[pdabbadabba]

> Because the person who runs the site in all probability is a male if you don't know otherwise.

I agreed with this at first glance, but on second glance: What makes you say this? If you are like me, then your antecedent probability assumption itself was based on sexism, and not evidence. And, in fact, some quick Googling suggests that at least half of bloggers are women. I suppose its debatable whether Ikeahackers is a "blog" but this seems like evidence enough to undermine the premise that, in the absence of any other information, the person behind the site is probably a man.

I don't mean to condemn you, or anything like that. I freely admit that I use the word "guy" by default and, as I mentioned, I was initially in agreement with your point until I took a step back and did a little intentional self-criticism.

I hope we can all agree that sexism is probably universal, to one degree or other, and that we all should work to minimize it, but also that the occasional slip does not make one a bad person.

[nawitus]

>I agreed with this at first glance, but on second glance: What makes you say this? If you are like me, then your antecedent probability assumption itself was based on sexism, and not evidence. And, in fact, some quick Googling suggests that at least half of bloggers are women.

You wrongly assume that the probability assessment was done solely on the fact that it's a blog. It's not. There are additional information that influences the probability. Mainly that there's hacking involved.

[pdabbadabba]

I think we're all still waiting to see the evidence -- as opposed to biases -- upon which you're basing these antecedent probabilities.

There's also another point worth making: even if it were true that you have a truly objective, rational reason for assuming that (e.g.) the author of the blog is a man, this doesn't resolve the question of whether you should speak as though you assume all unidentified hackers, bloggers, whatever are men. There is more at stake than whether you happen to be right or wrong in guessing the blogger's gender. The problem is that such patterns of language can and do easily harden into norms -- i.e., you may only use masculine nouns for probabilistic reasons, but this pattern of speaking, if sufficiently widespread, can give rise to the view it is abnormal (in the normative, not the merely descriptive sense) for women to hack or start hacker blogs. This is a bad thing because the social pressure that results can meaningfully restrict the freedom of future women.