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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

> I find this attitude pretty condescending.

That's fair. When somebody leaps into a discussion without understanding the basics and acting in a way that is basically ignorant denial, I am ok with condescending to them.

The discussion of gender bias and gender equity is a rich and complicated subject. Here on HN, people are generally expected to know something before they open their mouths. I think my condescension here is about 1% of what somebody would get if they were ignorant about language design and still offering similarly bold opinions on languages that they've never used.

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Can you really say that the parent comment lacks an understanding of the basics, or is somehow misinformed in their opinion? People aren't always going to agree with the things you say or the way that you choose to say them. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're wrong or ignorant.

Seeing "The discussion of gender bias and gender equity is a rich and complicated subject" statement with an attitude of "I know more than you despite me not possibly knowing anything of what you know of the topic" paints an interesting picture.

What I know of what he knows is what he said. In particular, the statement I addressed is one that no reasonable person would say if they had real knowledge of the topic.

If you can find some way to interpret him otherwise, I look forward to reading it.

That's the point, I'm not interpreting anything the person is saying. I'm commenting on you admitting the subject is complicated but you are somehow able to guess the knowledge of a person based on one statement you read on a website with little context.

Animal taxonomy is complicated, but if somebody says "bats are bugs" [1] it's fair to guess that they don't know much.

Try it yourself. Take any complicated domain that you know well. It's pretty easy to construct statements that make it clear that a speaker wouldn't know much.

[1] http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1989/11/03

But, this game is easy. If I make ten statements about a particular topic, one of them is spectacularly wrong, the rest are spot on correct; by your logic I don't know much about the topic.

My point is, you are deciding something completely off little information and I'm only suggesting that your guess on this person is not as accurate as you may think it is. I do agree that there's a chance you are 100% correct on the matter, but I don't see how we can determine that.

https://xkcd.com/386/

Of course, I admit that cartoon may apply to myself in this context as well.

If that's your only point, then it's mostly not correct, and where it is correct is isn't interesting.

I'm not deciding anything irrevocably; if he had come back and started talking sense on the topic, I would have been happy to revise.

And yes, of course my picture based on a couple of paragraphs is incomplete. But that's true of any comment here. It's the commenter's job to make sure what they post is a reasonable representation of their views. Repliers reply to what was actually written, not the infinite penumbra of the possibility space of what could actually be going on.

Your standard of "100% correct" is a deeply weird one to apply to online discussion, especially since you clearly aren't applying it to your own comments. I may not know what martiuk knows, but you have no better idea of what I know. But here you are, sniping as if you do.

I'm glad you agree with me, although it is a strange "I'm not really wrong but you are because of claims you didn't make" way of doing it.

I'm glad you can parse "mostly not correct" as agreeing with you. That must really help minimize feelings of cognitive dissonance.

And yes, I'm critiquing what you implied because you initially weren't brave enough to say anything specific, just to raise a (false) contradiction and then call it "interesting" when you meant something other than interesting.

I'm glad you're glad, but now you're using big words and my lowly status as someone who doesn't understand complicated things as easily as you do is causing me to be confused.

You're critiquing, I'm critiquing, it's all good. Well, until you start arguing semantics over words I chose to use (and define them for me to boot), even though I was quite obvious in my initial statement, is clear evidence this is going nowhere.

Thanks, it has been enlightening.

Methinks that wpietri is a troll.

You caught me, anonymous guy with karma less than 10. My 8 years of participation here under my own name has all been a false flag leading up to trolling this one small article.

Yes, I can say that.

The guy is talking about socialization of gender, and proving that it happens how he says because he doesn't personally remember it happening some other way. This blithely ignores that this is an actual field with actual decades of research. E.g., Gilligan's "In a Different Voice" is 33 years old at this point, and that's built on research that goes back decades more.

It also ignores decades of discussion about the discussion of gender and sexism. The blowhard guy asserting that there are no problems because he has never personally experienced them is so common that it is literally a meme:

http://cdn.viralwomen.com/ContentFiles/viralwomen.com/Posts/...

I'm fine with people having different opinions. I'm also fine with people not knowing. But I object to him acting as if he knows without knowing.

Does anyone else encounter the situation where, when confronted with a challenge to certain ideas, the response sounds like the following: "look it up in the literature" or "you don't understand the basics and therefore you are ignorant"? I have noticed this in particular to do with this ideology of gender etc.

It appears to me that this implies that these ideas are beliefs that rely on faith in the belief and that challenging the belief is considered a sign of ignorance at best and a conscious attack at worst. It seems to me that all a questioner need to do is educate themselves in the correct literature and there would be no need to question anymore. To challenge the belief of faith creates incomprehensibility in the holder of the beliefs as it implies that the belief is not certain and can be open to challenge. Thus the most common reply to a question about the certainty of the beliefs is a urgent request to educate themselves.

Yes, I have noticed that proponents of evolution frequently reply to people with "you don't understand the basics" and "look it up in the literature". So by your logic, they must be working from faith.

Or, alternative theory: the topic is actually complicated, they are tired of ignorant people acting like ignorance is just as good as knowledge, and they don't feel obliged to spoon-feed decades of complicated material to people who, by all evidence, have no interested in learning it because it would interfere with what their gut tells them on the topic.

You don't know what you're talking about either though.

Do tell.

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