Hacker News Reader

Comment by defen | Hacker News Reader

This whole "controversy" is so stupid. It consists of people taking pg's words out of context and assigning the maximally stupid interpretation to them. I mean, are there any examples of successful U.S. based founders who have accents that are so heavy that you struggle to understand what they are saying? I'm genuinely curious.

View on HN

What part of what he said was taken out of context? Up until a few years ago, there were no examples of successful black Quarterbacks in the NFL.. IF everyone just looked at that "fact", there would still be none. Data can be used to justify anything you like, as long as you are already sufficiently biased.

Bad example. There is nothing intrinsically different between a black QB and a white one, all other things being equal.

All other things being equal, there is a lot of difference between what an eloquent speaker can achieve and what a heavily accented speaker can achieve in the role of CEO.

This has nothing to do with preconceived bias. This has to do with Paul Graham's examination, over the course of funding over 500 different startups and his experience in that entire domain as a whole, that foreign accents are not desirable. The data is there; your bias prevents you from seeing it because you're misinterpreting it as discriminatory.

You present "eloquent" and "heavily accented" as if they were diametrically opposite. In fact, they are on different axes.

I suppose I could have said "coherent and articulate" instead of "heavily accented" so you're right. But I think my point stands.

Warren Moon, Randall Cunningham...anyway, there were "no successful black quarterbacks" because the pipeline of such players simply did not exist, for reasons outside the NFL's control. It's not like you had guys who were ready and able to play the position who just couldn't get jobs. The claim being made here is that you have talented people who would be able to succeed, if only Paul Graham would stop being a racist and give them money.

As far as I know this all started with a valleywag article a couple days ago, that somehow turned (paraphrased) "Something we've noticed after funding 500+ startups is that people with difficult-to-understand accents have trouble raising money and recruiting cofounders/employees" into "Paul Graham is a racist xenophobe who hates immigrants, pregnant women, and probably non-white people too."

PG is a huge supporter of the Founder Visa, but he hates immigrants? Come on everyone, dig a bit deeper. Luckily, PG has written an entire essay on this sort of topic[1], and how "taboos" are generally seen poorly by history. I'm sure the taboo biasing towards extreme political correctness and willfully ignoring things that can improve outcomes for people because they don't fit in some idyllic worldview will suffer the same fate.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

And yet he supports FWD, a stealth superpac whose only mission is to get as many cheap temp. engineers as possible in the country.

Foreign founders are SOL, no company is going to hire he who will disrupt them out of the market, and those who get in are doomed to menial positions with no change of getting ahead in the company.

The real losers will be local engineers who will be priced out of the market, downwards I mean.

This is such an incredibly poor description of FWD. And generally, those who oppose increased competition are those who cannot compete.

I am completely puzzled too by this controversy. I did not see pg saying that people with heavy accents could not be funded. He just said that CEO has to be a good communicator and not having a heavy accent (compare late 1960s Schwarzenegger to one in 2000s to see how one can improve) is part of the deal.

There is nothing preventing people with heavy accents taking a technical co-founder role.

Anecdotal evidence: my father the technical co-founder of a products company has a rather heavy accent while his US born co-founder was the CEO. It worked out decently for them and very well for the company itself: company has been bought for the 2nd time, that is VCs sold it to a conglomerate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com