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Comment by peter_retief | Hacker News Reader

Good grief, the level of ignorence is astonishing but add that that was in a science journal...

The level of ignorance of people dissing the article without reading it is not astonishing, it's par for the course.

My first computer science professor claimed women could not have been the first programmers because they were physically incapable of learning something this complex. Sadly this is exactly what I expect here.

My mum (who started programming mainframes in assembler at 17, was a very early adopter of PL/1 and was expert enough that IBM purchased her annotated copy of one of their manuals for quite a sum of money back in the 70s) says many of the earliest programmers were women because programming was viewed as secretarial work. It only became more male-dominated after it started being prestigious and highly paid.

The quote is accurate and stupid. The emperor is naked, we can all see it.

Of course the quote is "accurate" -- the text appears in the article. But here we are purportedly discussing science journalism and we yet get troglodytic comments like that. I see no refutation of the article from you or anyone else. Your comment is pure emo and of no value whatsoever.

I won't respond further.

I think it's pretty clear that the onus of showing evidence is on the one with the extraordinary claim.

I must add this:

The "extraordinary claim" is obviously that a SciAm article is "stupid" and that "The emperor is naked, we can all see it".

No, the extraordinary claim is that women can compete at the highest level with men at the highest level. In any sport.

> The level of ignorance of people dissing the article without reading it is not astonishing, it's par for the course.

I feel that's an unwarranted assumption on your part: I read the article, even quoted from it in my comment, and my take agrees with your parent comments.

Your comment smells a lot like "They disagree with the article, so obviously they didn't read it, because anyone who read it would agree".

I'd posit that it's not primarily ignorance, but the idea that ideology can bend reality. This idea is quite successful at spreading, in part due to ignorance, but there are other factors too.

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