generalizing stuff

In the movie 'up in the air', George clooney's character says something like this "i do profiling (racial/gender/profession etc) of airline passengers.. this simplifies my life" .. he goes on to say how he generalizes people and stands in the line where he thinks those people are quicker through security checkpoints - he says "never stand in a line where there are middle eastern looking gents since extra time is spent on them by security folks".. similarly he says, "asian men pack lightly and wear those easy slip-on shoes allowing them to go fast through security check-points" ..

so i never understood when people say "dont generalize things" .. generalizations work because 'exceptions dont make the rule' ... generalizations help us take decisions fast and to be more practical..

in our world of 6 billion or so people, we have to generalize things and most of the times we all do it - consciously or unconsciously...

take the case of the govt's decision to have the voting age as 18... here it has generalized saying that people above 18 only have the maturity to vote wisely... but i am sure there are some 16 yr olds who are more wise than some 25 yr olds...

take the case of combat forces in an army being men only... again, it is a generalization based on common trends... nothing wrong in it..

this applies to other important aspects like racial/ethnic profiling for identifying possible terrorists.. there is nothing wrong to generalize that muslims should be checked more than others for terrorist links.... it is a generalization based on statistics and gives us a fast method to do a quick one level of filtering...

so dont feel bad generalizing... it is just being practical