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.
The logic here takes the form: If we treat this person as female, then such-and-such danger arises that wouldn't if we treated them as male; here's a course of action that attempts to balance mitigating the danger to others against the interests of the person in question.
The appropriate conclusion depends on how real and how severe the danger is. (Of course it needn't be danger as such, and I take it you wouldn't claim there's danger associated with letting male-anatomy people compete in nominally-all-female sporting competitions.)
ChristianKI's example concerned people deemed enough of a threat to others to need locking up in prison. This is an unusually dangerous and (probably) unusually dishonest population. Outside that context, the balance will be different.
To transgender people "gender actually matters" much more of the time than you'd think. (How often does the state of your knee joints actually matter? If your knees are in good shape, hardly ever -- at least in that you hardly ever need to attend to it. But anyone who's had knee trouble can tell you that actually it matters all the time to them.)
I notice that you have so far declined to answer my original question: What actual false beliefs (expressed in terms of anticipated experiences) does this person have, in your opinion?
So do you support letting trans-"women" play on w... (read more)