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Comment by news_to_me | Hacker News Reader

> (NOTE: my use of male pronouns is deliberate; it is almost always male IT engineers who have this unreasonable optimism. Female IT engineers in my experience are generally far more conservative and realistic, almost to a fault, which is why I prefer them. I just wish they weren’t so hard to find.)

I don’t know why, but something about this aside really rubbed me the wrong way.

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It's the classic "look at the coarsest metric and use it to make some kind of a judgement" that basically everyone does. Not getting eaten by a lion is way, way more valuable than occasionally running away from nothing for no reason so human animals can't help themselves. It's in the firmware or hardware. You have to recognize it's happening in your software and decide to look for better clues to overcome what the firmware is doing.

It's the same kind of thing that causes a person who has been robbed to conclude that anyone who matches some kind of obvious characteristics of the person who robbed them to be the same kind of "other" and to diligently avoid them. You can't blame them! They got robbed! That's traumatic.

What's too bad is when the person never examines their beliefs for where they're wrong and to try and update their model of the world. Not every female engineer is amazing and not every male one has too much bravado. Not everyone who is wearing the same clothes as the mugger is a mugger. Not everyone who is wearing different clothes is not a mugger.

But also life is short and the heuristics we all use every day serve us well enough that to examine every single one would mean you couldn't do much at all with your life. It's too bad but try not to take it personally. We all do it and we rarely know in what ways we are.

> It's too bad but try not to take it personally.

Does this strike you as an odd way to respond to cut and dry sexism? Would this response be as reasonable and forgiving if the genders in the quoted aside were reversed?

It depends on if you're talking about the "oppressed people can't be racist" kind of theory of oppression, or the "the rules are the rules" kind of oppression.

Honestly it wasn't written to the person to say "it's totally OK for a person to speak this way" it was more of a "look lots of people are going to rub you the wrong way, here's a way to think about it that involves them being accidentally ignorant rather than purposefully malicious".

I'm not saying a person should have to have this attitude and "let everyone get away with it" but I can say that anyone who does have this attitude will probably have a happier personal life. The decision is up to all of us.

Inviting the question: on which side of the thermocline of truth might you consider yourself located?

Probably just the blatant sexism. I wouldn't want to work with someone who thought I was less competent merely because of my gender. I also wouldn't want to work with someone who thought I was hot shit merely because of my gender.

It's not just the blatant sexism but the blatant double-standard sexism. I wouldn't mind working with someone who made a fair assessment of the areas where I would likely be better or worse than average on account of my sex. But getting only the negatives sucks.

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