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Comment by sinxoveretothex | Hacker News Reader

> And right now, you are not focussing on technology, but on gender issues. So you're a hypocrite. You care enough about gender to voice an opinion, but only to lash out at others who dare to have an opinion?

When two unrelated fields clash (say science and religion to illustrate the point with different topics), you have to "take a stand" on both even if you want to care only about one of them.

In the specific case of the previous poster, I think that what he means is that he wants the most important criteria to be about technology. Inevitably, that means that gender ratios are only secondary considerations to those.

Maybe that stance is to focus on gender issues in your view. But in that case, what would a stance that focuses only on technology?

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They're not really unrelated fields. No two fields are unrelated, especially to sociology and psychology.

HTTPS was invented to solve a security problem -- a completely social issue that wouldn't exist if people just could be trusted with your data. Unicode was invented to solve the problem that not everybody writes with the Latin alphabet, a problem caused only because people don't agree to fix it. Neither of those would have meant anything if someone didn't convince everybody to use them -- another purely social problem. In fact, almost all computer science issues are attempts to solve or make irrelevant certain classes of social problems. They're not unrelated fields at all. Communication and technology are practically the same thing.

>I think that what he means is that he wants the most important criteria to be about technology

The most important criteria for what? For what conferences people should have? For establishing what a given human wants out of life? For determining whether an industry is prejudiced?

The cases you give are good examples of places where technology was harnessed to solve social problems.

But it is possible to not "care" about these issues: either by working on solutions to other problems or by focusing only on making the technology better.

That is what I meant by "unrelated", maybe I should have used "independent".

> The most important criteria for what? For what conferences people should have? For establishing what a given human wants out of life? For determining whether an industry is prejudiced?

The most important criteria for technological pursuits, not social ones. People who disagree on political issues can still pursue technology progress together on issues that don't involve those political issues for example (not that this is the case here, I'm speaking generally).

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