Hacker News Reader

Comment by vrotaru | Hacker News Reader

This is bad???

Sandberg confirms that “A is Average” at Harvard. Her brother David, a neurosurgeon whom Sandberg admires because currently “he splits child care duties with his wife fifty-fifty”, was also a Harvard undergrad. He takes “a class in European intellectual history”, skips all but two lectures and all but one book, gets tutored for three hours and receives an A for the semester (p32-33). The guy’s success is attributed to the general confidence of men. Sandberg does not consider how likely it is that her brother’s confidence would have resulted in an A in a physics class at Caltech.

View on HN

Yes it is. Because Sandberg never says she admires her brother because of that fact. She says she admires her brother, and then states that fact about the brother. Greenspun is the one who makes the false connection. Here is the full quote:

I should have understood that this kind of self-doubt was more common from females from growing up with my brother. David is two years younger than I am and one of the people in the world whom I respect and love the most. At home, he splits child care duties with his wife fifty-fifty; at work, he's a pediatric neurosurgeon whose days are filled with heart wrenching life-and-death decisions…

With Greenspun's logic, you could equivalently claim Sandberg admires her brother because he is a neurosurgeon.

You seem to be misreading a lot of the article. To be expected really, it's quite full of sarcasm and dry wit, which doesn't come across via text particularly well.

example? that quote is from the book btw, not the article.

Actually the point Greanspun (not Greensburg) is trying is whether her brother confidence

     would have resulted in an A in a physics class at Caltech.

That may be his point. My point is that he stitches together falsehoods to evoke emotional responses in his readers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com