[dkh]

You know, for someone who clearly is a bit triggered (reasonably) by dealing with whatever stereotypes and judgements people make about trucks and truck owners, their post is quite positive and respectful. Your reply to it is not. It seems like your argument is “the data indicates a statistical likelihood that someone judging, assuming, or stereotyping will still be accurate.” The factual inaccuracy of prejudice is not the problem with prejudice, the prejudice is

[jychang]

I fail to see how prejudice against waste is a problem.

Prejudice is a bad thing- for things that people can't change, like their race or age. Prejudice against people making bad or wasteful decisions is a good thing.

[dkh]

No, prejudice is bad, full stop. By definition it means to judge someone for something before you actually know for sure that they have/do the thing that bothers you. It doesn’t matter what the thing is, that’s not the problem or the point. The point is you can’t, or shouldn’t, view or treat someone as though they have some quality you dislike when you don’t actually know about this individual and only know that a high percentage of them do. You can’t judge an individual this way! If you hate waste (as do I) and you feel trucks contribute to that and that a majority of truck owners don’t make use of their trucks, then great! Speak about it exactly like that. But you can’t simply take any truck driver and say “that individual is wasteful” without knowing.

You can’t do that any more than you can assume my friends and I are criminals and drug dealers because at some point we decided to use Telegram as our primary messaging app, or like ICE can assume anyone standing near a pro-Mexico protest is an illegal immigrant, you cannot attribute a quality to an individual without having actual knowledge of it.

[jpk]

The point is you can't reliably tell if someone's choice of vehicle is wasteful unless you get to know them a bit. Snap-judging someone's entire lifestyle in the second it takes to recognize a make and model isn't constructive.

[simianparrot]

You can't know it's waste until you know their actual use of it.

Like another comment says, prejudice is bad -- full stop.