Malcolm Gladwell and Generalizations

Malcom Gladwell writes in the New Yorker about how generalizations should be used to make categories. It’s important to be able to make accurate generalizations when one is buiding categories, he claims, because for real-world things like detecting terrorists or identifying dangerous dogs, there are real world consequences.

I found this interesting, reminded me a lot of the book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff. Lakoff writes about prototype categories, where category membership is a fuzzy concept. Explicit rules for category membership, like ‘terrorists buy one way tickets,’ ‘pit bulls are dangerous dogs,’ and other concrete rules like that are less useful in establishing membership in categories than general rules like ‘is there something suspicious about this person?’ or ‘does this dog (or the dog’s owner, apparently more useful) have a history of violent behavior?’

The key, apparently, is that some genearalizations are stable and some are unstable. Unstable generalizations are things like ‘drug smugglers buy one way tickets’ and ‘pit bulls are dangerous dogs.’ Drug smugglers can change their behavior, and it used to be other dogs that were the dangerous ones. (It turns out, according to Gladwell, that the most dangerous kind of dog is the kind that people buy to seem dangerous themselves, and this has varied from era to era.) So, the key to building a category is to figure out what are the stable generalizations and which are the unstable ones. Gladwell gives examples ranging from terrorists, to NYC subway searches, to dogs.
Anyway, I thought it made for interesting reading. I recommend it.