Further, there’s no information that could possibly be useful in any stereotype that couldn’t be found elsewhere – even if it were useful to know the drinking habits of various ethnic groups, this could be found from various statistics on alcohol consumption, rather than cultural and societal stereotypes.
When it gets to a level where the marketing department can quantify it as a trend.
That’s a bit different. Stanford, Yale, Princeton and Harvard are self selecting groups with extremely competitive selection criteria. So if someone graduates from one of those schools, one can generally (but not always) assume they have met certain criteria for academic and intellectual achievement. And one fallacy with that approach is that the Ivy League and other elite colleges are not the all inclusive set of smart, hardworking students.
I’ve already addressed all this and you’re just repeating yourself.
This too.
You might prefer all sorts of things but it’s not always practical or feasible to get them.
You didn’t address it at all. You repeated that it was a hypothetical.
For reasons that are imaginary.
What I said, in the sentence following the one you quoted, was: “But anything which is the deciding factor when all else is equal will generally be a factor among others when all else is not equal.”
Not surprising that you cut off your quote before that line, because this way you could go back to harping about how “You would not ever make this kind of decision with no other information available and no other factors involved”, which ignores the point I made.
When do you make a decision with no data available and only a stereotype as “a factor among many?”
See post #39.
I saw it already. In that scenario, why are you forced to base your judgment on stereotypes instead of getting facts?
Then you shouldn’t pretend you haven’t.
Because the amount it would cost to commission a study is not necesarily worthwhile for the investment you’re making.
It sounds like you may be unfamiliar with the nature of this type of investing - or else you just play that way on a MB - but investment decisions of this sort frequently involve all sorts of non-factual hunches, whether involving stereotypes or not.
[This is in addition to the fact that the post also illustrated an example of the stereotype being one factor among others.]
True, I was thinking of those caveats when I posted. There are probably better examples of statistical discrimination in hiring that would be more pertinent to the conversation - but this was the least offensive one I could think of in a short amount of time.
Is there any reason to believe that involving stereotypes as part of one’s “non-factual hunch” provides any benefit at all for investment decisions?
Who needs to conduct a study? If I want to find out which countries and cultures drink the most, I can Google it. If I want to know which neighborhoods have the most bars or liquor stores, I can Google that or check city records or do any number of other things. I may choose not to do that if I’m playing a hunch, but it’s an option. And of course you can base a bunch on lots of data just as easily as you can base it on a little.
People play hunches, sure. That’s not the same being forced to use a stereotype because other information isn’t available.
You’re changing the meaning of the terms and the issues under discussion.
The very premise of the OP was that some stereotypes have some amount of validity to them, and this was also the premise of the post that you commented on (which I then responded to, to begin this exchange). Your position then was not that stereotypes were necessarily always inaccurate or unreliable, but that even if they were true they were of no use. Your words (post #29): “What is that worth, though? To my mind that part of the issue is rarely addressed. OK, let’s pretend the Russian in this example is more likely to be a drunk than the Turk is. What do you do with that information?” My response to this was that the information can be useful in dealing with groups, and here we are.
In that context, factual data that is itself only a confirmation of the stereotype doesn’t help your position. We’re already pretending for purposes of your argument that the stereotype is true anyway. What you need is factual information that is independent of the stereotype. So Googling " to find out which countries and cultures drink the most" doesn’t help you. That’s just confirming the stereotype, and in the end you’re still going to be relying on the now-confirmed stereotype - you’ll be saying “I now know that Russians drink more than Turks and since this neighborhood has mostly Russians and the other has mostly Turks, that’s one factor in favor of the first neighborhood”, which is completely besides the point.
What you need in order to not rely on the stereotype is to ignore “which countries and cultures drink the most” and focus just on the drinking averages of the neighborhoods without reference to the ethnic composition. That’s a much more difficult task, of course.