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Comment by slededit | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

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

As always, there's a relevant XKCD cartoon:

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

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