[endlessvoid94]

Most (not all) of the responses here seem to absolutely confirm this essay's main points.

The posters here generally are taking some kind of offense to this, and feel the need to shoot it full of holes. In the meantime, this behavior is only reinforcing the point to anyone who happens to not be a programmer.

It's actually quite striking.

[bena]

If someone came on here and said something blatantly false such as "Gravity doesn't exist. Here's a bunch of technobabble explaining why it doesn't. Anyone who doesn't agree is a douche and part of the conspiracy to hide the truth." Would the multitudes of people coming to refute his points confirm his point that there is a conspiracy to hide the truth?

Or would it mean that he just may be wrong.

[rorymarinich]

Bullshit. Gravity is a provable part of science. The social sciences are harder to deal with. Meanwhile, you want proof? I'll offer myself and every single person I know who's willing to be social as proof. I'm friends with guys with weird hair and glasses who use Digg and they were an accepted part of high school because they didn't go out of their way to be exclusive and closed-off. When I decided to stop being a dick to people just to preempt their disliking me, I found out that I was rarely disliked. (In fact, I went to a further extreme, because I'm quick to call people out for saying stupid things and I like colorful insults, and yet people didn't mind so much as I continued to get along with them.)

Show me the person who makes an active attempt to stop being hated - not by being "cool" but by starting to act friendly towards people - and fails after a few weeks' effort and I'll consider your experiment a potential refutation.

Would the multitudes of people coming to refute his points confirm his point that there is a conspiracy to hide the truth?

I said "Nerds are in denial" and a lot of people jumped on board to deny it. I'm not saying that proves it either way, because I don't presume to judge people by their comments online, but it's not exactly evidence of my wrongdoing.

[bena]

Don't argue the example. I chose the example as an obviously wrong opinion.

I know lots of people who are hated simply because they try to hard to be liked. Annoyingly friendly to the point of aggravation. They wind up being hated because they don't want to be hated.

And of course if I say something like "Nerds will deny their love of the music stylings of Britney Spears", I will get a ton of "nerds" who don't like Britney Spears at all and say so. But that isn't proof that they secretly like Britney Spears because you correctly predicted the response to an inflammatory statement.

A lot of people are coming up to say that they weren't assholes, that when they were nice they were still victimized, etc., etc. But to you that is only proof of your statement that they are in denial. You are refusing to consider that maybe, you are just wrong, extrapolating from yourself conclusions that don't hold in the larger context.