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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

No, what dang said was, "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." No reasonable person could possibly interpret this as meaning, "it is not possible to disagree, because a) she identified as being female, and b) said it was gross, c) it was mentioned in the context of abuse."

You are just trolling, and I am only responding because dang's comment may not be visible to other people reading this thread.

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Ok, humor me. What is the strongest plausible interpretation of:

"One that had a referrer as a thread on Hacker News kept insisting I couldn't be a real person, and wanting me to do basic math like 2+3 "before he would talk to me." It was gross."?

(I am not trolling. Disagreeing with your point of view is not the same thing as trolling.)

A stronger plausible interpretation is that the commenter has indeed seen many instances of harassment like the ones in the OP—which was obviously her main point; that as a SaaS founder she knows about chatbots, and would have no problem with a prospective customer who just wanted to make sure a human was at the other end (obviously it would be in her business interests to engage with such a user); and that she had additional reason to believe that the person asking her "2 + 3" etc. wasn't doing so in good faith, since she wrote "kept insisting" and "it was gross".

Now obviously I don't know what happened there, but the above interpretation is not only plausible, it's almost inevitable if you begin by assuming that the other person is just as smart as you are. Instead you began by being a jerk, assumed stupidity on the part of the other, and threw in additional insults. If you behave like that on Hacker News again we will ban you.

>Instead you began by being a dick

I'd like to point out that using this word to imply certain traits (commonly stereotyped to male behaviors) is not much different from calling someone a pussy to imply weakness/sensativity/etc.

I don't want to touch the flamebaity aspect of this but the word 'dick' was too harsh and not one I usually use in moderation comments. I changed it to the slightly more modulated 'jerk'.

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