What I strongly disagreed with is the following claim (your description of an allegedly "fashionable approach" which you may or may not have been ascribing to me)
that the exposition of views you don't agree with constitutes aggression
It sometimes happens that an exposition of some view or other constitutes aggression-as-I-understand it. It sometimes happens that it doesn't. Whether I agree with the view has nothing to do with whether a given exposition of it constitutes aggression.
If you'd instead said that some people think "that sometimes an exposition of a particular view can constitute aggression" then I wouldn't have disagreed with it. Perhaps that's what you actually meant to say some people think -- but in that case I suggest that you said it very badly. (Perhaps from a desire to make those people sound sillier?)
you think that considering transsexuals to be mentally ill is "aggression"
No, I don't, and I respectfully suggest that you retrace whatever mental steps led you to think I think that looking for errors.
I think that calling them (not merely considering them) delusional and hallucinating (not merely mentally ill) is "aggression". You can consider anyone you like anything you like and it will not constitute aggression; how could it. And "mentally ill" is a very broad category, covering e.g. things like depression and anxiety as well as outright craziness.
And: yes, words like "crazy" and "delusional" and "hallucinating" are pejorative in ways in which e.g. "suffering from gender identity disorder" is not, which makes statements that use the former terms more aggressive than otherwise similar ones that use the latter.
So I think the tension and inconsistency you perceive in my position is the result of misunderstanding it. (There might of course be tensions or inconsistencies even when it's correctly understood; maybe we'll find out.)
confounding factors (other than IQ)
True. I'm sure hiring managers are rarely concerned with IQ as such at all. But they do care about competence in the job, and that's the scale on which they rated applicants called "Jennifer" 0.7 points lower (out of 5) than otherwise identical applicants called "John". I personally would not classify "unlikelihood of disappearing on maternity leave" under the heading of competence; would you expect university science faculty hiring a lab manager to do so?
that critically depends on where your zero point is
Yup. That's a large part of why I am not bothered by LW (in my perception) leaning right.
It is not a useful exercise to assign a political tilt to LW -- that's not what this place is about.
You may recall that I was only talking about this because I thought you were implying that politlcally-motivated aggression on LW tends to come from "the left". I don't at all mind LW's tilting rightward (if indeed it really does).
I don't think [that gjm's comments are stupid] at all
I'm pleased to hear it! But you will find that in any political thread my comments (which I'm fairly sure are not generally any stupider than they are in this one) attract more than averagely many downvotes even when (as it seems to my of-course-perfectly-unbiased judgement) they are conspicuously reasonable and not-stupid. So do comments from other people with political leanings resembling mine. And that's part of what I mean by saying that LW has a conservative, not merely and anti-stupid, tilt.
I think that particular phenomenon is due to a very small number of users -- in my less charitable moments I suspect one with intermittent sockpuppets. But it's there, and I think it affects the overall flavour of discussion on LW, even if that's not what LW should be about. And, more generally, I think the left and the right have their characteristic unpleasantnesses, and those of the left are (1) largely absent and (2) heavily criticized and downvoted when they show up, whereas those of the right are (1) distinctly more common and (2) generally approved by the LW community, so far as one can tell from replies and karma.
(Again: I'm not saying there's anything very terrible about that. And LW is indeed distinctly less unpleasantly political than many other venues.)
If you'd instead said that some people think..
That would have been fairly useless. The phrase "some people think.." can be followed by pretty much anything at all and still be true.
I am still confused by your understanding of aggression -- right now it seems to me that it means just being impolite. Let's take Alice who may or may not have some issues. Bob says "She is mentally ill". Charlie says "She is delusional and hallucinating". Duncan says "Man, she's just batshit crazy". Is it you position that Bob is fine,...
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.