The claim that Neil Postman's argument is stereotypical follows along the same lines that it is unreliable. The examples he uses, like Francis Galton, are outdated and not accepted by social scientists today. Also, Neil Postman uses the terms sociology, psychology, and social science almost interchangeably. He makes a lot of generalizations. Galton was a psychologist, and if he did misuse statistics, that doesn't mean that every psychologist misuses statistics or even that every social scientist misuses statistics. Furthermore, with the "measurement" of intelligence, statistics may have been abused, but that doesn't mean statistics are always abused in every study and every field of social science. Postman cannot use an example and make generalizations about the entire field. In sociology there is a term that refers to a mistake very similar to what Postman is doing. It is called an ecological fallacy. An ecological fallacy is when you take aggregate information and make inferences about the individuals. Postman is not committing an ecological fallacy, but he using deduction, and it is equally wrong. Deduction is when you take information on an individual and use it to characterize the whole, or in this case, social scientists in their entirety. Postman is very stereotypical for a non-social scientist.
Postman does have one paragraph on page 138 where he attempts to use a rebuttal, "I do not say, of course, that all such statistical statements are useless." Yet further into the paragraph, Postman makes another generalization of statistics, "But statistics, like any other technology, has a tendency to run out of control, to occupy more of our mental space than it warrants, to invade realms of discourse where it can only wreak havoc." Postman also stereotypes polling as useless, "One may concede, at the start, that there are some uses of polling that may be said to be reliable...But to say a procedure is reliable is not to say it is useful" (132-33). Postman's argument would be a lot stronger if he did not use generalizations or stereotype statistics and polling. One cannot form a strong argument by citing one example and generalizing it to the entire field. Postman is guilty of this strategy.