[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.