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   ryan (ryan@bemrose.social)'s status on Thursday, 11-Sep-2025 03:38:42 JST ryan

   Not sure who needs this reminder, but…

   Stereotyping (and its specialized variants such as nationalism, sexism, racism, etc) is a powerful human instinct, which happens to have been correct just often enough to be passed down through evolution.

   Do NOT mistake it for logic.

   • “I observe a member of group X to have Y trait or behavior”
   • “It seems like a lot of members of group X have Y trait”
   • “We can prove that a majority of group X members have Y trait”

   These statements have varying levels of confidence which may allow you to make a stastitical inference about an arbitrary member of group X, but NONE of them is sufficient to prove the commonly assumed syllogism:

   • α is a member of group X, therefore α has trait Y

   This simple fallacious formulation is very often used as the basis for “othering” huge populations of individuals, and, I believe, is the source of most of the injustice in the modern world.