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Comment by tomhoward | Hacker News Reader

The root commenter may have started this flamewar with a simplistic and inflammatory comment, but you exacerbated it with an equally simplistic and inflammatory comment introducing gender politics in a way that has only a tenuous link to the original topic.

> There is a metric fton (an SI unit) of research on a wide range of socially beneficial change that happens simply from giving power to women.

Nobody who is the kind of contributor that HN welcomes would take serious issue with this.

That doesn't make your original comment a relevant or constructive contribution to the discussion, which is about poverty in general.

Discussions about just how equality can be achieved across gender and other axes, and how that can lead to benefits to society, are important and worthy discussions.

But they're not simple - if they were, these problems would have been solved long ago.

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Its a testament to the state of our national discourse that the statement of some simple, but obvious, truths could be considered "inflammatory". Also I didnt bring gender into the discussion; the burden of poverty falls disproportionately on women.

> our national discourse

You might want to check your assumptions about which country I'm from.

> I didnt bring gender into the discussion; the burden of poverty falls disproportionately on women.

This is a rhetorical tactic, not a good-faith mode of discussion.

From the age of your account it looks like you're a new participant on HN.

Fair enough that you're not yet up to speed with how things are done here.

This site is intended for people who want to engage in good-faith discussions, not rhetorical trickery and point-scoring.

So this is already generating more heat than light, but:

I really don't see how lorcan brought gender into the discussion. cmurf did. To me, it looks like you're chewing out the wrong person. (And therefore, I don't think it's a rhetorical tactic for lorcan to say so.)

Oh, true, thanks for pointing that out, apologies to lorcan, I was mistaken about which original-comment-writer I was replying to. I guess it was too late at night for me to be writing comments in a discussion like that.

To lorcan:

The problem with your original comment was that it is technically true, but handwaves away a whole lot of really important detail about how someone's circumstances (e.g., family/community environment and inherited attributes like genetics and innate behaviours) influence one's ability to do that. To your credit, you acknowledged this in a later comment, but the crappy discussion was well on its way by then.

Related to that is it conflates correlation with causation.

Comments like this inevitably set off bad discussions, because that missing detail is what really matters about the topic, so you'll get arguments at cross-purposes, with some people supporting the truthiness of your point, and others trying to point out the gaps, and so it's hard to reach common ground because people are focused on different aspects of the issue.

Anyway, as AnimalMuppet said, this is well past generating more heat than light, so I'm out and I hope others are content to move on too.

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