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.
I think you're doing the wrong calculation, in two ways.
The rate of sexual assault of trans people is very high.
I wrote a sentence of the form "For many purposes someone with characteristics A, B, and C is more like X than Y". You interrupted after "A" to ask a question that assumes I wrote "For many purposes someone with characteristic A is more like X than Y". This is not the way to have a rational discussion.
(I bet there are in fact contexts in which a convincingly made-up lion should be treated as a tiger. E.g., if you're training a computer vision system. Of course this is far-fetched and irrelevant, but that's what you get for pretending I wrote something I didn't.)
I have tried repeatedly to get you to turn your claims into actual empirical ones and you have so far not obliged, preferring to handwave about "the similarity cluster" even though it's obvious that a key point is that there are different notions of similarity around.
It looks to me as if I have consistently been careful to distinguish between empirical questions, questions of definitions, and questions of what policies to adopt. And if my aim here were to signal as loudly as possible my allegiance to the Blue rather than the Red tribe, I would be responding in a very different way to your repeated use of needlessly provocative terminology. (Which, now that you bring the topic up, looks a lot like signalling your allegiance to a different tribe...)
It would be if I went on to say "... so any notion of similarity is as good as any other", but I didn't and won't because I don't believe that. On the contrary, what I have repeatedly said is that what notion of similarity is best depends on context. There are plenty of possible notions of similarity that would be very bad in any halfway plausible context. It's my opinion that for many purposes a purely anatomical notion of gender-similarity (is that what you favour? I've asked before but you still haven't said) works less well than a more social and psychological one. (Not only because it makes people whose internal sense of their gender and external anatomy differ happier, though that's a bonus. Also because in most interactions perceived gender -- one's own and others' -- makes much more difference than anatomy, chromosomes, hormones, etc.)
What is your evidence for that? Anyway, I wasn't referring only to this case (I take it you mean Jenner's) but asking generally: do you really think that trans people are generally deluded about what anatomy they have, how strong they are, whether they are biologically capable of bearing children, etc.?
In the case of every trans person I know enough about to tell, the answer is: no, of course they are not deluded about that; they know the answer and hate it. (Or, in some cases: no, they aren't deluded about it; they knew that they didn't have the anatomy that felt right to them, and took steps to make their anatomy more like that, and now it's nearer.)