Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
It also seems to amount to arguing that we should take people's delusions and hallucinations at face value, as long as those are about there gender. It's also interesting that these are the only type of delusions society is, currently, expected to play along with.
If a man shows up claiming to be both Jesus and John Lennon his beliefs won't be taken seriously and he is likely to be directed towards treatment aimed at curing him of his delusion. On the other hand, if a man shows up claiming to be a woman, we are expected to take him at his word, disregard any other evidence to the contrary, and accommodate this delusion in all kinds of unreasonable ways.
Meh. I've always thought the gender stuff and many others (not getting into them) are borderline insane, which is why I usually avoid that if possible.
I might be overly cynical but the world runs in it's own way. I'd like to be treated in a certain way but I can hardly blame people for not treating me the way I'd like tp. Nobody owes you anything so you can't ask them to pay their debt. At the end of the day all you can really do is work on yourself and that's it.
There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.