's stereotype for a man might be big, hairy, coarse and loud, say. Anyone who has some of these characteristics and not others is simply not recognized as a "man" in the relevant sense, in the same way that a lame duck president is not a "real" president, despite nominally fulfilling the definition. When faced with an anomaly most people's response is to reach for a bigger hammer--they're gonna bash those facts into place if it's the last thing they do! Recently I've seen people accused of being man-hating collectivists for calling themselves feminists, because the person doing the accusing has a stereotype of "feminist" that is just "man-hating collectivist." And I'm sure there are man-hating collectivists out there who do call themselves feminists--men are pretty easy to hate, and collectivism is still a tiresomely popular doctrine. But anyone forming the concept FEMINIST, even if he first encounters almost exclusively man-hating collectivists bearing that title, will be forced to modify his concept to subsume what all people who use that name have in common, or abandon the concept if no such commonality can be found. My first encounters with feminism, as young and insecure male, were pretty negative, although I remember reading one good article in the student newspaper when I was in first year about the impossible standards of beauty that pornography placed on women (this was before the days of the Web, where every imaginable shape and size can be shown to be someone's idea of the erotic ideal.) It was thoughtful and obviously written by someone who felt a good deal of pity for the men who were being mislead by images of "the perfect airbrushed thigh". Over the years I encountered more women and eventually a few men who called themselves feminists, and came to realize that although many of them didn't have a clue what feminism is, there is a concept there. FEMINISM subsumes all doctrines that explicitly recognize that women's experiences have been massively neglected for millennia, and that as this historical condition changes we need to pay women's experiences special attention. I've deliberately stated this as broadly as possible, and in non-political terms, because there are a huge range of activities, from scholarship to politics, that feminism touches upon, and in my view the central similarity of feminist approaches is to ask: is there anything unique to the experiences of women that we should take into account here? Christians ask, "What would Jesus do?" Feminists ask, "How would this look to a woman?" or "What did the women experience?" But I've concluded that most people don't do this. They build up a stereotype of "feminism" from their early encounters, and then spend the rest of their lives throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They react with hostility and aggression at the very mention of feminism, and unsurprisingly they get some pretty strident responses. In this case, their own behavior elicits facts that reinforce their stereotypes. I don't think objectivists are worse in this regard than most people, but hanging around with them makes the phenomenon far more noticeable because their stereotypes are so weird. Most people solidify their stereotypes in their mid-to-late teens, which is when the stereotypical objectivist first "discovers" Rand. And Rand's "romantic realist" form of writing is little more than a collection of stereotypes made to lurch around the stage like the stick figures they are. The good men are humorless, tall, slim athletes who smoke heavily. The good women are humorless, sexually voracious submissives who smoke heavily. The bad men and women are humorless, flacid, short, flabby non-smokers. Beyond her fiction, Rand provides stereotypes for the analysis of current and historical events: "second-handers" and "whim-worshiping muscle-mystics", robber-barons as the pinnacle of civilization, Kant and his followers as the root of all evil, environmentalists as the enemies of humanity, feminists as the enemies of humanity, unions as the enemies of humanity... Rand's stereotypes are almost always negative. But while objectivist stereotypes are no more realistic than mainstream ones, they are no less, either. In the mainstream we see stereotypes of women as more cooperative and less confrontational than men, stereotypes of men as braver than women, stereotypes of non-European cultures as kinder and gentler than European ones, stereotypes of Canada as a more environmentally responsible nation than the United States, and so on. All of these are complete nonsense, false to fact in the most trivial way. But they are what people have been told they should believe, and they've accepted them and don't know how to change them. It must be very strange to be human, and not have any choice as to what to believe, to be locked in to patterns of response that are not open to change, and to be unable to integrate a huge range of facts because there just isn't any way to incorporate them into your understanding without first beating them to a pulp with that big hammer. This is why the struggle for the ideological high ground is so fiercely fought: if an organization or institution can just get the right stereotype set in the minds of people, it is becomes free to do almost anything, because if people see it through the lens of a positive stereotype, they will obliterate any fact that contradicts that stereotype. Thus, clients of astrologers or stock-market advisors will make excuses for advice that fails, because the failures can't be real because if they were they would contradict the stereotype of the wise advisor. A person who is stereotyped as friendly and open can get away with all kinds of dishonest behavior, and people will shrug it off because, "He's not really like that." You better believe he's really like that--what isn't like that is your stereotype of him. This is why first impressions are so dreadfully important--people are lazy. When they meet someone, they want to fit them in to one of a small number of stereotypical pigeonholes. "Slut", "stud", "brain", "party boy/girl", "go-getter", "lazy", "prig", "likeable"... Understanding this, it's possible to craft impressions that use the common, socially-accepted stereotypes to manipulate people's views of you. This is how social expectations suppress individualism, and I don't see any way out of it except to follow Orwell's dictate that "We sell our souls in public and buy them back in private." That is, I think doing field-work amongst humans requires that one find a stereotype that is a subset of one's actual personality, and try to learn to restrict oneself to that stereotype during interactions with humans. Then, when amongst your own kind, wipe away the stain that leaves and live as yourself. This is not an ideal solution, but I'm at a loss to know what else to suggest.