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> But look at the real story here: thousands of men going out of their way to write letters- not quick 5 minute emails, but paper letters with envelopes and stamps- to tell a woman she was wrong. If it had been a man writing the article, would it have gotten the same reaction? I doubt it.

My experience with the internet is that people just can't help themselves to point out when somebody is wrong - man or woman. Sometimes going as far to write what could be considered full essays complete with citations. Its just another anecdote but I don't think its at all obvious its because of gender. People just like feeling smart.

Yes, but most people don't cite a man's gender or appearance as a reason for his wrongness. Just from the sampling in the article we have two good examples of criticisms a man will never see:

> Maybe women look at math problems differently than men.

> You are the goat!

I'm sure there were many others.

I have heard the occasional comment about men being too irrational...

We don't know the samples in the article are representative of the feedback. In fact, I would expect the authors to cherry pick the feedback for entertainment purposes.

I believe the OP is right, but providing uncontroversial evidence of that is hard. You need a thorough classification of the feedback in a number of sufficiently comparable cases, involving both men and women, to provide hard evidence. And even with hard evidence in hand the conclusions could be ignored; cf. climate change.

This isn't a debate that can be settled by rational evidence.

Have you ever seen a woman's inbox? This scientist got 10,000 pieces of hate mail. Going by what I know about the kinds of e-mails women receive on the daily, it's safe to assume a good 2000 of those messages were misogynistic.

It's just how the world works. We can all pretend like we don't have uncontroversial evidence and that we'll never know if her identity as a female really affected the response. That's pretty much the status quo. Or we can not be blind and see what's happening right in front of us.

I think that these sorts of situations tend to have a mix of factors, and that "people love giving lengthy explanations about how other people are wrong" and "people have an implicit bias against women, especially in areas like math" likely both were contributing factors to the backlash. It's probably impossible to know how much each one contributed, but I think it's likely that both were significant.

My experience with the internet is that people just can't help themselves to point out when somebody is wrong

You can actually use this to your advantage. There are plenty of knowledgeable people who would rarely or never respond usefully to a request for assistance who are quite happy to spend time pointing out your errors (and flaws) if you post something incorrect.

I'm honestly not sure if this is a dark pattern. Is it wrong to take advantage of the negative behaviors of poorly socialized people?

Its a win win for everyone. They get the dopamine rush of being right and everyone else gets the information.

My experience with the internet is that people just can't help themselves to point out when somebody is wrong

As always, there's a relevant XKCD cartoon:

https://xkcd.com/386/ ("Duty Calls")

I remember this incident well.

Ascribing this all to gender seems like too broad of a brush, and with very little evidence to back it up either.

There were likely a multitude of motivations for people to write in and correct her, but isn't it natural for us to want to take someone down a peg when they are advertised as "all that" (in this case - smartest person alive), and they seem obviously wrong about something?

This is a statistics problem that many people who have had statistics training have been wrong about.

Seems like the setup for a perfect storm.

Personally, I don't think the larger response was because of gender. Well, a couple clearly were, but there's always outliers in any group. I think the vast majority were due to her status... the smartest person in the world. That leaves people chomping at the bit to disprove it and correct any little mistake.

That exists in any field, sadly. Top draft picks are scrutinized every year in sports. Every presidential gaffe gets its own 'mightier than thou' correction article. Anecdotally, I knew a mechanic who couldn't wait to read ClickNClack to find any little mistake and claim superiority.

> If it had been a man writing the article, would it have gotten the same reaction? I doubt it.

Based on what? I hear this only brought up in the media reaction of "men try and prove smart woman wrong!"

From the article I think I only saw one comment that involved gender - I think it’s pretty unfair to ascribe gender motivation to many of the responses (as embarrassing to read as they are).

Secondly, what is the implied norm that the author wants - you can’t disagree with someone of a different gender who has a higher IQ than you?

Yes, this was quintessentially sexist bullshit. It's so ubiquitous that there's a word for it -- mansplaining.

But it's not just about gender. Consider the racism faced by so many Black mathematicians and scientists. And Indians, such as Jagadish Chandra Bose. Even Srinivasa Ramanujan, before his genius was recognized in the UK.

But recall that Black men got human rights in the US before women did. And that corporations also got them before women did. So it's arguable that sexism runs deeper than racism.

On the other hand, I cringe at "smartest woman". What does that really mean? It's like describing some hugely multidimensional thing with a few numbers. All we know is that she did extremely well at whatever tests were used. And we also know that many such tests are culturally biased.

Anecdotally, I suspect this pattern extends all the way back to childhood. The tendency I've seen, repeatedly, is that misbehavior and horseplay is tolerated in boys, or even encouraged, whereas retribution is swift when little girls step out of line. I've found this tendency in myself, sadly. When my girls misbehave, take stupid risks, boss other kids around, tear around the house and cause general mayhem, I have to consciously skew my responses back to the mean. Not that I think the world would be a better place if we raised everyone up as misbehaving man-children, but at least I want to level the playing field somewhat for my own girls.

It wasn't just any woman, it was a threatening woman -- the "smartest" woman. They were so eager to prove her wrong, they didn't stop to even spend 5 minutes to brute force the problem. She seemed intuitively wrong, they couldn't even consider that the "world's smartest woman" saw something they, exalted PhDs, did not.

Indeed, and we still see the same behaviour in many male-oriented public forums, including this one. And of course the subsequent denial of their own sexist and misogynistic behaviour.

"It was nothing to do with her being a woman!" they will cry, ignoring the unconscious bias that led them to such an angrily disproportionate response in the first place.

Yeah, I'm pretty sick of it to be honest. The culture in silicon valley and its online reflections is pretty toxic and off putting.

Paper letters with envelopes and stamps were as ubiquitous in 1990 as email is today, and there have been plenty of articles in The Straight Dope where Cecil Adams - a fictional, but decidedly male identity - claims to have received letters telling him he's wrong "from every unemployed Ph.D. in North America, plus a few who aren’t unemployed."

I think plenty of people would have still written in but almost certainly the tone of the letters would have been different.

Also, more people probably would have second-guessed their intuition, at least for a moment, and perhaps there would have been a few less letters.

Actually yes, "a man" would. This is the same damned groupthink ignorance anybody intelligent gets when dealing with the less intelligent. It's fundamentally not about getting the right answer, but preserving monkeysphere group cohesion and hierarchy.

In fact, I'd say the zeitgeist of casting everything in an identity politics narrative is in the same exact vein. It's a nice, simple, and wrong answer, but it does sort out who has committed to the group (ie religion).

I'm certainly willing to posit that women are quite often on the receiving end due to many men immediately writing them off as lower status (likely in an attempt to keep from sliding further down the scale themselves), but I'm not signing up to drink divisive kool-aid that ultimately obscures the problem.

Gamergate wasn't about telling a women that she was wrong. It was gamers reacting to disdain and collusion from the journalists that were covering their industry.

The "Gamers are Dead" articles were authored by many different journalists, not just women. Perpetuating the narrative that it was an attack on women is exactly they type of behavior that keeps Gamergate alive.

Gamergate was most definitely about harassing women. "Ethics in games journalism" was the excuse for lengthy, focussed harassment campaigns against specific women who dared criticise videogames. If it really was about ethics in videogame journalism it wouldn't have started with a review about a free game.

Fully disagree. That review was done without the disclosure that the reviewer and reviewee were at the very least good friends. That is ethics in journalism 101.

The circling the wagons of journalists defending this poor reporting and actually attacking gamers is what Gamergate was about.

Harassing women was just another game for these troublemakers. A reasonable person would have stopped and reconsidered their behaviour, but these were not reasonable people.

It was nothing to do with ethics anyway, that was just the excuse. How ethical is it to participate in a sustained campaign of harassment?

Pointing out hypocrisy and unprofessionalism is not harassment.

Death threats, rape threats, releasing targets' private information, threats of violence, stalking, and other such unsavoury behaviour is harassment though. And that's what Gamergate was all about.

Please do post proof of these things. You do realize all of this got investigated by the FBI and they didn't find a single credible threat. Stop listening to what the media tells you about this. That is the whole point of Gamergate.

If you actually read the FBI report, you will find it corroborates the reported facts of Gamergate harassment.

Your 'fake news' protestation is not supported by the evidence.