It's not lying, it's just "Influencing natural stereotyping processes".

But stereotypes are almost always accurate (though never perfect). Decades of stereotype accuracy research has shown this.

Stereotypes are filtered by time, they are golden nuggets of truth. https://twitter.com/AotearoaYimby/status/1367993079068643329

If there's a stereotype about something, it's there for a good reason, usually that it's true and important.

Some examples:

(1) Gender stereotypes.

Most gender stereotypes are true in the statistical sense. There's a lot of research to back this up.

If you try to go against these stereotypes, the average result is horrible; equality doesn't work. Why?

Because women are evolutionarily programmed to want men who are more powerful/rich/competent/tall/confident than they are.

If you try to make men and women equal on these axes, the result is a broken sexual marketplace where many men are incels and many women are catladies.

Now perhaps in an ideal world you would magically make differences between different types of people totally disappear. Gender, age, race etc would essentially become like skins in a video game.

I'm not saying I'm against that world, but we're not living in it.

Though, would that world actually be better? Maybe. Though there are some fundamental problems with a hypothetical world in which gender is "just a skin".

The female sex role has some critically important functions in human society. They are nature's natural eugenicists, selecting the best men to reproduce with. Who would do that job if not women with a very selective sex drive?

Maybe both genders could become very selective. But then births would plummet even more than they already have as the few most desirable women would not be able to make any more children (womb, pregnancy etc cannot be sped up).

Maybe neither gender could be picky, and everyone would just have loads of sex with everyone else? Sounds like a lot more fun, but in the long-term the eugenic function of the female sex drive would be lost completely and we'd devolve into potatoes.

Maybe there is a solution to all of this. We replace eugenics via mate selection with genetic enhancement, and we do it really carefully™ so that we don't make a total mess out of ourselves, then everyone can have fun all the time.

Really, I don't understand how this would all shake out. And neither does anyone else.

More importantly, we can trace these mistakes back to enlightenment thinking as a whole... when you think about human beings mechanistically rather than in a narrative way, it becomes clear that the general thrust of the enlightenment is naive.

It's also not totally wrong though. Life is better when people cooperate than when they compete. But solving this is not easy and simplistic narratives get rekt by reality.

One big problem that we see nowadays is that old-fashioned competition about who can build a better thing or who can wage war more competently has been replaced by a new type of competition about who can lie/slander other people better.

Old fashioned sexual norms that actually worked for most people have been replaced by a hellscape of dating apps and paradox of choice. Game theory strikes again.