Don't Put Me in The Box
Over-generalization is a silent disease of our modern times, and it wreaks havoc.
A generalization (more accurately, an inductive generalization) proceeds from a premise about a sample to a conclusion about the population. The observation obtained from this sample is projected onto the broader population:
- The proportion Q of the sample has attribute A.
- Therefore, the proportion Q of the population has attribute A.
Generalization is the win of half-baked statistics (or worse, opinions) about a group over the individual. Misinterpreted as yet another flavor of abstraction (which reduces complexity by hiding irrelevant detail), generalization reduces complexity by replacing multiple a priori similar behaviors with a single behavior.
Now, if we add on top of inductive generalization a dosage of bad categorization, pure nonsense is assured, since the samples upon which we over-generalize are also ill-formed. What could go wrong?
This translates into decisions that affect broad populations based on very few and badly organized data points. The complexity of the lot becomes a more manageable unit. Thing is, plenty is lost in this compression.
Jorge Luis Borges, in his 1942 essay "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (Spanish: El idioma analítico de John Wilkins) illustrates the arbitrariness of any attempt to categorize the world. Borges describes this with an example of an alternate taxonomy of the animal kingdom which is worth reading. The list divides all animals into only 14 categories, and some of them are as subjectively described as: fabulous.
Some categorizations around us are as lousy [1]
Borges concludes: "there is no description of the universe that isn't arbitrary and conjectural".
More importantly: "Every individual is an exception to the rule.” Go find on your own who said that.
[1] "The comforting pseudoscience of the MBTI" by Anne-Laure Le Cunff https://nesslabs.com/mbti