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 can understand the sentiment, but history has shown that if insanity is not confronted it expends in both power and depth.
The problem is that it's a two-way street. What you see is not what I see, and if person X is claiming A, I myself might be seeing D instead. Reality-wise, we would probably have to check their genes, but that's less practical. So instead people go to their intuition and just call them whatever they think fits.
It's also a pretty big offense to call a woman a man, and vice-versa, so there's still risk in that.