[georgeorwell]

Okay, thanks for explaining, I better understand your position. For myself, I don't believe A -> S or !A -> !S. I also don't believe O -> S or !O -> !S. People will get offended over the silliest things, and conversely victims of abuse will also deny that any was done to them. I also don't believe D, in that I don't think she was intentionally lying about being offended in order to manipulate the situation. I'm not sure that H suggests D, unless you mean emotionally dishonest, which of course I believe. She did fabricate the bit about forking being sexual, but I thought that was more jumping to conclusions than lying. But, I do understand your position insofar as if A implies S, then H matters.

It does seem to me that when you say A is evidence for S, even though your diagram only has S -> A, that you're just affirming the consequent. That is, given P -> Q and Q, claiming P is true.

So, my position is, she's a hypocrite, she got offended, obvious character flaws, etc. But whether or not there was sexism can only be determined by looking at both sides of the description of events that we have. For the most part, it seems people are saying that it isn't sexism, and that it would have to be specifically degrading to women.

I don't think the flying saucer analogy applies, because nobody is disputing the events that took place, people are only disputing whether there was sexism, i.e. what the meaning of the events was. To me it's more like, crazy person sees something fly overhead, claims it was a flying saucer and the beginning of an alien invasion, and proceeds to escalate the situation, when everyone else who looks at the data after the fact says it was just a plane.

At any rate, barring a conversion one way or the other to the truth of A -> S and !A -> !S, I think this is at a standstill, but it was an interesting discussion, so thanks.

[dspeyer]

My arrows are for causality. It's simpler this way. Evidence flows the other way. If sexism causes offence, then offence is evidence for sexism. How strong evidence depends on the likelihood of the consequence in absence of the cause. Bayes FTW!

As for concluding !S, most statements aren't sexist. In the absence of meaningful evidence for S, we should conclude !S (or rather, p(S)<.1).

[georgeorwell]

Ok, I actually just didn't realize you were talking about probabilistic logic, because I'm used to propositional logic. If there is no way to determine S in the absence of A, then yes, A matters. However, we have a reasonable accounting of the facts agreed upon by both sides, at least as far as the dongle joke is concerned. Given that, a post mortem evaluation of the joke by a large group of people is a much better way to determine S, making A irrelevant, and therefore H irrelevant. It's not the case that you had to be there in order to know S directly. Does this make sense, regardless of whether or not you agree?

[dspeyer]

I always use probabilistic logic for real-world questions. Certainty is just too rare.

I understand and agree with your analysis except for one point: as I understand it, the exact text of the joke has not been published, sadly preventing post mortem evaluation.

[georgeorwell]

Well, mr-hank said it had something to do with "a big dongle joke about a fictional piece hardware that identified as male", and Adria corroborates that less specifically with it being a joke about a "big" dongle.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5398681

http://butyoureagirl.com/14015/forking-and-dongle-jokes-dont...

However, if that description isn't enough (it is for me), I'd much rather accept Adria's oversensitivity and injustice-seeking behavior as applicable character flaws. As opposed to her hypocrisy, those things really do make her a bad judge of what is and isn't sexist, because they generate false positives.

Her hypocrisy is also galling because of her response to the events, but that still doesn't affect her claim that she took appropriate action, because it's a generic claim about any woman in that situation, and doesn't rely on any of her character flaws.

Okay, that is as refined as it gets for me, I think. I did come to see how I was implicitly accepting an ad hominem argument without realizing it (the one about oversensitivity), so thanks again.