I believe a large component of wisdom is the construction of more accurate groups to clarify the complexity of reality.
The risk to wisdom is having excessive confidence that the grouping is accurate for the topic being discussed.
Racism is in the domain of inaccurate grouping. Many attributes are irrelevant.
Sloppy grouping is also found when discussing liberals, conservatives, Americans, Southerners, Californians, Techies, Gen-Xers, Boomers, Gays and White Males.
Any other sloppy groups?
@jurban
I would guess that almost all socially constructed groups, are "sloppy".
Sloppy grouping, is very close to the philosophical concept of category error.
"is a semantic or ontological error in which things belonging to a particular category are presented as if they belong to a different category, or, alternatively, a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property."
more
Both are wide spread.
And sadly hard to refute: the necessary condition is logic and rationality.
@corlin
Thanks for the intro to Category Error.
The debatable part of the definition would be "could not possibly". If it was so obvious it wouldn't require much analysis.
Logic and Rationality is certainly required. But, first, there must be discernment. I have found that you can teach rationality but you cannot systematically teach discernment. Without discernment any solid logic is poisoned with inaccurate data.