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Is generalization unconditionally evil?

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OliveOilMom
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08 Feb 2012, 1:40 pm

It is not a generalization to say that Klansmen are racist, because the Klan is by definition a racist organization. That would be like saying it's a generalization to say that Knights of Columbus are Catholic.

Saying Nevada is ugly is not a generalization, it's an opinion and therefore subjective. Saying that most of Nevada is desert is not a generalization because of the qualifier "most". That is a statement of fact.

A generalization would be "The South is racist" or "The West is desert". Generalizing means making a sweeping assumption about all things that are in one catagory, when it is not true. There may be many racists in the South, but the South is by no means racist as a whole. Much of the West may be desert but there are many other types of environment in the region. Those are generalizations. If you use the word "most" or some other such word to imply that there are cases where something isn't the case, then go on to state what you believe, it's still not a generalization because you were not attempting to fit all of one thing into a catagory.


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08 Feb 2012, 1:45 pm

Vexcalibur wrote:
No generalization can be evil. Plenty of them are stupid though (aka based on poor/inexistant evidence or prejudice). We use generalization to learn, for example, it is a rather good idea to assume that all house owners would have a problem if you took a crayon and drew stick people in their walls.

When a generalization is based not on actual experiences but on prejudice or in skewed experiences or in third hand experiences that were misrepresented. It becomes a stupid generalization. Still, there is nothing evil with that generalization.

What would be evil is to base something evil on a stupid generalization.
True, too many people think that because arbitrary inductive logic (aka common sense) works in everyday life that it makes it applicable to things you would have to look at systematically and deductively to really understand.



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08 Feb 2012, 1:45 pm

Is it evil to say people are bigoted and racist? Even if it was true?



ValentineWiggin
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08 Feb 2012, 1:47 pm

snapcap wrote:
Is it evil to say people are bigoted and racist? Even if it was true?

Some people would say we must be tolerant, even of intolerance.
I say f*ck that.


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08 Feb 2012, 1:49 pm

Master_Pedant wrote:
ValentineWiggin wrote:
I think the biggest problem lies in generalities made not in the context of known or reasonably-asserted facts (IE, 90-10% desert-forest ratio in Nevada, or something similar) but wherein someone's personal experiences are involved, and they genuinely assert that, say, encountering a buncha people of group X with Y quality means most or all of group X has Y quality. Had a conversation t'other day wherein someone genuinely thought that was a reasonable basis on which to not only form personal generalizations but to assert them as "evidence" of something in discourse about something. It's not so much "political correctness", but for goodness sake, if you're going to make a generalization, have better evidence for it's veracity than "me and a buncha people I know think so! !1"


I guess what you're saying is that the problem is with hasty generalizations based on anecdotal evidence.

http://www.skepdic.com/testimon.html


Not necessarily "hasty"..they actually tend to be more entrenched, since they stop noticing anything that doesn't fit the trend. 8)


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Last edited by ValentineWiggin on 08 Feb 2012, 1:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

snapcap
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08 Feb 2012, 1:49 pm

I think it's a correct generalization, but is it evil to say, like the OP is asking?



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08 Feb 2012, 2:09 pm

snapcap wrote:
Is it evil to say people are bigoted and racist? Even if it was true?


Is it evil for people to have opinions? It surely is not. Without opinions and judgments we would be paralyzed.

ruveyn



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08 Feb 2012, 2:11 pm

ValentineWiggin wrote:
snapcap wrote:
Is it evil to say people are bigoted and racist? Even if it was true?

Some people would say we must be tolerant, even of intolerance.
I say f*ck that.


What do you mean actually? That we should criminalise hate speech? Or that we should hate haters?



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08 Feb 2012, 2:11 pm

ruveyn wrote:
snapcap wrote:
Is it evil to say people are bigoted and racist? Even if it was true?


Is it evil for people to have opinions? It surely is not. Without opinions and judgments we would be paralyzed.

ruveyn
lol actually considering certain opinions evil does not mean you are against the expression of them.



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08 Feb 2012, 2:18 pm

AceOfSpades wrote:
ruveyn wrote:
snapcap wrote:
Is it evil to say people are bigoted and racist? Even if it was true?


Is it evil for people to have opinions? It surely is not. Without opinions and judgments we would be paralyzed.

ruveyn
lol actually considering certain opinions evil does not mean you are against the expression of them.


Opinions and judgments will be, good, bad and indifferent. It is totally unavoidable.

ruveyn



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08 Feb 2012, 2:21 pm

ruveyn wrote:
snapcap wrote:
Is it evil to say people are bigoted and racist? Even if it was true?


Is it evil for people to have opinions? It surely is not. Without opinions and judgments we would be paralyzed.

ruveyn


I don't think it is, of course opinions are a lot different than bodily harm, but I don't know of any reasonable person that can walk into a group of people they have nothing in common with and not put on a face that they wouldn't put on if they were around their own kind(not just race, but religion, etc) Would that consider you for being a bigot or racist? Or is it racist not to and act like yourself?



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08 Feb 2012, 3:50 pm

Generalizations aren't unconditionally bad, however they *can* be very insulting to people.


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08 Feb 2012, 7:03 pm

I tend to take exception to generalizations about people as they are so often insulting and more reflective of the prejudices of the generalizer than of reality. Personally, I try to insert qualifiers whenever I fee I'm veering into a generalization both because I don't like being generalized about, and I don't like (rightly) being called a hypocrite. It's amazing the difference a few "most" "often" and "many" s sprinkled throughout a statement can make.


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09 Feb 2012, 2:45 am

It's wrong to make sweeping generalizations against whole groups of peoples, such as that all black people are lazy, all German Lutherans are Anti-Semitic, all Irish Catholics are drunks, all Jews are greedy, all Muslim Arabs are terrorists, etc. People who have a grudge against a particular group will point at someone within said group representing the worst stereotypes, and will make that out to be representative of all members.

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09 Feb 2012, 3:56 am

Kraichgauer wrote:
It's wrong to make sweeping generalizations against whole groups of peoples, such as that all black people are lazy, all German Lutherans are Anti-Semitic, all Irish Catholics are drunks, all Jews are greedy, all Muslim Arabs are terrorists, etc. People who have a grudge against a particular group will point at someone within said group representing the worst stereotypes, and will make that out to be representative of all members.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer


*cough* Teapartiers!*cough* :lol:


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09 Feb 2012, 4:05 am

Dox47 wrote:
Kraichgauer wrote:
It's wrong to make sweeping generalizations against whole groups of peoples, such as that all black people are lazy, all German Lutherans are Anti-Semitic, all Irish Catholics are drunks, all Jews are greedy, all Muslim Arabs are terrorists, etc. People who have a grudge against a particular group will point at someone within said group representing the worst stereotypes, and will make that out to be representative of all members.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer


*cough* Teapartiers!*cough* :lol:


Yeah, yeah! Guilty as charged.
From now on, I'll qualify my tea bagger rants by directing them at the a**holes affiliated with them, rather than the good tea "partiers".
But in all fairness, I have mentioned more than once that a member of my church is a member of a local tea party, and he and I get on very well. He has also told me that he's very concerned about the racism that's been in the tea party movement from the beginning, so I'm not far off in my criticism.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer