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.
So do you support letting trans-"women" play on women's sports teams and use women's bathrooms? I notice, you avoided actually addressing the question.
In the sense that people make implicit Bayesian deductions based on peoples gender all the time, this is true. Of course, for purposes of those Bayesian deductions trans-people are much closer to their biological then their claimed gender.
That he's in the similarity cluster labeled "women" for one thing. Yes, you can steelman his position to be conpletely non-falsifiable if you want, I don't believe this is actually what most of them are claiming (as seen by the fact that they do insist on, e.g., using women's facilities, playing in women's sports, being celebrated as "female" CEO's.)
I think sports teams and sporting organizations should make their own decisions. I don't know what's actually best overall; I think transgender people are rare enough that it wouldn't make a big difference in practice to most . My guess is that the best policy for smaller informal sports teams and organizations is to let 'em in, that the best policy at the highest levels where a lot is at stake is to say women's teams/competitions are only for people... (read more)