Nathan Rowley, Chapter 5, Question 6

Chapter five dealt a lot with the economics of discrimination. It got me thinking about a lot more than just that (what numbers are, how human thought and computer thought differs, to name a couple). It especially got me thinking about the way humans reason. There are two primary kinds of reasoning: inductive and deductive. The difference between the two is that deductive reasoning produces conclusions that are necessarily true, provided the starting assumptions are true. Inductive reasoning does not produce necessarily true conclusions.

Now, you might be thinking, "If deductive reasoning is always right as long as the start is true, it must be better." And you are mostly correct. In many cases, it is better to deductively reason than inductively reason. Deductive reasoning is basically critical thinking. But it is not the be all and end all of logic. Humans are really good at inductive reasoning, and we do it all the time. It's how we make useful generalizations about the universe, and, you guessed it, it's how we make stereotypes and discriminations. Yes, individual cases are better served by deductive reasoning, as Charles Wheelan mentions. But don't write off inductive reasoning just because it creates unfair discrimination; it is a powerful tool for abstracting patterns.

This is absolutely not an endorsement for discriminatory practices; there are ways that business can, and should, avoid it. This is merely an exploration of the underlying mechanics of discrimination: human reasoning.