I just want to say that I agree with you 100 percent. Furthermore, I don't think stereotypes are self evident. Just on their merit of definition alone they are not true. We can easily disprove that by coming up with a stereotype about people. Everyone loves baseball. This is obviously false. I am part of everyone and I do not love baseball.
This leads to another topic. I think that even by Kanazawa's own argument he is wrong. His equivalence principle of equating what people commonly hold as "stereotypes" with what scientists commonly practice as empirical observations and generalizations. It's a whole different ball game. People stereotype in a more subjective manner. They do not have access to a controlled environment or the amount of information about the subject matter as scientists do. Societal stereotypes are more of a product of emotional potentially biased information and quick judgment with a high level of acceptance and low level of actual confirmation. On the other hand scientists have their work assessed and scouted for inaccuracies by the entire scientific community. Their empirical observations and generalizations are challenged more frivolously and any good scientist will try and be as objective as possible thus their generalizations generally (I just generalized about generalization hehe) will be less controversial and far reaching for example "The apparatus was 1 meter wide."
That's what I think anyway.
Keep up the good work!

I just reread Kanazawa's piece, and I didn't get that he really meant all stereotypes are always true. I didn't see any absolutes in there. In fact, what he said was:

"Many stereotypes are empirical generalizations with a statistical basis and thus on average tend to be true. If they are not true, they wouldn’t be stereotypes. The only problem with stereotypes and empirical generalizations is that they are not always true for all individual cases. They are generalizations, not invariant laws."

Nowhere does he state they are always true. That's quite a different thing.

NP

Hi, great blog on psychology! I write for the Myartspace Blog and I just posted an entry concerning the link between mental illness and creativity. I've also been discussing the stereotypes concerning artists lately. It would be great to read your opinion on the topic.

www.myartspace.com/blog

Stereotypes are simply not true. They simply statements that some utters and other repeat until it becomes accepted by a large group. Think of the ridiculousness of the assertion of the laziness of African-Americans. If this were true then European Americans must be huge ignoramuses. If Africans were lazy then why would you spend so much time and money to get so many of them to work on your plantations? Only an ignoramus would think, "Hmmm I have all this land to work so let me go find the laziest people in the world to work it for me." Anyone can start a rumor or outright lie and simply keep repeating it enough to it takes root. (Iraq has WDM's, Iraq was responsible for 911, Obama is a Mulsim, McCain fathered an African-American child, etc.) As we've seen these tings get repeated enough and soon you have 4100 US soldiers dead and 20,000 injured and countless with PTSD.
No stereotypes are not true , just repeated and unexamined.

I think stereotypes are established and mainatined by people who are either too lazy to find out and/or too afraid or face the truth. That truth is that human behavior transcends race and culture. But, discovering and acknowledging that seems to takes more work, courage, and common sense than too many people are willing to expend.