Now that deserves an Insightful mod. I dislike that questions such as this are just accepted without reservation: That you get to choose between Wikipedia and Compromised Wikipedia. Who framed those options and what did they do to reach the conclusion that this choice is inevitable.
They missed something off the list. One of the biggest, if not the biggest barriers I see is the desperate attempts of managers to pretend they know more than their staff. This is never more apparent than in computers and the painful experiences I have had with managers who have to try and justify a higher salary whilst doing something which, at the end of the day, is less critical to the production of a product or service than the people who are actually developing it, have left me with nothing but pity for those managers. It's a terrible burden to have to try and instruct someone who knows a lot more about how to accomplish something than you do, and it tends to result in interference or denigration. Only a few non-technical managers I have had have had the confidence or humility to just ask me what the best thing they should decide is. And they were the best managers.
He picked a bad example when he went for the orange juice. I have an empty carton of organic orange juice next to me right now - tastes much nicer than the non-organic and far, far better than the dilutable stuff. But in both your case and mine, we have come to that conclusion ourselves. It's not marketing that makes the organic stuff taste better. Our choice is informed by a different source of information (experience in this case) rather than advertising. So I agree with what you say but draw a different conclusion - marketing is not necessary in this case for me to make an optimal choice and the only possible effect of marketing is to lead me to make an non-optimal choice.Take any argument to extremes or apply it in all cases and it's going to break down, but I would often agree with the OP who said that directed marketing has a negative effect on the viewer.
I wish you luck in finding other Linux gamers and see nothing wrong with gaming... but I'm not sure why there should be a strong correlation between using Linux and gaming? You do get people who are generally enthusiastic about all aspects of computers - into both O/S's and games, but these two areas of interest are not inherently linked. If anything, you may find that Linux users have a smaller percentage of gamers into them for their age group than Windows users. The reason being that Linux is somewhat a specialist area, most commonly pursued by those with unusual interests, and gaming is a mainstream hobby.
But I'd certainly like to see better support for gaming in Linux and more thought given to working across platforms by developers. The number of times I've seen someone write that they only keep their Windows box around for gaming is more than I care to count.
"Obscene" language is a class thing. People from working class backgrounds frequently use such language - and why shouldn't I talk the way my parents brought me up talking? Whilst people from middle class backgrounds perceive certain words to be inherently offensive. This perception is never stated to be, but originates from, the belief that such language is of the lower classes.
You ask why choice of words is necessarily part of freedom of speech, but the censorship of "obscene" language is merely the repression of the language of one part of society by another part of society. Your term of "civil speech" shows you come from or have adopted a particular cultural viewpoint but this is not necessarily universal. This linguistic division in society along class backgrounds is real and to demand that someone adopt a different subset of language in order to put forward their views is to demand that they renounce their own culture in favour of the one with more power (to some extent). It is not acceptable to proscribe words on behalf of others. I have every right to talk in the language I am familiar with, rather than adopt some other group's mode of expression.
Then again, the group I play d&d with consists of 2 guys who have been practicing martial arts for years, a guy who is almost six and a half feet tall and works as a security guard, and a guy who was on the varsity track team. Kinda defies the stereotype there.
Defies the stereotype, yes (though it's more a stereotype in the USA than in the UK, where it's not so bad). But defies my usual experience? Not so much. I've played role-playing games on and off for over a decade and I'd say at least half of the people I've played with have pursued martial arts to the point where you could reasonably call them a serious martial artist. Of course there is a distinction between practising a martial art and actually being the sort of person who people are wary of hassling, but a high proportion of the people I gamed with were pretty tough looking as well and certainly they played high-status in social situations (clubs and bars and everywhere else).
I'm with you as regards dumbing down, but I think we know too little yet to say if this is the case. For example, I don't think that a wizard running out of spells is exactly gone, so much as supplemented with some basic magic abilities to be used when they run out instead of being forced to shoot their friends in the back of the head with a crossbow.
Don't get me wrong - my two main concerns with 4th ed. are that it turns out to be dumbed down and that it focuses too much on being a defining everything in terms of combat. For example the Pit Fiend entry we have seen details "Tactics: The Pit Fiend acts as follows..." which rings alarm bells. However, there are some very talented people working on this game and they are long time players. These include Mike Mearls who wrote the incomparable Iron Heroes alternative player's handbook.My ideal scenario would almost to have seen them just revamp the core ideas of that game for 4th Edition with a few of the weaknesses filled in, but failing that I'm optimistic that he'll bring across some of the expertise he showed there to the new game.
4th Edition might be the dumbed down money extractor that we fear, but there are positive signs with a lot of this, so please reserve judgement. You can be sure I'll be as loud as anyone in complaining if I feel it's damaging the game I care about.
Terrible? Not at all. AMD is still producing very good processors. They were also first up with proper quad-core chips. There's nothing wrong with AMD chips. They're very good. Likewise in the server market their quad core Opterons are excellent. I'm buying exclusively AMD at the moment.
I played D&D as a child and am better for it. It fostered a love of storytelling and is solely responsible for my love of probability theory. If everyone wasn't so busy in their lives at the moment, I'd quite happily still run a game as an adult.
Mr. Gygax, thank you for creating something so great.
Your strategy could have the desired effect on people if their opinions were sufficiently open to influence. But I think opinion is so hardened right now that the actual outcome would be lots of people taking advantage of the firesale to replace Vista with XP. And why not? I'm not one of the people who is condemning Vista as garbage (though I have strong issues with the DRM and chose XP over it for that reason on a recent machine), but it's less mature than XP and it doesn't really have any selling points that most users will care about.
I don't know why someone marked the parent as troll, but it's unfair as this is a reasonable explanation as it both fits the observed fact and there are groups with means and motive to do this. We also have previous instances of this sort of behaviour from these groups and of private companies complicity in such activity (including Microsoft). As to the other poster who discounted this because a hardware solution would make much more sense, that's hardly a solid counter-argument because a hardware solution would firstly be more difficult to implement, crossing multiple areas of hardware requirements and manufacturers in all probability (including manufacturers in countries such as Germany and China), we don't know what companies behind the scenes are amenable to aiding US spying efforts and a hardware solution seems likely to be less flexible.
This is not to say that this is the reasoning behind Microsoft's desperate attempt to get people to take up Vista. A private awareness that if they don't lock people into their O/S using the drm mechanisms in Vista, that they're in serious trouble. Could also be the reason. Or it could be multiple reasons. But certainly the parent shouldn't be modded a troll because it's a strong possibility. Installing subversive software on people's machines is one of the first things that I thought of when I read this article.
Because the ISP buys "bandwidth" from another supplier who charges per bit/byte/MByte transferred. The ISPs, (well those who have "unlimited" packages) of course, bet that most won't use all of their share, but then get stung when everyone does.
Then that just puts the same issue at one more remove. This panic is a false panic in some ways. If greater infrastructure is built, then pricing models do not need to be changed. And in fact, changing pricing models for quantity or type of data would only "solve" this problem in so far as it would price it out of people's reach. In contrast, building greater infrastructure allows greater uptake and usage without changing the pricing model.
What I don't get is where this cost of x pence per Gb comes from. If an ISP has the wires and the routers all running, why does it cost extra to be sending more data? I see that you might ramp up electricity costs slightly in the systems that route this data when it's processing lots of packets, but I have trouble seeing this being the source of the cost.
Once the infrastructure is in place, then where is the big cost? That's what I'm not getting.
The article points out that this is a niche skill, not one that's widely useful.
It was always a niche skill, possessed by only a tiny fraction of the population. There are probably more assembly language programmers today than there were forty years ago. And assembly language is used for the same things today as it was back then. If people want to say that today, programmers use languages like PHP and Java for creating web-applications not Assembly, then that is fine. Assembly never was used for creating web-applications because they didn't exist back then. Assembly has neither diminished in popularity nor entirely been superceded in its area. Shouldn't be on that list.
Count another sale up to Novatech, for supplying laptops without Windows installed. It's the reason we bought from them and also the reason we found their site.
On the other hand, when you see someone unknowingly driving toward a cliff, you don't wait until they ask for your advice to tell them. The submitter here is trying to help them about a problem that they seem not to have really grasped. I have had the same conversation as the OP with people. I can usually get it past the stage of treating it seriously, but come up against the wall of "there's nothing I can do" or simply that it appears to require effort to protect against.
I think perhaps you were trying to argue a case in favour of stereotyping in the abstract whilst I continue to consider the debate to be at least half about this device and attitudes to teenagers and children specifically. That cross-purpose may be why you consider me to be not sticking to the argument. It may also be why you say I've been making ad hominems toward you. I'm not sure the areas in my post you consider me to be doing this but my best guess is that it is in the points where I refer to your stereotype of teenagers being thieves or vandals, etc. I didn't say that you necessarily held such an attitude, but I consider that for the purpose of the arguing that it is legitimate to use a device like this on people, it is necessary that the behaviour one is trying to prevent has to be something serious such as theft - it would not be arguable that a device like this should be used simply out of a dislike for the look or language of teenagers. Hence, my several times setting up such an example stereotype to criticise. It is not my intention to state your argument for you, but without giving me your own stereotype that shows your justification of it being legitimate to use such a device on people, then it can't be argued that a stereotype supports this.
I honestly don't fully understand what you're trying to say in the post I am replying to, but you are right that I do not know you and no ill-will is meant. I am simply arguing strongly for something I believe in - treating people firstly as individuals and holding them responsible only for the behaviour they are actually responsible for.
I am happy to continue this discussion or not as you wish. But there are probably few people still reading this story and if you don't wish to continue it (and these discussions do take up a lot of time), then no problem. We can agree to disagree and perhaps find we agree on something else in another Slashdot article.
So, asshole, keep your holier-than-thou attitude to yourself.
Sorry.There was no indication in your original post that you were restrained enough to limit the device usage to a couple of minutes or what lengths you were driven to before you actually resorted to this. We're on the Internet and I don't know you. There's no way to distinguish between the person that takes pleasure in having come up with a clever way to inflict invisible suffering on an animal and someone who is doing the minimum they feel they can do to preserve their own well-being, other than further comments. A lot of your other respondants give the impression they'd take pleasure in doing this willfully. That attitude I do not like. You now come across as much more reasonable than I thought.
You can obviously see where I was coming from. Wasn't my intention to be an asshole. Okay?
It's factually incorrect when you say that preventing abstraction decreases the quantity of information.
If you mean a rhetorical "you", then we agree. Preventing abstraction does not descrease the quantity of information. If you attribute the statement to me, then, well, I said nothing of the kind. I said it prevents information from being discovered. I didn't say that it prevents information of existing. I won't beat the dead horse with a proverbial tree falling in a forrest.
I'm afraid that was not a rhetorical you, I was referring to the person of Superiwz him or herself. As a side-note, rhetorical means 'for dramatic effect.' I think you meant an indefinite you. I am not a grammar nazi, but I am a semantic one.;)
Now dealing with this actual point, you said:
It disallows abstractions when describing people and by the virtue of that disallows a good deal of information which is true from being discoverable.
This is incorrect. When you accept a stereotype, you are reducing the quantity of information. If you survey the teenagers you are exposed to and conclude that x % of them have vandalised property for example, then that is not a stereotype and no information is lost. If you say "teenagers vandalise property" then you have abstracted the data and information is lost. What you are doing is saying that in order to take appropriate action, we must follow the latter mode and stereotype. This is not the case, the former is perfectly sufficient.If you are interested in pure efficiency (and not ethics, incidentally), then the cut off point for stereotyping being useful is the point at which so many members of the stereotyped group fit that stereotype, that the effort to deal with exceptional cases exceeds the benefit from dealing with these exceptional cases. I can't think of any common stereotype where that is true.
For you to say that it's not worth considering those that don't fit your stereotype, you must consider a huge proportion of people to fit a stereotype. Four out of five people. Is that resonable? You'd say it's worth treating a thousand people the same if only two-hundred of them didn't fit your stereotype? Or would you set a higher standard? Or a lower one. The proportion of teenagers who (a) cause significant trouble and (b) do it habitually so as to qualify for consistent discrimination is far, far lower.
My purpose in this is to show that stereotyping is not a handy way of more efficiently determining how to treat people. If you want to say it is, please illustrate with any of the common negative stereotypes that are prevalent in society... race, sexual orientation, etc. Youth does not stand up to this. Attempting to stereotype teenagers as vandals or threats produces far, far more false positives, than not stereotyping produces false negatives. Additionally, false positives creates major problems, not the least of which is huge resentment and lack of faith in justice or fairness in those victimised. Whilst in comparison, there are many other processes than the simplistic one of stereotyping that can eliminate those false negatives for you, so there's no great benefit to the stereotyping.
An abstraction is only fitting or not fitting the subject. It cannot be "incorrect"
An abstraction can certainly be incorrect. If 1 out of 10 teenagers has smoked pot and you abstract this and say "teenagers smoke pot" then that abstraction is incorrect. It's not even really an abstraction so much as it is summation. But this is the term you have used and this is what you have done. If you really think it is a useful abstraction to treat teenagers as criminals by default,
That's crap in three ways. It's factually incorrect when you say that preventing abstraction decreases the quantity of information. Abstraction is a process whereby you eliminate information that is [hopefully] irrelevant for a given purpose. It is incorrect when you firstly make an unsupported assumption that stereotypes have validity and proceed from there to further assume that there is [i]sufficient[/i] correlation with a stereotype to derive increased efficiency through acting on that stereotype as opposed to being equipped to deal with those that do not fit that stereotype. And it is thirdly incorrect when you conclude that it is okay to trample on the well-being of people in your measures to deal with your stereotypes.
I can expand on those last two points as well. As regards your unquestioning assumption that your stereotypes are valid, It is well-established that negative impressions of a group via individual encounters are far more likely to be remembered and acted on than positive impressions, leading to a bias toward negative stereotypes. It is also pretty obvious that these stereotypes are not going to be statistically representative of their demographic unless you think that teenagers are really that homogenous. Who knows, maybe they do "all look alike" to you, but a little thought should clear the matter up. What examples are you thinking of when you talk about a lack of responsibility? Vandalism? Abuse? Noise pollution? A quick tally of the thousand or more teenagers that are present in even a small to medium town (let alone cities) in comparison to the actual incidents of any of these that you have experienced should show that your stereotypes are based on a small proportion. That is if your stereotypes are based on personal experience and not the media, anyway.
And the other point to expand on is whether or not it is just to take measures based on stereotypes even if they were valid. After all, a lot of the law is based not on protecting the majority (which does not need protection) but on protecting the minority which does. What you are advocating are pre-emptive measures against people who are not guilty of any wrong sending the very clear message to everyone that justice is no longer a feature of your world view, but only your ability to enforce your will over others. That attitude is immensely destructive to the victims of it, and it can and will bring retribution from the wronged people. If you punish someone who is guilty of something, you may or may not get trouble for it. Punish the innocent, and you will stir up trouble you wouldn't believe.
Prejudice is not a handy way of increasing efficiency through streamlining your interactions with different groups, as you are saying. It is something that prevents you from receiving and acting on the actual information you are receiving. And it produces resentment and prejudice toward you.
Slashdot Mirror
Now that deserves an Insightful mod. I dislike that questions such as this are just accepted without reservation: That you get to choose between Wikipedia and Compromised Wikipedia. Who framed those options and what did they do to reach the conclusion that this choice is inevitable.
-A Proud Wikipedia Donator
-H.
They missed something off the list. One of the biggest, if not the biggest barriers I see is the desperate attempts of managers to pretend they know more than their staff. This is never more apparent than in computers and the painful experiences I have had with managers who have to try and justify a higher salary whilst doing something which, at the end of the day, is less critical to the production of a product or service than the people who are actually developing it, have left me with nothing but pity for those managers. It's a terrible burden to have to try and instruct someone who knows a lot more about how to accomplish something than you do, and it tends to result in interference or denigration. Only a few non-technical managers I have had have had the confidence or humility to just ask me what the best thing they should decide is. And they were the best managers.
He picked a bad example when he went for the orange juice. I have an empty carton of organic orange juice next to me right now - tastes much nicer than the non-organic and far, far better than the dilutable stuff. But in both your case and mine, we have come to that conclusion ourselves. It's not marketing that makes the organic stuff taste better. Our choice is informed by a different source of information (experience in this case) rather than advertising. So I agree with what you say but draw a different conclusion - marketing is not necessary in this case for me to make an optimal choice and the only possible effect of marketing is to lead me to make an non-optimal choice.Take any argument to extremes or apply it in all cases and it's going to break down, but I would often agree with the OP who said that directed marketing has a negative effect on the viewer.
I wish you luck in finding other Linux gamers and see nothing wrong with gaming... but I'm not sure why there should be a strong correlation between using Linux and gaming? You do get people who are generally enthusiastic about all aspects of computers - into both O/S's and games, but these two areas of interest are not inherently linked. If anything, you may find that Linux users have a smaller percentage of gamers into them for their age group than Windows users. The reason being that Linux is somewhat a specialist area, most commonly pursued by those with unusual interests, and gaming is a mainstream hobby.
But I'd certainly like to see better support for gaming in Linux and more thought given to working across platforms by developers. The number of times I've seen someone write that they only keep their Windows box around for gaming is more than I care to count.
"Obscene" language is a class thing. People from working class backgrounds frequently use such language - and why shouldn't I talk the way my parents brought me up talking? Whilst people from middle class backgrounds perceive certain words to be inherently offensive. This perception is never stated to be, but originates from, the belief that such language is of the lower classes.
You ask why choice of words is necessarily part of freedom of speech, but the censorship of "obscene" language is merely the repression of the language of one part of society by another part of society. Your term of "civil speech" shows you come from or have adopted a particular cultural viewpoint but this is not necessarily universal. This linguistic division in society along class backgrounds is real and to demand that someone adopt a different subset of language in order to put forward their views is to demand that they renounce their own culture in favour of the one with more power (to some extent). It is not acceptable to proscribe words on behalf of others. I have every right to talk in the language I am familiar with, rather than adopt some other group's mode of expression.
Defies the stereotype, yes (though it's more a stereotype in the USA than in the UK, where it's not so bad). But defies my usual experience? Not so much. I've played role-playing games on and off for over a decade and I'd say at least half of the people I've played with have pursued martial arts to the point where you could reasonably call them a serious martial artist. Of course there is a distinction between practising a martial art and actually being the sort of person who people are wary of hassling, but a high proportion of the people I gamed with were pretty tough looking as well and certainly they played high-status in social situations (clubs and bars and everywhere else).
I'm with you as regards dumbing down, but I think we know too little yet to say if this is the case. For example, I don't think that a wizard running out of spells is exactly gone, so much as supplemented with some basic magic abilities to be used when they run out instead of being forced to shoot their friends in the back of the head with a crossbow.
Don't get me wrong - my two main concerns with 4th ed. are that it turns out to be dumbed down and that it focuses too much on being a defining everything in terms of combat. For example the Pit Fiend entry we have seen details "Tactics: The Pit Fiend acts as follows..." which rings alarm bells. However, there are some very talented people working on this game and they are long time players. These include Mike Mearls who wrote the incomparable Iron Heroes alternative player's handbook.My ideal scenario would almost to have seen them just revamp the core ideas of that game for 4th Edition with a few of the weaknesses filled in, but failing that I'm optimistic that he'll bring across some of the expertise he showed there to the new game.
4th Edition might be the dumbed down money extractor that we fear, but there are positive signs with a lot of this, so please reserve judgement. You can be sure I'll be as loud as anyone in complaining if I feel it's damaging the game I care about.
Terrible? Not at all. AMD is still producing very good processors. They were also first up with proper quad-core chips. There's nothing wrong with AMD chips. They're very good. Likewise in the server market their quad core Opterons are excellent. I'm buying exclusively AMD at the moment.
I played D&D as a child and am better for it. It fostered a love of storytelling and is solely responsible for my love of probability theory. If everyone wasn't so busy in their lives at the moment, I'd quite happily still run a game as an adult.
Mr. Gygax, thank you for creating something so great.
Not to mention pilots.
Your strategy could have the desired effect on people if their opinions were sufficiently open to influence. But I think opinion is so hardened right now that the actual outcome would be lots of people taking advantage of the firesale to replace Vista with XP. And why not? I'm not one of the people who is condemning Vista as garbage (though I have strong issues with the DRM and chose XP over it for that reason on a recent machine), but it's less mature than XP and it doesn't really have any selling points that most users will care about.
I don't know why someone marked the parent as troll, but it's unfair as this is a reasonable explanation as it both fits the observed fact and there are groups with means and motive to do this. We also have previous instances of this sort of behaviour from these groups and of private companies complicity in such activity (including Microsoft). As to the other poster who discounted this because a hardware solution would make much more sense, that's hardly a solid counter-argument because a hardware solution would firstly be more difficult to implement, crossing multiple areas of hardware requirements and manufacturers in all probability (including manufacturers in countries such as Germany and China), we don't know what companies behind the scenes are amenable to aiding US spying efforts and a hardware solution seems likely to be less flexible.
This is not to say that this is the reasoning behind Microsoft's desperate attempt to get people to take up Vista. A private awareness that if they don't lock people into their O/S using the drm mechanisms in Vista, that they're in serious trouble. Could also be the reason. Or it could be multiple reasons. But certainly the parent shouldn't be modded a troll because it's a strong possibility. Installing subversive software on people's machines is one of the first things that I thought of when I read this article.
Thank you for that. So I'm understanding that the public has no recourse to remove a president even if they have evidence of a crime or dishonesty?
So why isn't impeachment being done? Who has the power to bring impeachment charges to a president?
Then that just puts the same issue at one more remove. This panic is a false panic in some ways. If greater infrastructure is built, then pricing models do not need to be changed. And in fact, changing pricing models for quantity or type of data would only "solve" this problem in so far as it would price it out of people's reach. In contrast, building greater infrastructure allows greater uptake and usage without changing the pricing model.
What I don't get is where this cost of x pence per Gb comes from. If an ISP has the wires and the routers all running, why does it cost extra to be sending more data? I see that you might ramp up electricity costs slightly in the systems that route this data when it's processing lots of packets, but I have trouble seeing this being the source of the cost.
Once the infrastructure is in place, then where is the big cost? That's what I'm not getting.
It was always a niche skill, possessed by only a tiny fraction of the population. There are probably more assembly language programmers today than there were forty years ago. And assembly language is used for the same things today as it was back then. If people want to say that today, programmers use languages like PHP and Java for creating web-applications not Assembly, then that is fine. Assembly never was used for creating web-applications because they didn't exist back then. Assembly has neither diminished in popularity nor entirely been superceded in its area. Shouldn't be on that list.
Count another sale up to Novatech, for supplying laptops without Windows installed. It's the reason we bought from them and also the reason we found their site.
On the other hand, when you see someone unknowingly driving toward a cliff, you don't wait until they ask for your advice to tell them. The submitter here is trying to help them about a problem that they seem not to have really grasped. I have had the same conversation as the OP with people. I can usually get it past the stage of treating it seriously, but come up against the wall of "there's nothing I can do" or simply that it appears to require effort to protect against.
It's something I'm still working on.
Thanks. Sorry for any ill-feeling.
I think perhaps you were trying to argue a case in favour of stereotyping in the abstract whilst I continue to consider the debate to be at least half about this device and attitudes to teenagers and children specifically. That cross-purpose may be why you consider me to be not sticking to the argument. It may also be why you say I've been making ad hominems toward you. I'm not sure the areas in my post you consider me to be doing this but my best guess is that it is in the points where I refer to your stereotype of teenagers being thieves or vandals, etc. I didn't say that you necessarily held such an attitude, but I consider that for the purpose of the arguing that it is legitimate to use a device like this on people, it is necessary that the behaviour one is trying to prevent has to be something serious such as theft - it would not be arguable that a device like this should be used simply out of a dislike for the look or language of teenagers. Hence, my several times setting up such an example stereotype to criticise. It is not my intention to state your argument for you, but without giving me your own stereotype that shows your justification of it being legitimate to use such a device on people, then it can't be argued that a stereotype supports this.
I honestly don't fully understand what you're trying to say in the post I am replying to, but you are right that I do not know you and no ill-will is meant. I am simply arguing strongly for something I believe in - treating people firstly as individuals and holding them responsible only for the behaviour they are actually responsible for.
I am happy to continue this discussion or not as you wish. But there are probably few people still reading this story and if you don't wish to continue it (and these discussions do take up a lot of time), then no problem. We can agree to disagree and perhaps find we agree on something else in another Slashdot article.
Regards,
-H.
You can obviously see where I was coming from. Wasn't my intention to be an asshole. Okay?
With pleasure. :)
I'm afraid that was not a rhetorical you, I was referring to the person of Superiwz him or herself. As a side-note, rhetorical means 'for dramatic effect.' I think you meant an indefinite you. I am not a grammar nazi, but I am a semantic one. ;)
Now dealing with this actual point, you said:
This is incorrect. When you accept a stereotype, you are reducing the quantity of information. If you survey the teenagers you are exposed to and conclude that x % of them have vandalised property for example, then that is not a stereotype and no information is lost. If you say "teenagers vandalise property" then you have abstracted the data and information is lost. What you are doing is saying that in order to take appropriate action, we must follow the latter mode and stereotype. This is not the case, the former is perfectly sufficient.If you are interested in pure efficiency (and not ethics, incidentally), then the cut off point for stereotyping being useful is the point at which so many members of the stereotyped group fit that stereotype, that the effort to deal with exceptional cases exceeds the benefit from dealing with these exceptional cases. I can't think of any common stereotype where that is true.
For you to say that it's not worth considering those that don't fit your stereotype, you must consider a huge proportion of people to fit a stereotype. Four out of five people. Is that resonable? You'd say it's worth treating a thousand people the same if only two-hundred of them didn't fit your stereotype? Or would you set a higher standard? Or a lower one. The proportion of teenagers who (a) cause significant trouble and (b) do it habitually so as to qualify for consistent discrimination is far, far lower.
My purpose in this is to show that stereotyping is not a handy way of more efficiently determining how to treat people. If you want to say it is, please illustrate with any of the common negative stereotypes that are prevalent in society... race, sexual orientation, etc. Youth does not stand up to this. Attempting to stereotype teenagers as vandals or threats produces far, far more false positives, than not stereotyping produces false negatives. Additionally, false positives creates major problems, not the least of which is huge resentment and lack of faith in justice or fairness in those victimised. Whilst in comparison, there are many other processes than the simplistic one of stereotyping that can eliminate those false negatives for you, so there's no great benefit to the stereotyping.
An abstraction can certainly be incorrect. If 1 out of 10 teenagers has smoked pot and you abstract this and say "teenagers smoke pot" then that abstraction is incorrect. It's not even really an abstraction so much as it is summation. But this is the term you have used and this is what you have done. If you really think it is a useful abstraction to treat teenagers as criminals by default,
So what you did is find a way to torment people's pets from your home.
That's crap in three ways. It's factually incorrect when you say that preventing abstraction decreases the quantity of information. Abstraction is a process whereby you eliminate information that is [hopefully] irrelevant for a given purpose. It is incorrect when you firstly make an unsupported assumption that stereotypes have validity and proceed from there to further assume that there is [i]sufficient[/i] correlation with a stereotype to derive increased efficiency through acting on that stereotype as opposed to being equipped to deal with those that do not fit that stereotype. And it is thirdly incorrect when you conclude that it is okay to trample on the well-being of people in your measures to deal with your stereotypes.
I can expand on those last two points as well. As regards your unquestioning assumption that your stereotypes are valid, It is well-established that negative impressions of a group via individual encounters are far more likely to be remembered and acted on than positive impressions, leading to a bias toward negative stereotypes. It is also pretty obvious that these stereotypes are not going to be statistically representative of their demographic unless you think that teenagers are really that homogenous. Who knows, maybe they do "all look alike" to you, but a little thought should clear the matter up. What examples are you thinking of when you talk about a lack of responsibility? Vandalism? Abuse? Noise pollution? A quick tally of the thousand or more teenagers that are present in even a small to medium town (let alone cities) in comparison to the actual incidents of any of these that you have experienced should show that your stereotypes are based on a small proportion. That is if your stereotypes are based on personal experience and not the media, anyway.
And the other point to expand on is whether or not it is just to take measures based on stereotypes even if they were valid. After all, a lot of the law is based not on protecting the majority (which does not need protection) but on protecting the minority which does. What you are advocating are pre-emptive measures against people who are not guilty of any wrong sending the very clear message to everyone that justice is no longer a feature of your world view, but only your ability to enforce your will over others. That attitude is immensely destructive to the victims of it, and it can and will bring retribution from the wronged people. If you punish someone who is guilty of something, you may or may not get trouble for it. Punish the innocent, and you will stir up trouble you wouldn't believe.
Prejudice is not a handy way of increasing efficiency through streamlining your interactions with different groups, as you are saying. It is something that prevents you from receiving and acting on the actual information you are receiving. And it produces resentment and prejudice toward you.