Why Making Sweeping Generalizations Implies Stupidity

[madnak]

Human beings come in all shapes and sizes. Variety is part of our nature, literally. And when that variety is added to a structure as complex as the human mind, it becomes expressed in more and more unexpected ways.

Personality isn't easily classifiable. That's true of beliefs, actions, and perceptions. To say "most people who X are Y" may be valid. However, to say that "anyone who X is Y" is virtually never valid. Anyone who suggests that is failing to understand X and Y.

Seriously though, these statements are mistakes. For almost any attributes X and Y (that aren't directly dependent on each other), there will be some people who have X but not Y, some who have Y but not X, some who have both, and some who have neither. This is true even when two traits occur together very commonly. But it's especially true where personality is concerned. Personality doesn't follow any clear identifiable patterns and the theory of personality is rather stagnant for that reason. There are only two effective approaches - either focus on an extreme trait and try to identify its correlates as closely as possible, or group things into categories so general they're useless (and typically riddled with exceptions besides).

Let me get to the point. It's never correct to say "smart people never do X" or "people who believe Y are stupid." Never. Highly logical people (people who score at the very top on IQ tests, for example, and successful mathematicians) are less likely to be religious. But they may also be more likely to be fundamentalists. And there's a strong likelihood they're more likely to do drugs, many can be found among the ranks of astrologists, plenty even believe in the WWF! And some of them engage in almost every behavior and belief that most of us consider to be "stupid." There is nothing that smart people are immune to, no superstition or con game or other trap they aren't susceptible to, regardless of how profound they are.

So why don't we stop calling people stupid? It's drama, not reason, and it's universally unjustified. This isn't a matter of morality, by the way, it's a matter of poor logic - something that is frequently applied by even the smartest among us. The only way to determine that someone is stupid is to observe the full constellation of the behaviors and reach a conclusion on that basis - and even then they may surprise you. Researchers on intelligence can't figure it out, philosophers can't figure it out, military experts can't figure it out, and if you think you have it all figured out - you're not looking hard enough.