I don't think it's based on any ethical theory, but the ethical theory to which I subscribe is approximately utilitarianism.
So do you have a calculation why laughing at someone for dressing in a funny way lowers total utility?
Your opinion is noted. I'm not sure to what extent you're seriously stating your position, and to what extent you're attempting a sort of reductio ad absurdum (since "I would suggest you'd be being a jerk" is kinda symmetric with "I'd suggest they'd be being rude", etc.) -- but if you mean what you say, then apparently you think laughing at someone for their choice of clothes is less obnoxious than saying someone's being rude by doing that. I wonder why?
The simple answer is because it's not rude. While the choice of clothing in question was funny.
Less politically-motivated employers, however, might well prefer their employees not to behave in ways that predictably lose them customers and goodwill.
I agree. I don't think this applies to the current example. For example, the "humorless corporate drone" type of employee is widely disliked.
So do you have a calculation [...]
Only in the rather hazy sense in which I do for most other ethical questions. It goes something like this: if X wears a dress and Y laughs at X for it, X gets to feel insulted, belittled and maybe threatened, Y gets the satisfaction of laughing at someone they find risible, and anyone else around maybe gets encouraged to think ill of either X or Y. X's utility loss here looks a lot bigger than Y's utility gain. (From, e.g., my experiences of laughing at other people and being laughed at, and what I've heard of other peo...
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.