Well, as it happens, the only example personally known to me at present of someone who contemplated getting a job and changed their mind because of the impact on benefits
Unless you regularly interact with the type of people who live in underclass ghettos, or the class of people sometimes called "white trash", it's not surprising that you personally haven't met people like this.
(Famous examples: "Abstinence-only" sex ed in schools doesn't stop kids having sex, but it does make them more likely to get pregnant when they do. Restricting the availability of contraception increases the incidence of abortion and single-parent families, both of which the opponents of contraception usually say they're more strongly opposed to.)
Setting aside the validity of these examples, I note that none of them are actually examples of incentives.
Let's continue that discussion when you're prepared to engage seriously with what I'm saying.
I am engaging seriously. I merely applied your epistemology to a slightly different domain and suddenly it becomes clear how silly it is.
OK. So if a trans person's brain structure, personality, behaviours, etc., were found to be nearer typical-female than typical-male, would you then consider them something other than deluded/hallucinating/bullshitting? What sort of differences in brain structure would be most relevant? (Brain structure is kinda hard to explore, beyond the very coarsest features; what if we couldn't tell about brain structure but their personality and behaviours were "more female than male"?)
Frankly, I have a hard time believing that something would mess up the development of precisely the sexual characteristics expressed in the brain.
Unless you regularly interact with [...]
Could you briefly describe your own interactions with that segment of the population?
I note that none of them are actually examples of incentives.
I'd say they're about as much so as your example of alleged-rape-victim policy. (E.g., if you teach teenagers that they must be sexually abstinent and make it clear that any sexual non-abstinence is disapproved of, you intend to give an incentive not to have sex, but you also give an incentive not to have contraceptives, and then when other deeper-rooted incentives l...
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.