That's a GREAT experiment. A hacker will not change his opinions on the article, either good or bad. He might even ask "so?". A non-hacker hating the article will mutate opinion, and now regard the piece as an inspiring essay from a challenged minority.

Exactly. I've conducted this experiment myself. One self-proclaimed geek feminist went from a very hostile reaction to what was perceived as something aimed at economic exclusion to a sympathetic reaction to a woman bemoaning assaults on the culture she values.

I realized she was a woman from this line:

>There are progressive, libertarian, anarchist, moderate, communist, conservative, liberal, and reactionary hackers, just the same as can be said for women, bisexuals, Texans, or engineers who aren’t hackers.

The sentence only really makes sense if the final 4 traits are describing the author.

Meredith is a hacker under any definition. So that trait definitely is not descriptive of her.

I meant the 4 in the list (women, bisexuals, Texans, engineers).

The last item is "engineers who aren't hackers".

I have no idea if Meredith is bisexual or Texan.

Here's what the sentence is saying:

There are people who aren't like me who are hackers. Also there are people who are like me who aren't hackers.

The list of people who aren't like her is: progressive, libertarian, anarchist, moderate, communist, conservative, liberal, and reactionary.

The list of people who are like her is: women, bisexuals, Texans, or engineers.

Why else would she come up with 4 random traits? They obviously have something in common: they describe her.

The "who aren't hackers" part doesn't apply directly to engineers. It applies to the entire list. So if you were to parenthesize it to show precedence it would be "(women, bisexuals, Texans, or engineers) who aren’t hackers." Not "women, bisexuals, Texans, or (engineers who aren’t hackers)."

Oh, that makes more sense when it's parsed that way! English is often ambiguous. If you're familiar with Meredith's work, the fact that this thread is all basically because of a parsing error is all very funny.

It's probably most accurate to say that gender isn't a significant factor in my calculus of attraction. I was born in Houston, though, and lived there for 23 years.

For what it's worth, I don't recall intending anything in particular with that list of adjectives, but you never really know about authorial intent.