Your general impression is about a hyper-politicized topic. ‘Most stereotypes are accurate’ is exactly the sort of technical claim which goes against political sacred cows I would expect researchers in a field to not play up and the few counter-examples get a great deal of press as proof of certain sacred cows. I see this all the time in intelligence-related stuff: a study claiming IQ gains or that IQ is not correlated with something gets publicized, while the studies showing the opposite get ignored or misinterpreted; hence you run into people who think that the general impression of the field is that IQ has been debunked, while it’s never been in better shape and tied to more things and closer to being nailed down into specific aspects of the brain and genes.
I see the same thing all the time as well, but I’m also used to seeing people drawing grand narratives based on an opposition to biased research which are, themselves, biased research. The fact that there are political reasons for scientists to downplay any research which indicates the accuracy of stereotypes is not sufficient to disabuse my skepticism in this case.
ETA: There’s plenty of intellectual status to be sought in meta-contrarianism. That being the case, I think one should be wary of adjusting too much on the knowledge that there are strong political biases favoring the position a person is arguing against.
Your general impression is about a hyper-politicized topic. ‘Most stereotypes are accurate’ is exactly the sort of technical claim which goes against political sacred cows I would expect researchers in a field to not play up and the few counter-examples get a great deal of press as proof of certain sacred cows. I see this all the time in intelligence-related stuff: a study claiming IQ gains or that IQ is not correlated with something gets publicized, while the studies showing the opposite get ignored or misinterpreted; hence you run into people who think that the general impression of the field is that IQ has been debunked, while it’s never been in better shape and tied to more things and closer to being nailed down into specific aspects of the brain and genes.
I see the same thing all the time as well, but I’m also used to seeing people drawing grand narratives based on an opposition to biased research which are, themselves, biased research. The fact that there are political reasons for scientists to downplay any research which indicates the accuracy of stereotypes is not sufficient to disabuse my skepticism in this case.
ETA: There’s plenty of intellectual status to be sought in meta-contrarianism. That being the case, I think one should be wary of adjusting too much on the knowledge that there are strong political biases favoring the position a person is arguing against.