a definition that fails to cut reality at the joints (or at least is worse at it than the traditional definition)
Would you like to justify that?
So would you seriously argue that Bruce Jenner is closer to the "female" cluster then the "male" cluster?
I would seriously argue that "closer to" in this context can mean multiple things. For, e.g., medical purposes Jenner is much nearer the male than the female cluster. [EDITED because I'd got things the wrong way around in the previous sentence.] For some others it's the other way around; e.g., the only pictures I've seen I would classify as nearer "typical female" than "typical male". For some others it's more complicated. For some others I simply have no idea (I have never met Jenner nor heard her[1] voice).
It seems to me tha...
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.