Generalising the General

You Can't Generalise...

This post is going to be a little unpopular, but I do want to write it down before I forget.

One of the most irritating discussion points that has been on the increase in the last 20years is the notion that we cannot generalise things. For instance, if somebody makes a claim about the characteristics of an 'x' population as defined by age or grouping, the counter argument is always "but you can't generalise..."

The "you can't generalise" trope has permeated so much of our discussion to such a degree that it has made certain types of conversations moot. You can't talk about ethnicity, or gender, or for that matter religiosity or beliefs once somebody pulls out the "you can't generalise about..."

Let's consider this for a moment. Demographers, statisticians, marketers and scientists are always chopping populations up by characteristics in order to draw knowledge from such procedures. You have to set general categories in order to get to the specific. This is the nature of ordered thought; that we proceed don the order of things, such as say, Plant kingdom and Animal kingdom; or vertebrate and invertebrate; and each step along the way we find specific characteristics about these populations.

Indeed, we can go a good deal along this path in order to talk about species  and even breeds of dogs or cattle. The moment we get to human populations, we hit an idiotic chorus of "you can't generalise...."

Well, yeah, you can, and if it's done right, it's more meaningful than denying it.

I was watching Q&A last night and host Tony Jones, with guest panelists Tony Abbot and Kathy Lewis were all carrying on with the "You can't generalise" mantra, most of the time where I thought it suited them not to draw general conclusions about a general tendency or *gasp* a political persuasion. It's even in the general parlance of everyday discourse where people say, "you can't generalise women of the ages 19-24!"

So I beg to differ. Marketers and demographers and statisticians do so all the time and draw salient conclusions - certainly enough for these people  to continue to find employment, and for their clients to sell these people what they've been led to believe they want.Whether we like it or not, if we fit into a demogrpahic, somebody has studied how we think, what we do, hat we want, how we go about it and so forth.

Even the politicians do this very kind of generalising of whole population segments when they poll people. And they must draw meaningful conclusions in such exercises, otherwise they wouldn't do them.It's critical in polls to find out about demographic segments in detail.

The point I'm making here is very concrete and it is this: you can split up populations according to category and yes, you can draw general conclusions from such studies. The caveat is that there is a sample size that meets a criteria, and that we should not be tempted into essentialist arguments.

By essentialist arguments I mean, the variety that ascribe the generalised characteristics to being essential to the studied group.

• e.g. 1  Lebanese Australians have a higher representation of criminality, ergo Lebanese Australians are criminally oriented.


• e.g. 2  Jewish Australians are well represented in the affluent, so the Jews are naturally good with money.


• e.g. 3 White Australian women are over represented in the prostitution trade, therefore White Australian women are naturally more slutty than other types of women.

The only way the second clauses can follow the first clause premised in each of these examples if you think that these characteristics are essential to the character of this population. In most cases we come across in life, they are correlations without cause.

These essentialist arguments are wrong not because they are generalisations, but because they are veiled racist/sexist arguments ascribing essential characteristics to a group of people.

I don't know how this "you can't generalise..." trope of argument got started, and then adopted. I suspect it happens in Highschool education where people struggle to be politically correct and this shorthand has replaced actual thought and analysis. However it really needs to be put back in the box where it popped out. If we stopped drawing general conclusions about categories we set for studies, we'll never draw and conclusions. The next time somebody pipes up with "you can't generalise..." we really ought to point out the fallacy of their premise.