Note that your reply here is basically "not all men!" A response that has been examined and found deeply lacking:
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.
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.
If you can find some way to interpret him otherwise, I look forward to reading it.
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.
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.
Of course, I admit that cartoon may apply to myself in this context as well.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.