On Wed, Jun 15, 2005 at 08:00:41AM -0700, perdurabo wrote: > > well, you are dealing in stereotypes. > > As does everyone else. Stereotypes are often (but not always) a handy > way of quickly processing information. Humans are not wired to > consider every little snowflake that falls.
In fact, *Psychology hat on*, stereotypes are a necessary artifact of how we process information into category and hierarchy when we encode it into schemas. The exact workings of all of this are a bit beyond current neurological understanding, but we do know that information not not maintained actively in a person's iconic and short term memories is always stored in terms of these schemas. These schemas, in turn, depend on quick classification and generalization of sensory input. We're very good at this. If you show me a thing made of glass with a metal end and a couple of connected wires inside of it, for example, I will stereotype this thing as being a lightbulb, whether that is in fact what I am looking at or not. The reason is that I see the glass, the metal end, and the wires--the attributes I associate with a lightbulb. All long-term memory is based on this concept, so stereotypes are really a good thing. What's bad is when stereotypes are mixed with ignorance. > > Besides, most of the people on this list now think you are in deep > > denial... ;-) > > They're just stereotyping ;) . They assume that because one likes UNIX > and that one likes to hack, they're immediately a "geek". My name is Joseph, and I'm a UNIX geek. But with the help of a good twelve step program, I'm learning that I don't have to compile a bunch of crap once a week to actually get some work done... ;) _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
