What I said was: "I think that no one should be laughed at [...]" and the meaning of "I think X should happen" is something like "my values prefer X to not-X".
What ethical theory is this based on?
I wouldn't try to stop other people laughing at someone for wearing a dress, with the following kinda-exceptions. 1. I might gently suggest that they were being rude.
I would suggest you'd be being an obnoxious jerk by doing so.
- If the person laughing were some kind of official performing his or her duties, they might well have a stronger obligation not to be rude / discriminatory / etc., and if they were working for me in some sense (e.g., my employee; public servant in a country where I get to vote and pay taxes and so on) then I might require them to stop.
Ok, so if I was an employer I'd do my best to avoid hiring you, and certainly not let you anywhere near a position where somebody might be reporting to you.
I don't think it's based on any ethical theory, but the ethical theory to which I subscribe is approximately utilitarianism.
It occurs to me that there is an ambiguity about "I think no one should do X". Taken literally it means something like "I prefer a world in which no one does X", but of course one can imagine a lot of different sorts of world in which no one does X. The most probable such world is probably one in which everyone is prevented from doing X, but that isn't what I had in mind (and I think it's very seldom what anyone wh...
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.