>I'm making the assertion that people who are drawn to computers, especially those who began at a young age, have differently wired brains from the population average, and that this preference for computing fields may be associated with reduced capacity for empathy.

And I'm saying that this is not true. Sure, there some very small proportion of the computing industry that have trouble with empathy, but there is a very small proportion of the population in general that has this problem. Even if the computing field had twice as many people with this issue as the general population, it would still be a small portion of the overall computing field. (And I seriously doubt that it's twice the average. I've never seen anything substantive demonstrating that it is more prevalent at all.)

> You're already talking about someone who is acting like a jerk. Becoming confrontational is the last thing I would expect to convince anyone to want to change their behavior, much less a "jerk."

First, there are many different levels of "confrontation". Telling someone that they've hurt your feelings can be viewed as confrontational, but is much different than yelling at someone and calling them an asshole. Second, if someone is unwilling to acknowledge that their behavior is inappropriate, they are certainly not going to try to change. Someone who sees no problem with their behavior sees no reason to alter it.

> "Dismissing" isn't the right word. Again you seem to assume that I intend to excuse inappropriate behavior and that I expect it to continue. That is not the case. I am proposing a more rational, less reactive approach to persuading people to be more considerate.

You're proposing that we concede that asshole behaviors by people in the tech world are largely due to an inability to empathize. I don't think there's any basis in fact for this claim, so this can not inform an rational approach to resolving the problem.

> a piece of code.

Code doesn't have feelings, and the inappropriate behavior was not toward the code.

> Is this a new analog of Godwin's law? If you wouldn't talk about it w/r/t race or sex or gender, you can't talk about it at all?

Is every metaphor now somehow a meta-invocation of Godwin's law?

Let's talk about racism, though. It's absolutely true that there are people with syndromes (e.g. Tourette's) who shout racial slurs because of their diseases. It is not, however, useful to bring up Tourette's in a conversation about racism, because while it does explain why a tiny portion of society might appear racist to the uninformed, it says nothing at all about the actual issue, because the vast, vast majority of racists do not have Tourette's.

> I would consider those to be less situational explanations, at least the way you've worded them.

You think that explanations that involve situational context are less situational than explanations that are entirely internal to personality? I really don't understand how you can make this claim.

> I've avoided reading the original tweets at issue, so all I'm aware of is that the metaphor of bleeding eyes was used, which is common and inoffensive among nerds.

It's common. That doesn't make it inoffensive. If I say that your clothes are making my eyes bleed, then I'm telling you that your clothes are horrible to a level that has caused me physical damage. This is offensive.