The Right to Generalize

I was on a popular social media site, and on an MBTI page, I shared my experiences with a particular personality type; said experiences being overwhelmingly negative. It occurred to me afterwards that it's a thin line between making any sort of generalization and what is considered to be "hate speech;" a purported category of speech that covers any sort of generalizations about people according to a somewhat arbitrary set of parameters.

If I had made those comments about a group of people based on one of the "hate speech" parameters, as opposed to a parameter not currently covered by said category, I likely would have garnered severe consequences to myself, the validity of my comments notwithstanding. A person's MBTI type is theorized to be fixed early on in life, and is therefore outside of an individual's control. This logically makes it more valid as a protected status than, say, religion, which can be changed, but is nevertheless protected.

Hate speech is not illegal per se, but depending on the circumstances, it can bring about rather severe social, professional, and civilly litigious consequences; and there is a push from many corners to make it illegal outright, even though it is only vaguely defined.

So all of this begs the question: is there a right to generalize? And if not, what does that mean?

Generalizing is a mode of thinking. Generalizing is to unconscious thought what statistics are to conscious thought. It is a way of collating and correlating data so that judgments can be made quickly. This is an important process that is connected to survival. So what does it mean if we have to suppress and repress our ability to generalize? And furthermore, what does this mean for the field of statistics? Statistics seeks out correlations, which are a form of generalization. Will the entire field of statistics now be relegated to a legal gray area?

Conversely, what would it mean for society if we were to reject the concept of hate speech and normalize the act of generalizing?