[wpietri]

> My thought is that it's not because they mean to be rude. It's because they pattern match. I've noticed when folks see the same pattern over and over it's difficult to see outside it.

Most rude people don't mean to be rude. They're just thoughtless. That doesn't make their behavior less rude.

For example, the zillion people who, upon learning I'm a computer guy, bust out their computer questions and put me on the spot to diagnose and possibly fix their issues. Are they just pattern matching? Sure. But are they also being thoughtless and self-centered? Definitely.

The problem isn't the pattern matching. Anything with neurons does that. It's the lack of consideration about how other people will feel.

[melindajb]

The pattern matching itself isn't the problem, indeed. It's the apparent lack of some men, usually white men to override it and take a more charitable view of their fellow human beings.

For some reason those same men cry out for "rational discussion" unless it's about their own behavior, of course. They can somehow override most of their animal instincts to steal, fight, or fuck indiscriminately, but can't somehow find a way to overcome thinking a woman at a trade show booth can't possibly be an engineer.

So we're saying, either the person can overcome that thinking or they can't.

If they can, but choose not to, they're deliberately discriminatory.

If they can't overcome that thinking, we might want to have them institutionalized for anti social behavior, because what other animal instincts are they not able to overcome?