Why Lefties Make Less

to get the math right: what percentage of the best programmers were lefties?

Same experience. 4 out 7 of my CS professors were left handed and some of the smartest people in their field.

The plural of anecdote is not data. The results of the research conducted do not dictate that left-handed people must be inferior, it only presents the findings that statistically, those traits were present in the sample.

It is entirely possible for you to have had great experiences with lefties, and the findings stated in the article to be true. The findings in the article are also not a good reason to discriminate against left-handed people.

When you eat in public with your hands, like a sandwich? Because I was taught growing up in the UK that everybody should hold their fork in their left hand and knife in the right. That's how to set a table, forks left, knives right.

This is a good point and there may be something in it.

There's a semi-related, interesting phenomenon in fencing, which results in a a disproportionately large percentage of fencers being left-handed.

This is because at a beginner/intermediate level, left-handed fencers have an advantage over right-handed ones (think about how swords would meet slightly differently if the fencers are each same-handed or opposite-handed). It turns out that this creates an advantage because right-handedness (and hence, same-handedness in pairings) is still >> 50%, so left-handers get very used to fencing opposite-handed, while it tends to throws off right-handers who aren't as used to it.

The advantage goes away at a high level, but it create a bias towards more left-handers taking up and sticking at fencing, because they make more progress when starting out. They feel like they are better at fencing than other sports they might have tried, where they don't have a strategic advantage by default.

Anyway, one of the obviously related subtle effects is what happens when you reach out to shake someone's hand. If you reach out to someone opposite-handed, the result can be brief but tangible awkwardness. Little cues like that can add up to create a subconscious picture of something not being quite right, or perhaps even "sinister".

Again, like with the fencing example, the left-hander is used to this because it happens to them 90% of the time. For the right-hander, it feels like something is off because it only happens 10% of the time, so they aren't expecting it.

I'm the same as you. Given that people write with pen and paper less every day, it's becoming a much more trivial issue everywhere outside of sports.

The Greeks, I suppose out of superstition, called the left (among other things) "aristeros", which has the look of a comparative of (the superlative) "aristos", best, noblest, etc. But Liddell and Scott say that the derivation is uncertain: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

It may be a bit different in sports, where handedness matters more directly. At least in fencing, a right-hander going against a left-hander is a very different situation than two people of the same handedness competing, and because right-handers are such a majority, lefties have loads of time to practice exploiting the lefty-v-righty special case. Actually one of the really interesting things is watching lefties against other lefties, because neither tends to be used to what for righties is the 'normal' orientation to the opponent.

A left-handed pitcher can last in major league baseball into his early 40s, an age when most position players and right-handed pitchers would have retired. There is an advantage from unfamiliarity in boxing (another comment mentions fencing). I believe that Marvin Hagler was naturally right-handed but taught himself to box as a left-hander.