On Paul Graham and Duck Dynasty
cbracy.tumblr.com
cbracy.tumblr.com
As a techie, I see think there's significant truth to PG's opinions. Surely it takes two to tango, the tech industry is keen to hire and encourage women entrepreneurs, but it's not like women are being turned away at the gates, by sexist VCs.
It sucks, because I want to help somehow, but I don't want to be misunderstood and have my name be raked through the coals either.
I'd like to discuss it, without judgment, and come to a way I can help. The process of getting there is hard when it's so easy to jump the gun and assume that I, as a white male, am definitionally likely to be discriminatory. That occurs a lot.
Votes/Flags are the silent voices of those who can't afford to get drawn into a battle with potentially severe consequences about an issue which they have personally relatively little to gain from.
Some people have oversimplified Paul Graham's perspective; doing the same to other people's perspectives will get no one anywhere.
The OP itself says that PG is saying "Crazy" things. How are they crazy? He doesn't point out how this is the case. Instead, he's made a final judgment and anyone that disagrees must also be crazy. There is no reasoning with those who shun reason and react to disagreement with accusations of craziness and bigotry.
Maybe it isnt a pervasive piece of EVERY conversation, but you can literally find hundreds of articles on this site about that very topic. Hey look, right now! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6975533
My favourite one is the article about one of the problems with women in tech being that Silicon Valley believes it's more meritocratic than it is, on which PG comments that it's really that meritocratic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6795606)
I'm still curious if he spotted my last minute edit just as it was dropping off the front page while an interesting discussion was emerging.
No, he never said that. He said that there are fewer women in tech, not that "women cannot be" in tech.
> But rather than seeking why women are excluded from technology even as children, he just blames women for not being interested in hacking.
He never did this either. Find me one quote where he blamed women for their lack of interest? The only thing he said was that the real way to solve this problem would be to get girls interested in hacking at a younger age, but that that's a difficult task. Does anyone actually disagree with that?
> ...but refuses to hire or fund anyone who does not have the exact life trajectory of Mark Zuckerberg.
YC invested in me, and I'm black. There were girls in my batch, too.
Rather than actually listen to the points being made, reflect on the nuances, and engage in conversation honestly, you'd rather feign outrage over falsified "facts" and make-believe quotes. This is exactly why discussions like this are always of such low quality.
Women aren't in technology because gender norms enforce at a young age that technology is not for girls. The industry perpetuates this norm by being dominated by men who do not make an effort to change the culture to be less of a "boys club." Women who do join technology have their qualifications and contributions second guessed, and have to endure work environments that are more like a fraternity house than an office, including greater chances of sexual harassment. The solution to this problem is going to have to come from within the industry. People within the industry will need to make an active effort to fix the problem, rather than just lamenting the status quo and shifting the blame to society and education.
But to generalize, I think it's unrealistic to expect investors et al to shoulder this entire burden themselves.
The point I am making is, people (women, blacks, latinos etc. and that includes the rabble who whine about "greedy companies hiring foreign workers") should not expect things on a platter. There is no giant conspiracy to make things "uncomfortable" for women or minorities.
A case-in-point is the success of Indian-Americans & other Asians in tech. I recently read that nearly 1/2 of startups in the valley has an Asian co-founder. It's not like tech had welcome buffets & red carpets laid out for the Asians.
While I too find the absence of women and non-Asian minorities in tech troubling. That change can only be wrought by starting up (pun intended). Reminds me of the saying by Gandhi "Be the change you want".
The comparative difference is closer to the latter than the former, actually, though neither is complete and the reality is more complex: the difference in racial stereotypes is not mostly due to real differences in the groups to whom various racial identities are ascribed, but due to different perceptions that are a combination of deliberate engineering (in the case of Asians, by elites who had a positive interest in importing their labor to undercut domestic wages for the "hard working" bit -- in the case of persons of African descent, by elites who had an interest in keeping them in "their place") and different responses of not-necessarily-representative subsets in often non-equivalent circumstances, plus subsequent reinforcement through confirmation bias.
Sure, there are plenty of hard working, intelligent persons of asian descent in the US -- also plenty of hard working, intelligent people of hispanic or african descent in the US.
I've got a much simpler one: getting to the US from their (generally much poorer home country) was a brutal selection game for many people of those races, and they come from cultures that emphasize education as the primary means of getting ahead in life. The ones that made it are naturally going to be the most motivated, educated, wealthy, and/or otherwise lucky people, on average (there are always going to be exceptions). I'm frankly in awe of what the people whose stories I've heard have accomplished from where they started.
The children of those people would have two parents of above-average motivation and belief in education coaching and driving them from a young age.
Viewed in that light, of course they're going to do well in school and be overrepresented in higher education. That's been their explicit, overriding goal, and they've had very motivated coaches helping them along.
Of course these aren't universal things, but they're common enough to have caused a stereotype to form, no convoluted conspiracy of elites scheming to manipulate society necessary.
BTW I think that arguments also applies to the rabble who whine and moan about "foreign workers" taking "American jobs". Sure there are cases of abuse of the H1 and other visas, but on balance it has largely benefited the tech community.
From looking at it, PG describes how things are (YC applications, startup CEOs) and Catherine describes how things should be.
I myself get often argued with because people confuse when I describe things a I see them with I tell people how they should be.
It took me a while to realize that this is actually a feature and not a bug as HN exists as a promotional tool for YCombinator.
Having much needed discussions around sensitive topics might be good for the community as a whole; but is much too risky a proposition for YCombinator to take on.
That is taking a stance on how to approach discussions on sensitive topics and is exactly what I was talking about.
What would happen if that weren't the case is pure speculation; because for all we know a common consensus would quickly emerge if these discussions would be allowed to run their course.
And from my time on the internet, I can tell you that maybe everyone who is still around at the end of the discussion will be on the same page, but it's not going to be nearly everyone that started, and along the way, a lot of people will have developed negative feelings towards each other.
There are numerous ways to deal with the issue of flame wars, from human moderation to Reddit-style collapsing of threads.
My point is that YCombinator chose the 'drop discussions at first sign of controversy' path because it aligns best with their corporate interest.
PG stresses over how to design the software for this place such that its community doesn't fall into the common traps that online communities usually do. That's not what most people are here for, and in the end, a minority would spoil this for the majority.
That perhaps not everybody who holds an opinion different from his own is a homophobe, racist or misogynist.
He’s been saying crazy shit like this on the regular for a while now...
Crazy? Maybe he's just gleaming from observation and experience or hunches? Is that crazy?
No, he said that people whose accents make it hard for others to understand them will likely have a hard time.