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Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

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Good Ideas 313If people form stereotypes even about rabbits and fish, does racism comenaturally to us? And if racism is both natural and irrational, does thatmake <strong>the</strong> love of stereotypes a bug in our cognitive software? Manysocial and cognitive psychologists would answer yes. They link ethnicstereotypes to an overeagerness to form categories and to an insensitivityto <strong>the</strong> laws of statistics that would show <strong>the</strong> stereotypes to be false. AnInternet discussion group for neural-network modelers once debatedwhat kinds of learning algorithms would best model Archie Bunker. Thediscussants assumed that people are racists when <strong>the</strong>ir neural networksperform poorly or are deprived of good training examples. If only our networkscould use a proper learning rule and take in enough data, <strong>the</strong>ywould transcend false stereotypes and correctly register <strong>the</strong> facts ofhuman equality.Some ethnic stereotypes are indeed based on bad statistics or none atall; <strong>the</strong>y are a product of a coalitional psychology that automatically denigratesoutsiders (see Chapter 7). O<strong>the</strong>rs may be based on good statisticsabout nonexistent people, <strong>the</strong> virtual characters we meet every day on<strong>the</strong> big and small screens: <strong>Italian</strong> goodfellas, Arab terrorists, black drugdealers, Asian kung fu masters, British spies, and so on.But sadly, some stereotypes may be based on good statistics about realpeople. In <strong>the</strong> United States at present, <strong>the</strong>re are real and large differencesamong ethnic and racial groups in <strong>the</strong>ir average performance inschool and in <strong>the</strong>ir rates of committing violent crimes. (The statistics, ofcourse, say nothing about heredity or any o<strong>the</strong>r putative cause.) Ordinarypeople's estimates of <strong>the</strong>se differences are fairly accurate, and in somecases, people with more contact with a minority group, such as socialworkers, have more pessimistic, and unfortunately more accurate, estimatesof <strong>the</strong> frequency of negative traits such as illegitimacy and welfaredependency. A good statistical category-maker could develop racialstereotypes and use <strong>the</strong>m to make actuarially sound but morally repugnantdecisions about individual cases. This behavior is racist not becauseit is irrational (in <strong>the</strong> sense of statistically inaccurate) but because itflouts <strong>the</strong> moral principle that it is wrong to judge an individual using <strong>the</strong>statistics of a racial or ethnic group. The argument against bigotry, <strong>the</strong>n,does not come from <strong>the</strong> design specs for a rational statistical categorizer.It comes from a rule system, in this case a rule of ethics, that tells uswhen to turn our statistical categorizers off.

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