When "a man shows up claiming to be a woman", what exactly -- in "beliefs pay rent in anticipated experiences" terms -- do you think this person is wrong about?
I could ask the same question about the man who claims to be Jesus. In both cases it's possible to "steelman" the claims to be unfalsifiable if one is so inclined, although at that point the claims are unfalsifiable and have no connection to reality and are mere free floating claims.
I could ask the same question about the man who claims to be Jesus.
You could ask it, but I think a correct answer would look quite different in the two cases.
I should preface this by saying that I am neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist, and will welcome corrections from those who are. So, anyway, my understanding is that if someone thinks he's Jesus then either (1) he expects to have some super-Jesus-powers like performing miracles or offering teaching so supremely wise that following it will greatly improve anyone's life[1], and/or (2) his thinki...
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.