What I Didn't Say
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Well, pg has earned our trust and deserved the benefit of the doubt when something so off kilter as this is attributed to him. He did not get it here, and that is a sad testament to how crowd-inspired frenzies can bend our perceptions in such faulty ways. Let us only hope that we can learn some good lessons from this.
pg's response is actually priceless: it is like a soft-spoken witness upending a bullying lawyer who had just viciously attacked him, leaving the attacker reeling for all to see. Indeed, the mob looks pretty much like an ass at this point and kudos to pg for his more-than-able defense. Very lawyer-like, in a way, but far more classy.
But jesus,
> pg's response is actually priceless: it is like a soft-spoken witness upending a bullying lawyer who had just viciously attacked him, leaving the attacker reeling for all to see.
What's with the almost cult-like reverence for this largely pseudo-intellectual entrepreneur?
Determining which definition is in use, in a given case, is not always straightforward.
It sounds like you disagree with his ideas; what qualifies someone as an intellectual in your book and not a pseudo-intellectual?
Here's a randomly picked example: http://paulgraham.com/inequality.html
Randomish quote from end of article,
"The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption? We don't need to prevent people from being rich if we can prevent wealth from translating into power."
Umm... how about in a capitalist society money is the vehicle of positive freedom... to increase ones ability to do something on has to have more money. Therefore under capitalism there is always a fundamental tie between money and power.
That's a small off-hand point.
But if you have any serious reading on the last two hundred years of economic, political and sociological critiques of capitalism, wealth and power that whole article will just seem silly.
I'm sure he means well. But it takes a certain kind of "pseudo"-something to think that this kinda hackney "thought-lite" material should be delivered at a major conference (Defcon 2005). If i were asked, on the back of my reputation, to speak on this, I would at least spend a week watching/reading/etc. as much as I can in the area.
One's ability to make money - to have one's skills suit the market; or to be lucky - has nothing to do with the value of your opinions or how frequently/prominently they should be offered to the rest of us.
pg doesn't even begin to engage in anything like this critique of inequality. I dont really think he knows anything about why serious academic researchers and writers have seen inequality as a serious problem for democractic societies. Because he hasnt spent the time to find out.
If you have any "erious reading on the last two hundred years of economic, political and sociological critiques" you'd know that ALL articles and books will just appear silly in isolation. Especially since most of the important critics are vehemently opposed to the ideas of other important critics.
The role of an isolated piece of writing on some topic is not to provide a summary of the ideas ("the last two hundred years of economic, political and sociological critiques") on the topic -- that's just what you do for a bad academic paper.
Its role is to showcase the ideas of the author in a clear light and within his frame of thinking.
>But it takes a certain kind of "pseudo"-something to think that this kinda hackney "thought-lite" material should be delivered at a major conference (Defcon 2005).
Then again, it also takes a certain kind of pseudo-something to value Defcon as a venue for intellectual thought, as opposed to a mostly technical conference and get-together.
That said, I'm one of those who "don't see the problem". I reread his essay about inequality. I tried to imagine your thought process. I agree that money, freedom, and power are joined at the hip. I don't see how this contradicts pg's quote.
Here's how I understand things. Corruption implies power by definition. But does power necessarily imply corruption? Lord Acton believed power consistently causes corruption in practice. But it doesn't have to be that way. I think we can agree on this.
Here's where I imagine our disagreement lies (best guess, low confidence). Corruption connotates "immoral behavior". But pg's examples indicate (to me) that he wanted to address not immoral behavior per se, but the double standard society imposes between the privileged and the less fortunate.
This distinction frames the discussion in a more actionable way. Like you said, power enables people to do what they want... which isn't always moral (or fair [1]). It's inevitable. So society won't be able to prevent this consistently, lest reality resemble Minority Report. But one thing society can prevent is punishing offenders according to a double standard. Another thing society can prevent is lack of transparency. I imagine either would decrease corruption while allowing the privileged to enjoy their power (money) in more socially acceptable ways.
Personally, I'm especially upset with the U.S. lobby system. In theory, democracy is supposed to afford one vote per capita. In practice, the lobby system allows the powerful to undermine this principle.
btw WTF is a 'vehicle of positive freedom?' This is not a term of art in any serious social science or philosophy that I'm aware of but apparently it is important to your theory of money and power in a capitalist society. A theory, incidentally, which you don't take the trouble to outline. You simply state that 'under capitalism there is...' It is indeed a small off-hand (and unclear) point.
And why the heck shouldn't he be able to give a talk like this at a tech conference? Defcon isn't an academic conference. Unlace your girdle and give yourself a break from your half digested pomposity. :)
You are seeing respect for Paul Graham because, as flawed as some of his opinions might be, he also has the experience backing them. Louis CK said this best:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXcWeFn-YYM (NSFW in the latter half)
If you're under 40, I'm largely uninterested in your take on the world. That includes my own; I know I still have things to learn and I make a proactive effort to listen more than I talk. I don't always succeed.
pg isnt peddling his "take on the world". He talks about serious academic topics in a chronically under and misinformed way. My 50 year old plumber knows jack about Metaphysics, Quantum Field Theory or Abstract Expressionism despite - as in a Louis CK bit - his seeing a dead body "one time".
If you want to have a fire-side chat with him - be my guest. But I ain't fetching the scribe because he's had a few decades wandering around.
Well, most of the stuff guys "under 40" think they know about "Metaphysics, Quantum Field Theory or Abstract Expressionism" are a half-understood mismash too (I'm not talking about someone with a PhD in Physics here).
And, as some they will find out later in life, not only knowledge of those "serious academic topics" doesn't matter as much as they thought, but also most of them are inherently bullshit too.
There is a kind of wisdom that arises through knowledge of oneself and other people that comes with age. A kind of knowledge which helps you predict what is going to be worthwhile, etc.
However we shouldnt fall into the trap of saying "academic persuits might leave you unsatisfied therefore you can be blase about them whilst discussing them". You cant dispense with the particulars of physics when discussing gravity because your interest in "the universe" owes to a unfulfilled religious need.
"age" is a different category of knowledge and doesnt excuse or justify glorified amateurism in another.
But that's kind of the point isn't it? We should judge people on their qualifications and achievements, not their age.
"pg's response is actually priceless: it is like a soft-spoken witness upending a bullying lawyer who had just viciously attacked him, leaving the attacker reeling for all to see."
Which you don't mention at all in your response...
"If you're under 40, I'm largely uninterested in your take on the world. That includes my own; I know I still have things to learn and I make a proactive effort to listen more than I talk. I don't always succeed."
Are you actually being serious? Your brain works in such a way that any person who has lived less than 14,610 days couldn't possibly add any value to your life? I don't mean to be harsh but this could be the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. Certainly worse than anything I've seen on Medium.
If I was pg and this was these were the type of people and defenses that were coming to my aid, I would be mortified.
If that's the case, then you're a very sheltered person.
Lay off the hyperbole next time.
-Should I listen to anything this person has to say or take value from their life experiences?
-Well I dunno, have they turned 40 yet.
Is very certainly in the top 5 dumbest things I've ever heard if not the dumbest. A human being going well out of their way to avoid learning things and gaining more experience. But thanks for contributing with the random insult. Hope it helped rebuild your self esteem?
Why would you think that?
See the words 'largely', and 'uninterested'?
Do you understand what those words mean? Fucking hell.
Now I am 33 and I tend to ignore what most people my age and younger think about things like global politics or new programming languages. This has less to do with intelligence than perspective. Basically, if the 'Arab Spring seemed like a new and good thing you don't know enough about the situation to make informed commentary.
I'm 25 years old, and it's been one of -if not the- most important discovery of my life so far that compared to those older than me, I know hilariously little about (all aspects of) life.
Of course young people add value, we do after all make our own world by our subjective views, but those older than you generally have had more time to explore more of those views, and have a much richer notion of how things are and can be.
Jefferson was 33 when he penned the Declaration of Independence. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed when he was 39. Marx published The Communist Manifesto when he was 30.
Seriously, this list could go on for ages. Dismissing the perspective of youth is as indicative of an ignorance of history as youthful naivete.
I too was very uncomfortable when reading that paragraph. When I read comments like that I can see why it's possible that PG is starting to run into this recurring theme with the outside world. First it was a misunderstanding around founders with accents. Now it's a misunderstanding of women in technology. If he's becoming inadvertently surrounded with such adoring followers he's likely to find few of his assumptions challenged by such a receptive audience. He speaks, no one challenges him, he becomes emboldened. Then he speaks to a third party not under his spell and all heck breaks loose.
1. Keep the interview short and stick to the script. This is what Laura Bush does better than almost anybody. Don't give reporters any "gotcha's" to their tricky line of questions.
2. If possible, do the inteview by email, not phone, videochat or in person. This way, you can give a considered response to their questions, which is what folks like PG excel at.
PG is not a professional interview giver. It shows.
And I'm no PG fan boy. I think his Startup = Growth article is flat out misleading w/r/t startups that start from a base of one user or one cent in revenue (to take extreme examples) and then say a startup is growing if it has 5% weekly growth.
People with high confidence in themselves often over estimate their experience around this time and look silly to anyone with actual experience.
I don't think 40 is some magical number. In fact many experiences that happened over 10 years ago in high tech starts to "fade" and become less relevant.
I'm frankly surprised you've been here for 2 years and never realised.
You see the ycombinator in news.ycombinator.com? In this website?
That's pg's company.
Do you know what ycombinator is? That he started the seed funding movement? That he was blogging about hacking startups before people even really realised you could hack startups? Before lean startup existed? That he's written his own dialect of LISP? That he started and sold his own startup in the early days of the web? And that, now this is some serious respect, it was actually written in LISP?
That's not cultish, it's earned respect and pg's got it in buckets around here.
Crikey.
Little drunk, but crikey, talk about having absolutely no fucking clue. The guy's a machine of intellectualism, most things he turns his mind to he de-constructs, encapsulates and then explains brilliantly. Yeah, occasionally he's wrong, especially when he tries to justify certain aspects of exploitative capitalism, but damn he's good. Very good.
And that response was classic pg as grellas said.
I am disinclined to acquiesce to your assertion.
Listing accomplishments is okay. Listing accomplishments paired with fawning and idolatry is cultish.
Oh dear.
But anyway, given that I actually pointed out I disagree with him in some aspects, how is that fawning?
The guy's got a history that reads better than any of us here could probably hope for and he writes some amazingly well thought out and well reasoned essays.
I'm don't idolize him, I think he's more intelligent than me.
Which I say about very, very few people.
I think it's absurd to call him a pseudo-intellectual.
Going by your personality as demonstrated here it seems you idolize intellect so when you "think he's more intelligent than" you you're going to put him on a pedastle. This may seem natural to you, but it comes across as fawning and misplaced.
To dig into word choice here a bit. You attack someone for placing a value on "intellect", but criticize pg for being a "pseudo-intellectual". One interpretation of this is that you regard an "intellectual" to be something other than person who effectively used their intellect. Instead, you seem to regard an intellectual as a person who expresses conformity with the majority view of American academia (i.e., a modern liberal who isn't fond of markets.)
Your argument does not make any sense at all. It's a string of words ordered to seems to mean something rational, while it is in fact complete gibberish. Listing accomplishments paired with fawning and idolatry is ... exactly that. Reverence, not cultism.
You can see my comment here on his pseud-osity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6988150 to save repeating myself.
Why would you do that?
And furthermore, how can you possibly feel you survive your own critique of "pseudo-intellectuals"? This is you [0] spouting amateur social science:
> Umm... how about in a capitalist society money is the vehicle of positive freedom... to increase ones ability to do something on has to have more money. Therefore under capitalism there is always a fundamental tie between money and power.
Which, by the way, I have no problem with. A well-regarded logical fallacy is "appeal to authority", the contrapositive of which implies that we should judge arguments on their merit regardless of where they come from. So if people find some writing illuminating, attack the logic, not the writer, and not the readers.
> Why would you do that?
I'm responding to the questions raised in the most convenient way. I'm not going to give a serious critique of the many essays which require it to make a small point about his blase approach to serious academic topics. Far too much effort to spend on a crowd whose faith in pg's intellectual status is based on his money-making ability.
Pics or it didn't happen.
>I didnt because HN comment boxes are not vehicles of long essays. (...) Far too much effort to spend on a crowd whose faith in pg's intellectual status is based on his money-making ability.
It isnt "backtracking" to criticize a person for one thing while you are doing another. Jon Stewart criticizes news programs whilst his program isnt a very good news program. Fortunately he's in the comedy business.
Equally, my off-hand comment isnt a very good essay but fortunately I didnt post it to an Essays section of a website and then go and read it to a conference audience.
So, it isn't backtracking if you pre-emptively declare that you are backtracking. Right.
>It isnt "backtracking" to criticize a person for one thing while you are doing another. Jon Stewart criticizes news programs whilst his program isnt a very good news program. Fortunately he's in the comedy business.
Unfortunately the similarity doesn't hold, because Jon Stewart doesn't also say "I can do a much better news program than them", whereas you did said that you could write a respectable "5k word essay on this very small point" (and then didn't).
>Equally, my off-hand comment isnt a very good essay but fortunately I didnt post it to an Essays section of a website and then go and read it to a conference audience
As if the section of website where something is published matters one iota. It's not like having an essays section necessitates that you only put George Steiner quality material in it. Heck, Zed Shaw has an essays section on his website.
Also, you keep mentioning this conference audience a lot -- Sounds like sour grapes to me.
As if Defcon is some elite philosophical conference, and Paul Graham failed to keep to the level of previous speakers, like Plato or Heidegger.
You have to put what im saying in the context of how his work is read (as some kind of obviously briliant religious text).
Absolutely not the case; here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6987798, the relevant comment that sparked this discussion), you are simply taking the conversation into new territory and insulting people.
> But jesus,
>> pg's response is actually priceless: it is like a soft-spoken witness upending a bullying lawyer who had just viciously attacked him, leaving the attacker reeling for all to see.
>What's with the almost cult-like reverence for this largely pseudo-intellectual entrepreneur?
They're childish research-lite versions of a 50s-style classical liberalism. It is much the same as Ayn Rand another amateur philosopher who knew very little on the topics she was writing about.
I dislike the "talking head" approach to serious topics. I dont think "giving your opinion" excuses a lack of serious research. Half-baked, under-informed opinion isnt truth or even the attempt to reach it; regardless of whether it is phrased with feigned objectivity. I wouldnt be too annoyed if he wasnt glorified by other $-eye'd idiots.
Similar to your unsubstantiated comment about Ayn Rand?
This is why Nozick and others are taught in political philosophy and not ayn rand. You can listen to a somewhat detailed introductory treatment by people well-read in philosophy here: http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2013/07/01/ep78-ayn-ran....
One of her greatest sins is her perpetually trashing people like Kant whilst having no idea what theyve said - because she makes many of the very same points. pg does this too.
pg writes candidly (but respectfully) from the perspective of someone who has been very successful in some areas, and has opinions on other areas. His world view shines through clearly and he doesn't seem to claim authority (or not too often, anyways) on the issues. In fact, I started enjoying his articles long before I was even aware of HN or of who he was. He just seemed like a bright dude with interesting articles to me.
I find everything he writes fascinating, and the closer to his expertise, the more 'value' I ascribe to his writing. But he isn't, nor does he seem to want to be, some kind of guru on all matters of life. He seems pretty honest.
The fact that he has a relatively small group of starry-eyed followers exhibiting cult-like behavior is not really his fault, but just a natural consequence of his fame/success. I don't think it warrants mjburgess' response.
But maybe I'm missing something or underestimating the degree of cult-like following going on?
The tech world is meritocratic, politically concentrating on wealth disparity over wealth creation is nonsense, Silicon Valley's problems are minor look elsewhere, etc. etc.
It's a very Panglossian outlook meant to make you feel good about yourself, generally.
I mean if he wrote an article about race and Cornell West wrote a critique, you'd have hundreds of people coming to defend pg on the back of the cultish Bay Area mentality.
I don't know if PG is the right about everything he says or even most of what he says but he has inspired a lot of people to do things (largely for the good of society). A philosopher could hope for little more I suspect (not even suggesting PG would self-ascribe that term but I would ascribe it to him).
You don't get insights into these by getting a degree from some university on the subject. You get insights into those things by studying them, practical experience, and more importantly thinking.
If anything, the most clueless people in those areas I know are tenured professors.
And REAL thinkers, the kind that leave a mark in history, from Socrates to Sartre and from Kierkegaard to Popper and Wittgenstein to leave it to philosophy, are full of scorn for academia in general and professors in particular, and even if they sometimes happen to be working as such themselves, they are greatly atypical to their "churn papers" colleagues.
Not that pg is on that level, but critisizing him because "none of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on" is bullshit.
Your a priori abstract attack that he lacks insights has no meat at all behind it. You could just as well have said that "he has tons of insight into what he writes" -- and it would be exactly the same.
If you want to provide something worthwhile, do a SPECIFIC critique of what he wrote somewhere, and tell us what is wrong with it by providing counter-arguments and rebuttals.
Not about the subjects they research. That is the purpose of research.
> are full of scorn for academia in general
All of those people are academics par execellance. I'm not talking about business-ified institutional academica. I'm talking about spending a long time on a topic, researching it and thinking deeply, clearly on it before you offer your opinion as though it were valuable.
> do a SPECIFIC critique of what he wrote somewhere
I have on one of his essays, but I took it seriously to write that critique.
The audience I would be targeting in a critique of the man (via a critique of his under-informed rants) are those who equate money with success and "money-making" with intelligence. I value my time too much to spend the amount required undoing that confusion.
>>Not about the subjects they research. That is the purpose of research.
They are cluless _especially_ about the subjects they research.
Most philosophy, political economy etc academics are beyond mediocre -- not only in advancing their field, but even in understanding the greats who contributed to it and rightfully presenting their knowledge.
Most real development comes from outsiders to this system -- people incombatible with academic life, even if they happen to work as professors (like Adorno or Wittgenstein did for example). And that was true already in the '40s and '50s, were academic discourse and research freedom in those fields was extremelly better compared to (market driven, low quality, paper churn) today's reality.
>The audience I would be targeting in a critique of the man (via a critique of his under-informed rants) are those who equate money with success and "money-making" with intelligence.
Oh, those poor fools. Because there are other, proven, definitions of success that everybody should ascribe to, right?
>I value my time too much to spend the amount required undoing that confusion
Yep, I expected this part.
The purpose of research is to farm grant money and citations. Any actual learning that happens during the process is beside the point.
All of those people are academics par execellance. I'm not talking about business-ified institutional academica. I'm talking about spending a long time on a topic, researching it and thinking deeply, clearly on it before you offer your opinion as though it were valuable.
pg spent weeks on each of his early essays. He spent a solid month writing What You Can't Say. He spent at least a couple days writing this one. They aren't opinion pieces.
Stephenie Meyer spent years writing the Twilight books. Time spent on a work is in no way indicative on the quality of that work.
Reaction from literary critics? Reaction from the target audience? Financial success?
It seems to me that by two of those standards Stephenie Meyer knocked the ball out of the park. It is not clear to me why we should care about the other standard of quality.
Yeah, I think this is a fairly good characterization of pg's audience.
Personally, I agree with some of his essays, but on some others he's way off the mark. For instance, his writings on anything Hollywood or copyright-related betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what artists sell. Yet those essays were extremely popular simply because they confirmed people's biases (hence "pop philosophy"). However, if you check the so-called "blogosphere", you can find many others who have posted well-reasoned criticisms of those (and other) essays.
It's pretty creepy calling people "intellectuals" if they babble on about "political economy".
> if you have any serious reading on the last two hundred years of economic, political and sociological critiques of capitalism, wealth and power
It seems like you're calling Paul Graham a pseudo-intellectual not because he's posturing, but because you disagree with him. You don't address any of the actual claims in the article, but you do call them "silly".
Here's the problem with your response to that one quote you took out of context:
>"The problem here is not wealth, but corruption. So why not go after corruption? We don't need to prevent people from being rich if we can prevent wealth from translating into power."
>Umm... how about in a capitalist society money is the vehicle of positive freedom... to increase ones ability to do something on has to have more money. Therefore under capitalism there is always a fundamental tie between money and power.
It's a matter of degree. Many countries which rank low on various measures of corruption are nonetheless capitalist (New Zealand, Sweden, etc). Many countries which are socialist nonetheless suffer nepotism of the form Graham described in his previous example (Argentina, Zimbabwe, etc). Sure, it's a "small off-hand point", but it's the only part of your comment which isn't simply an insult without any backing.
>One's ability to make money - to have one's skills suit the market; or to be lucky - has nothing to do with the value of your opinions or how frequently/prominently they should be offered to the rest of us.
This is not related to the essay you had claimed to respond to. It apparently represents drawback of inequality, but it is left up to the reader to magically grasp your intuition that this drawback exceeds the benefits Paul Graham claims may be derived by rewarding those who are successful in business endeavors.
One way to phrase this comment in a mature, reasonable way would be the following:
"I think that the lacuna between the abilities of rich and poor to communicate to a large audience makes the level of inequality Graham advocates in society unacceptable."
I might respond as follows: since people can only consume a finite amount of information, there will always be a situation where only a tiny minority have the ability to broadcast their views effectively. It is not clear to anyone how to identify in an objective manner who is most deserving of a wide audience, and so no society which has attempted to restrict this has ever succeeded in improving the quality of media reporting (but please provide examples!). In fact, essentially all societies which replace "communication by the rich" with "communication by the community-endowed-communicators" have even less reliable media than capitalist countries, consider e.g. Pravda. Thus your claim about inequality does not really provide much basis for an alternative, nor is it a problem specific to monetary inequality per se.
>None of his achievements as an entrepreneur give him insights into philosophy, political economy or anything else he writes on.
Actually, a great deal of the essay Inequality and Risk focuses on the motivations of entrepreneurs, which, considering that he has worked with dozens of them, one would expect him to be in a uniquely important position to address. He usually does a pretty good job sticking to what he does know in this and many other essays.
I downvoted you. In this and your subsequent comments you show little willingness to contribute to the discussion in any but a superficial way, and you provide little substantial argument or evidence to back up your repeated insults. Since you have been commenting on this thread (we can see your timestamps) for over an hour, one would expect it to be worth your time to write a comment that is worth reading.
Head: explode.
> It's a matter of degree.
It has nothing to do with "degree". "Corruption" has nothing to do with the mixture of wealth and power: in extremely capitalist societies the Law codifies wealth as power (eg. Citizens United) and in extremely Socialist societies it codifies the opposite. "Corruption" is perceived to be prevalent in societies (eg. italy) in which the public and private sphere are blended and the Law tracks this lack of clarity.
This is why its not sufficient to say "abuse of wealth" is corruption and we need to fix corruption. Because "corruption" is defined by and against the norms of particular societies and does not measure how much wealth distorts the political landscape. Americans do not see owning many news outlets as "corruption" for example, but it is arguably an abuse of wealth to gain political power and influence.
To treat his articles seriously and engage with them (I have written about his essay on Philosophy before) is to give them too much credit. If i wanted to contribute substantively to this debate I would go and find someone informed on the matter and reply to a essay they have written. To reply to pg is to educate him.
It is easy to dismiss PG's entire article -- from its foundation to conclusions about transparency -- if you've already concluded that democracy does not exist; that votes do not translate to power in any meaningful way; that capitalism has become the real foundation on which political power is merely a simulacrum. In doing this we've hit philosophical bedrock with the shovel of pessimism, and the discussion ceases to be productive.
The law only codifies what the people, through their votes, decide to codify within it. Capitalism does not a priori codify wealth as political power. The law merely aids the confluence of capitalism: money, a signifier -- to represent resources: the signified. Capitalism is contained within the theater of democratically held political power -- until it corrupts that containment. PG's mention of secrecy in a democracy is a useful one: secrecy subverts the power of the informed voter, it is a breach of that containment. It allows the potential for capital to slip out into the realm of realpolitik -- which is reserved for the people alone through their vote.
I think if you review what PG is saying about corruption through the prism of philosophy without the distortions of politics itself (and all its frustrations) you might not consider it unsubstantiated idealism or what have you.
So I don't see the force of your critique: pg and you can both be right. Wealthy people can have more ability to do things even if there are systems in place to prevent them from corrupting particular processes that are considered worthy of such protection.
To be honest I found your comment shallow and mean spirited. You didn't present a true criticism of the article. You simply alleged that it was lame.
Ironically, whilst you may be correct that being an entrepreneur will not give a person insights into philosophy, he happens to have a degree in philosophy so perhaps that gives him some insight. More specifically, he has a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Cornell University.
As for his achievements not giving him insight into 'anything else he writes on' that appears to me to be patently silly. A good deal of what he writes on is about entrepreneurship.
All in your criticism smacks to me of small minded jealousy. It's a familiar pattern - small petty people trying to boost their flagging self esteem by trying to tear down those who have achieved.
> That he started the seed funding movement?
Um, people were doing seed rounds before YC. For like, decades. They weren't blogging about it, because there was no HTTP and HTML and always-on broadband, but crikey, how the hell do you think half of silicon valley started?
> That he was blogging about hacking startups before people even really realised you could hack startups?
I don't even know what this means. Every true startup is fundamentally a hack; it's probing at the boundary of the risk frontier. (I'm not talking about those VC dice rolls on the flavor du jour, manifest as a bunch of brogrammers with zero understanding of the time value of their own risk profile.)
For "hack startups <v.>" to make sense, one would have to infer a new usage of the word "startups", namely, to refer to the pattern-matching herd mentality of tech VC dealmaking and The Great Game of Deal Flow. Partially driven by real opportunity and partially driven by the wealthy exodus from equity markets in a post-HFT world, the modern funding bubble has led to a difficult climate for seed-stage companies, and Paul & YC are merely taking advantage of that impedance mismatch between them and traditional VCs. But to imply that there is some fundamental new structure that Paul discovered with YC is absurd. Incubators & incubation is a decades-old concept: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_incubator
> Before lean startup existed?
The term "lean startup" started being popularized in 2011 by Eric Ries. This is less than three years ago. There are innumerable things older than this. Actually, there are few truly noteworthy things in the technology space that cannot be described as existing "before lean startup".
> That he's written his own dialect of LISP?
I think many LISPers have done this. Isn't the whole point of LISP to write your own dialect of it for each problem?
Anyways, I just wanted to point out that your list is not very impressive at all, and the fact that they impress you doesn't really reflect well on you.
2. He has mentored a great many startups. Granted, he gets his pound of equity for cheap cheap but nonetheless this devotion so the cause of helping other geeks start companies is very admirable. Note that this is not the same thing as what the parent poster claimed: "hacking startups" and "starting the seed funding movement".
Also, building HackerNews is a very cool badge of honor but frankly it is nowhere near as sophisticated as Reddit (c'mon, "Unknown or Expired link" and hellbanning?). The fact that there is a driving function behind pageviews to it makes it a go-to place in the tech world, but the technology and codebase of HN itself is not anything terribly impressive.
- Founded a successful web apps company back in the 1990s when that wasn't common, and sold it to Yahoo
- Founded Y Combinator to advise and invest in startups
- Smart investor with substantial success and track record (Dropbox, AirBnB, etc)
In other words, he's earned a reputation for doing some very smart things, and documenting them in clear, easily understood language, over the past 20 years.
I'm not being a mirer or a nuthugger here. I participate in HN because it benefits me and I learn useful things amidst the noise. (And of course pg started this site too.)
Peter Norvig on the book: http://www.amazon.com/review/RRFAH7G81ASUL/ref=cm_cr_dp_titl...
That's not ball washing. That's a comparison to the journalists, academics, writers, editors, analysts, etc etc who aspire to that public identity.
While that is awesome, it is a substantially different game we play nowadays than in the 90's.
Hence, YC, etc.
People worship and idolize their heroes all the time.
By making the comment you will assuredly elicit the response you expect, imply, but it is not necessarily for the reason you state.
pg was misrepresented and held out as a misogynist. We think highly of pg, why should we not defend what is merely slanderous nonsense?
I'm the first one to disagree with many ideas in our echo chamber ... That's healthy. But the idea that pg said anything wrong is ridiculous.
Who, pray tell, are the real intellectuals?
Note: I don't think that he actually is a pseudo-intellectual, just giving you the example you were asking for.
1: I'm not trying to argue with you. You plainly qualified it as a clarification, not a position. I just think your definition falls short in some respects, so thought I would clarify your clarification. :)
2: http://www.learnersdictionary.com/definition/pseudo-intellec...
Just entering an opinion on a subject you don't know 'enough' about is not pseudo-intellectualism. Pseudo-intellectualism is making it seem like you have significantly more intelligence on a subject than most other persons or have put significantly more thought into it, often connecting a subject to other subjects, and are thus qualified to make more informed comments on these subjects. You can lend more credence to your comments by using the correct academic vocabulary, but can be caught as a pseudo-intellectual by using it in the wrong way.
I would think that the validity of the argument is what matters!
Seriously, wtf. What does this even mean when talking about a person, and not a particular essay? Do you honestly not think that Paul Graham embodies a life of the intellect?
This is a nice demonstration of 'framing': you frame pg as not deserving cult-like reverence because of his 'pseudo-intellectuality' and people respond by explaining how he is a true intellectual. Except that the arguments they give for that assertion are wrong, because that is not the assertion for which they have arguments. Their arguments actually explain why pg is revered and they are now contorted to be arguments that seem to be meant to explain why is he is cult-like revered for his intellectuality.
The result is that it seem like people are tacitly acknowledging the 'cult-like reverence' and are giving completely ridiculous arguments in support. The ridiculousness of those arguments is pointed out and we get into pointless discussions about what things mean, completely losing sight of the original point.
The bottom line is: pg is revered and reasons for that reverence are given. There is nothing cult-like about the reverence and the pseudo-intellectual part of his writings (I would use another word to describe that quality of the writings, but that is beyond my current argument), are not the reason for the reverence.
If you can do better, go for it.
On a second note I'm also curious as to what exactly you're referring to when you say he has the credibility that should make us know that he isn't sexist. I'm not saying he is sexist, I'm just saying that all of his credibility lies in making good business decisions, not gender relations.
I agree. This willful blindness to bias and prejudice because smart people are not biased or prejudiced prevents us from examining our thoughts and behavior.
Personally I don't trust anyone, I've been burned too many times. Yeah that makes me paranoid, but it comes from too many bad professional relationships were I was backstabbed by the other person to further their career goals. I must state that this does not happen in every organization, and that there are a few people I would trust if they showed some good faith and helped me out with things. But since nobody I know wants to help me out, and once I reached the age of 40 I get old I am too old for this industry.
But PG is worthy of my respect, he has paid his dues in this industry, he knows what he is talking about and has experience, he hasn't backstabbed anyone that I know of so he has credibility, yes he is one of the few that I would trust had he helped me out in some way.
Look there is a lot of jealousy in the industry for experienced people. We get called nerds, geeks, dorks, etc by all of the people in other industries. They claim they know how to use a computer, and sure maybe use a Wordprocessor and write on a blog using Wordpress, but every once in a while one of them gets a bad case of jealousy that 'hackers' or 'IT workers' know more than they do, so they lash out and do a hatchet job on someone who got some attention in the media. This is basically politics, and how one person can backstab another.
I've had my words taken out of context a lot as well. It is but just one way to backstab someone. It is not just the Internet trolls who do it but the news media and these people writing blogs that hate the startup community.
In street terms, these people are 'haters' if I used that term correctly.
My sister who got into discoranism calls such people as 'greyfaces' and here is the Urban Dictionary definition. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=greyface
You can use either the first or second definition, and it would define the person who did this to PG quite accurately.
I think that is what grellas means by "trust".
People I respect I give the benefit of the doubt and interpret it as charitable, but I still have to verify what they say by checking other sources.
People I don't respect, I assume they are lying to screw with me and in 90% of the cases when I try to verify what they are claiming is true, ends up being untrue. The other 10% of the time I had a mistake and had misjudged them.
I have a respect for the Hacker community here, because most people are honest about their feelings and speak from experience and cite sources and stuff.
On Facebook there was this guy on a friend's group who asked me to prove what I was saying, so I cited seven peer reviewed sources. He said he didn't need to prove anything he said was true and that I was wrong for simply disagreeing with him. He then went into a rage and sent me threats via private message. I then blocked him and reported him for abusive behavior, he then accused my friend of censoring the posts to hide the truth because when I blocked him all of my comments vanished from his view. My friend explained to him that he had been blocked by me and that he could no longer see the comments of a user who blocked him. He still refused to believe it. This guy claimed to be a programmer, had no clue how math and science worked, couldn't even figure out how the block feature of Facebook works. Guys like him I have no respect for.
More importantly, it's not about some beloved leader besmirched by a drive-by interview. The focus is best on YC's track record — and what it'll do to fix it — not a quote/misquote.
For example, how does the non-credibility of the press work? We all know from experience that the actual business of the press in general is to produce catchy headlines based on a forced interpretation of the "facts" (or based on no facts at all).
And yet, we're always ready to trust an article and get all upset as if the press was doing its theoretical job of uncovering some hidden truth (last sentence of PG's post: "even now I'm still fooled occasionally.")
Why is that? Why does the press still have any credibility left?
In a similar vein, I'd love to see YC take on one or both of the following:
1) Do at least one application cycle completely blind. How could you accomplish this? Much like in the concert auditions where this was first tried, put people behind a curtain--and then use technology to change their voices so every voice sounds the same. I think it would be a really cool experiment to see if different types of companies or a more diverse founder set would get funded.
2) Publish more stats on the success of YC companies, and publish stats on % of female(, black, ...) founder applications submitted, % accepted, % funded after acceptance, etc. Of course, I'd fully expect that this would be "opt-in" from the founders as well--i.e. each set of founders would need to agree as part of the application to have their data anonymously shared. You could also share data on % who opted to not have their data shared. (Techstars is doing some great stuff with their stats here: http://www.techstars.com/companies/stats/ )
I've talked to many female founders and YC does have a reputation as a "frat house" (I told one of the YC partners that personally when he asked me to apply.) I decided to not apply to YC and instead was in the first Techstars Austin cohort, which was a fantastic program overall. Techstars definitely seemed more welcoming to women from my perspective as a geek-turned-tech-entrepreneur.
I'm hoping this is the start of breaking down the "frat house" reputation around YC and getting more women actively involved with it.
When you evaluate a team, you need to be able to judge their confidence, see how they interact with each other, get a feel for the trustworthiness, the way they look at you when they answer a question, and so on. If you can't see them, and their voice is distorted, then you might as well just ask for a slide deck and forgo an in-person interview altogether. Which doesn't seem like a good idea.
I've long wanted to see in general some more experimental testing of selection variations. What if YC (or some other funder's) candidates were just selected completely randomly from the applications? What if they were selected solely according to some dumb criterion, like take everyone with the most degrees, or the longest CV, or the most GitHub LoC? What if they were selected purely based on the applications (without the dumb-criterion requirement) but without interviews? For a few tens of thousands of $$, someone willing to try those kinds of things out could get some pretty interesting information on how reliable different selection methods are.
My own hypothesis is a negative one: that beyond screening out a few obviously-bad candidates and taking a few obviously-good candidates, the bulk of the YC selection process is randomly related to outcomes, and the YC mentoring/contacts/press/etc., rather than predictive value of the selection process, is the main driver of their generally strong outcomes. But I can't prove that. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect#Rosenthal.E2.8...
Also, you have to consider how much quantitative and qualitative experience YC has accumulated, the partners are pretty good at telling in a couple minutes conversation if you're a strong founder. This advantage would be lost with blind interviews.
This is the part I doubt, though, if by "strong founder" you mean "statistically more likely to exit successfully than people selected according to much simpler 'dumb' criteria". These kinds of claims to predictive ability based on un-quantified holistic properties like "experience" rarely hold up under scientific scrutiny.
2.) Paul has admitted to being susceptible to the Mark Zuckeberg effect, at least he was honest about that and should be respected for the fact that he realizes that. Most VC's i believe also fall into this trap but don't admit it.
3.) Now what are we going to do about this? Shrug our shoulders and just say this or that won't work or get to trying solutions and iterating on that?
How many are asking for this? Where are your stats?
While I agree that blind applications would be somewhat tough for startup founders, conducting seems like a bad example. You could fairly easily judge the resulting music without being able to see the conductor.
Even with world-class orchestras, where performances are regularly put on with guest conductors after only a few hours of rehearsal time, no permanent conductor would ever be hired on the basis of merely listening to their music. It's a leadership position. (Unlike orchestra players, where it really is more directly about musical proficiency.)
I would disagree strongly in that YC has a measurable financial risk of excluding potentially profitable founders solely for meaningless cultural woo woo reasons. For example if some Finnish dudes conduct perfectly normal business transactions nude in the sauna, a prudish American who refuses to participate has an obvious measurable economic loss solely because of irrational cultural woo woo. Now extend that far out example into female communication style.
Now what would work, or at least would be interesting, is having a female partner interview female founders separately from the male partners then study the female partner's impression vs male partner impression. I don't suspect there would be a huge difference; but at least this would be a somewhat more effective way to test the proposed effect. For my ridiculous made up example, you'd need a Finnish partner; probably easier to run this test on the somewhat easier to acquire and categorize male vs female test subjects.
This fratty culture certainly drives away slightly older founders (by that, I mean 25+!) and others who don't appreciate the atmosphere. Ultimately, I expect differentiation in the ecosystem, with different incubators forming to attract talent from different pools of talent.
Creating an atmosphere where your founders feel like they belong is a competitive advantage for an incubator. But no one incubator can make an atmosphere that appeals to everybody. If you make an atmosphere to appeal to 40-year-old females, someone else will lure the 19-year-old males away with beer pong, dorm living, and video game breaks.
The truly break-out companies founded in markets where customers are willing to pay, are started by entrepreneurs over 28. Age is not a hard rule but we talking about averages here. Steve blanks spoke well about how he started up his companies while still managing family life. Check quora for famous tech founders over 30 and their take on it.
An example about how a person over 30 starts a business from Quora:
Marc Bodnick, Co-Founder, Elevation Partners
We did it by starting with a profitable service line.
I was 34 when I founded Arcstone. We had three young kids (we now have four). I was coming off a VC salary of ~$250K, and yet didn't have much savings to speak of. I started Arcstone with $18K borrowed from my brother-in-law, and a couple credit cards to service revolving debt.
We started a service business targeting a specific, relevant pain point, which has a quick sales cycle. We became profitable immediately; with our profits we both fed ourselves and invested in technology and infrastructure. We were careful not to overbuild on our way up, though some expenditures (like our 5-year lease) were taken with a leap of faith.
Three+ years on, we are a nationally respected financial services firm (primarily in the valuation niche) with a healthy top (and bottom) line, and a very happy and dedicated team of seven.
Getting out of the Silicon Valley mindset -- Seed/A/B/C/Exit -- has been incredibly liberating.
John William Meriwether - born August 10, 1947
Myron Samuel Scholes - born July 1, 1941
Robert Cox Merton - born 31 July 1944
I said that I think that people interested in fratty culture tend to be young.
Beanbag chairs and a constantly flowing keg are not meant to attract older talent. Certainly there are some older people who are attracted to that type of climate, but that really is not the target audience.
Not everyone who works at a hedge fund comes from the cast of Boiler Room. Talk about painting people with the same brush...
What kind of pressure are you feeling about applying to funds now?
Edit: Is this a bad question? I was trying to be empathetic.
A lot of this has to do with impostor syndrome which is why the idea of a blind applications would, in my opinion, help many other talented founders think of applying.
Thanks for your comment on empathy. That is something that makes me feel really welcome to comment here.
The successful among us are the ones who operate even though they are afraid of failure. Otherwise only the people that were born with a perfect hand dealt to them would ever succeed.
“Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning. But fear is your best friend. Fear is like fire. If you learn to control it, you let it work for you. If you don’t learn to control it, it’ll destroy you and everything around you.
“You think you know the difference between a hero and a coward, Mike? Well, there is no difference between a hero and a coward in what they feel. It’s what they do that makes them different. The hero and the coward feel exactly the same, but you have to have the discipline to do what a hero does and to keep yourself from doing what the coward does.”
When I read this, it exactly encapsulated what I was trying to say. You are allowed to fear everything, but if you let fear control you or decide what you will or will not do you will not become great. You may even regret bitterly not taking the jump off the cliff.
Which brings up another point: it would be interesting to see a YC batch where the colleges/universities' names were redacted from the screening process.[1] Again, I don;t think this will ever happen...but as a thought experiment I would likely be of equal interest in terms of "opening" access. At some stage, business is as much about trading favours as it is about measuring "competence". There are some good game-theoretic reasons for this (ie, establishing trust in sequential repeated games), but there is more to the story than that.[2]
___________
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/ivy-league-discriminates-agai...
[1] Even if this was replaced by a sort of rating system, eg. that placed X schools into N buckets. This could be done so that the information was recorded but never made visible (say by online application). And the data could still be verified later prior as part of due-dilligence/ affadavit to avoid a problem with gaming the system.
[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-30/jpmorgan-s-mistake-...
I'd like to think that we could genuinely make a fairly well balanced system for meritocratic selection. Yes, it's a lot of work and there is always room for error however I'd like to think that ultimately the STEM industry favours these kinds of methods and they could be improved on so we'd see some kind of futuristic system that we saw in the Starship Troopers narrative (as a crazy example that in the movie at least, no-one complained about). Maybe we just need a ton more data to be able to make better predictions. But I also think that face-to-face interviews are ultimately needed as others have mentioned: cultural fit is important to a degree as well.
On that note it reminds me of the Declara article I read (about the founder Ramona Pierson), where data is working to pair relevant people.
Telephone numbers? I found that I identified a lot more with area code 206 than 425 or 253, just as I identify a lot more with an @gmail.com address than @hotmail.com or @aol.com.
- Kaytlyn (female, youngish, spelled unconventionally)
- who graduated from WSU (the rival of my alma matter)
- who has a 253 area code (my least favorite suburb)
- who uses Papyrus for headings (my least favorite font)
- with the email address belieber69@aol.com (triple yuck)
I would want to get that person in for an interview and explicitly check the subtle biases of me and other people who are making hiring decisions.
True story: when I was in college I had a classmate in my database class who was so good-looking it kind of hurt to look at her. I never once explicitly thought that she was a dumb blonde, but I was surprised when I found out that she was just brilliant. Similarly, I worked on a group project with a few prototypical "frat boys" with their Abercrombie sweaters and backwards baseball caps, and found myself surprised that they were smart as hell, too.
I just want to give people an honest chance to be brilliant and not have their resumes passed over for bullshit reasons, even subconsciously.
I wonder how a surname like "Lang" would fair. It is either Germanic of Asian, though it seems to be primarily Germanic in practice but seems strongly Asian to people who are not familiar with it[0]. If there is discrimination keyed off of "Asian-ish sounding" names then it might be apparent when looking at these sorts of names.
[0] I know a germanic "Lang". Apparently he gets asked how his family got that name a lot.
You chose not to apply. No one else forced you to walk away from the opportunity.
If you're unsure about applying, I recommend doing so. No matter what happens, you stand to benefit.
"Do at least one application cycle completely blind."
Sorry but this comes off as insulting (I know that wasn't your intention), you applaud and agree with him then turn around and pull a "but I still don't trust you". As if PG can't be trusted, or you think that he's secretly sexist and want him to change his successful interview process just to prove himself to you.
I'm positive that women get discriminated in many fields, I've heard my mother's own stories. There's something about seeing a strong woman succeed that makes men feel weak. But this assumption that women are absent or less represented at Y-combinator simply because they are subconsciously discriminated against by Paul and Jessica Livingston just seems absurd. Especially seeing has how politically correct everyone's trying to be now a days. Many people (especially those running Tech Crunch events) are purposely looking for that unicorn female developer to rid themselves of male guilt. The one that's worked on algorithms, programmed since a kid, and coded up numerous apps.
Rather than focus on discrimination ask yourself this: How many times have we seen a female coder's blog? How many frameworks/api/apps have we seen created by females? Is it discrimination or lack of ambition? Take a look at the 10 industries that women rule http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2009/01/26/10-industries-where-.... Are men being discriminated against (one can argue the day care industry) or do they lack the desire and ambition to get into these industries?
Just because we're in pg's house, it doesn't mean we have to treat him like a god. He's a fallible human being, just like the rest of us.
The whole point of a blind interview is to prevent implicit bias that the bearer might not even be aware of.
"You assert that these studies exist, but you don't bother to identify them for those of us who are not au courant with the journals in which they presumably appear. Would you care to link at least a representative example of the studies to which you refer, so that those of us who are unimpressed by argument from authority may examine them for ourselves?"
The semantic value of these two rather long sentences being identical with that of the two words I actually posted, the only apparent reason to choose the former over the latter would be an interest in pandering to your prejudices. I harbor no such interest, and therefore feel no urge to replace what I did post with what you seem to prefer I post.
All that aside, the request stands. Do you intend to cite a representative sample, &c., or do you prefer to settle for the bare-faced argument from authority you've made so far, without even bothering, as I gather is customary in the use of that fallacy, to name the authority from whom you are arguing? "Studies suggest," after all, is rather weak tea.
Finally, there's probably a name for the fallacy inherent in tossing out an unsupported assertion followed by " -- now prove me wrong!", the way you're also doing; I can't be bothered to look it up, though. Between trying to find the studies to which you cannot possibly have referred more vaguely, and trying to do the impossible by proving a negative, I've got too much on my plate already; you'll just have to find the name for that fallacy yourself, I'm afraid.
One interesting place to start is Harvard's "Project Implicit". They have a massive publication list[1] and you can even test your own implicit reactions[2].
There are plenty of other scientists testing things like whether people judge women as less competent. A quick google search pulled up a PNAS paper where they did an experiment on women in science, for example.[3]
This is just the tip of the iceberg, of course. There is a whole host of related work, testing other sorts of biases and using other methodologies. I'd suggest a search on your favorite academic search engine for "implicit bias".
[1] https://www.projectimplicit.net/papers.html [2] https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/ [3] http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109#aff-...
You disappoint me, sir. I had such hopes of finding something new and interesting, only to discover that your mere vagueness led me astray.
So even if we arbitrarily exclude a perfectly valid psychological technique because it "doesn't impress you", there's still the matter of my third link. Didja click it?
EDIT: The most surprising part of the PNAS study, to me, is that people who agreed with statements like "Discrimination against women is no longer a problem in the United States" were statistically more affected by implicit gender bias.
On the other hand, I must concede that I previously failed to look closely enough on first inspection at your third link. In my opinion, it does a great deal more to substantiate your statement than the IAT stuff does. I'd like to see similar studies with much higher n, but it's hard to argue with the analysis.
Your response was filled with bitterness, like someone who was flustered at having been proved wrong. It sounded just like a child crossing their arms and yelling, "Well citations are stupid anyway!"
We all have some biases, and taking reasonable efforts to mitigate them has worked very well in other fields, the typical example being the screen for orchestra auditions.
[1] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/between-the-lines/201204...
1. Isn't a woman, Jessica Livingston (Paul Graham's wife) on the interviewer panel and a part of the application process? It's not just Paul Graham himself.
I'm quick to defend Paul in the same way others are quick to blame him. It seems we as a diverse society are so conditioned to enforcing equal extremism that any time we don't see an industry, a workforce, or a group equally divided between male/female, black/white, gay/straight we immediately sound off the alarm and go on a witch hunt. All of this without considering that certain groups of people are better at something than others. For instance, African Americans make up only 12-14% of the population but over 60% of the NFL. Jewish people make up less than 6% of the population yet they make up almost 100% of entertainment industry executives (see Joel Stein article in the New York Times if you don't believe me). We hold up the majority to a level of standards that the minority cannot even reach. There's this stigma that if you have nice things, you cheated to get them, didn't earn them, and must divide them and share them with everyone else or else you are sexist/racist.
The solution isn't bias in the other direction, but to look for ways to remove the bias. This is why in science we have things like double-blind studies, for example. In music, doing auditions behind a screen seems to have been effective.
Putting systematic measures in place against bias also tends to help with self-selection, since it assures applicants that they have a fair shot. I believe that's what the original poster was asking for. I don't know what the best solution is for something like Y Combinator, but it seems worth giving it some thought. Of course, it's not going to be so easy as performing music behind a screen.
The percentages you cite show this is a problem in many industries. I doubt that 50% is achievable, but I also don't think it's helpful to either say "these people are sexist" or "yeah, but everyone does it." Those are both examples of moralistic thinking. The solution is to move beyond that sort of thing and treat this as a problem to be solved.
So the reason why I'm not on the football team isn't because I'm 5'8" and 125 pounds and can't compete with the other players but because football has a bias against my kind? So instead of me trying to bulk up, gain muscle, gain weight, and try to better compete with the other players I should instead blame the recruiters and coaches for discrimination? Maybe if they lower their standards and we implement some sort of forced quota more little guys like me will feel more welcome in the NFL.
Football has a lot of numbers associated with it so I'd guess it's pretty fair, especially since Moneyball was published. (Assuming football coaches learned from it; I don't actually follow football.) I was actually more interested in your other example of entertainment industry executives.
I am pro-analytics: I think you should measure all the things you can because the numbers can be interesting. But just as you wouldn't judge programmers by lines of code, raw numbers about hiring are only a suggestive data point. To figure out if there's a real issue, we would need to go deeper and look for other things to measure. (But obviously we're not going to do that here in a chat room discussion.)
I'll be the first to agree with this, but I don't believe the guy owes anything to anyone. This idea that he should go out of his way to up-end an interview process to appease the writers of a hack-job and other whiners might be PC, but it's ludicrous.
My advice to PG: Leave it for the next person. If there is systematic sexism in tech incubators, that means there's economic profit to be made by targeting female founders. Someone else should hop to it!
Fixed.
I first met pg at SXSW several years ago, when he was swamped by hungry startup founders. The whole scene was intimidating to me--I hate crowds! I finally got to ask him a question, which I can't recall the exact content of now, but was something about women and YC. He suggested I email Jessica about it. I didn't do that--probably because I had been intimidated, and partly because I felt like he had punted on the question instead of giving me an actual answer (I now know that this was just part of his characteristic bluntness, and I definitely don't hold it against him especially given the environment in which the conversation happened, but at the time I didn't know pg and I found it offputting.)
Since then, I've had two good friends go through YC, both young white males. One of the companies is now "Internet famous" and shows up here on HN on a regular basis. The other one is still completely underground. Both of them enjoyed and recommended YC.
Another fellow entrepreneur here in Austin went through YC recently and we sat down and compared notes after he went through YC and I went through Techstars. Our conclusion: Techstars wins in terms of mentoring and support, but YC wins in terms of visibility and fundraising.
So, tl;dr I've met pg (briefly), I know one of the partners and a handful of YC founders, but they're not female. I didn't specifically seek out female founders who'd gone through YC, though now that you ask, I'm really curious to hear some of their viewpoints!
For context: I am male and Indian. There were several female founders in my YC batch and I know female founders from other batches. From everything I heard, they felt quite comfortable and enjoyed and value the YC experience as much as I did.
Having been through it, I know YC definitely treats founders the way great startups treat customers - they pay a lot of attention to what founders want.
If a group of my prospective customers had trepidation about using my product, especially if it was because of undeserved generalizations, I would work hard to fix that. Looks like YC is going to do more of that with the female founders conference they have planned.
The great majority of YC alumni are young white males. Every time the issue is raised of some minority or another being under represented, the answer is invariably that the process is completely fair and that the problem lies somewhere upstream.
That may be so. But wouldn't it be interesting to have some proportion of YC selected purely randomly and see what happens?
To say it would be high risk / low volume / high cost service would be an understatement. And just defining success would be hard. But a hard problem is a good startup problem. And you could probably pivot into (or out of?) employee interviewing.
I guess you could bootstrap as some kind of outsourced HR lady to ask those annoying anxiety producing interview questions (you know the typical HR lady questions, like explain your worst attibute, or tell me about your greatest failure, or the classic when did you stop beating your wife? (kidding about the last one)). This is a legit business opportunity to help small biz do the "HR" questions at an interview and formalize the reporting of multiple candidates, and could pivot into this A/B testing of startup founders once some cash starts flowing.
I'm not kidding about this. Someone else with more spare time that me, take it and run.
I'm not sure where this "frat house" thing comes from (scare quotes, not direct quotation). Have you ever been to a frat house? Believe me, they have nothing in common with a summer at YCombinator. I've described yc dinners as being "like a high school lunchroom where everyone is happy to see you and every table is the cool kid's table". Women are utterly and completely welcome. Minorities are welcome. Bring them your nerds, your socially inept, your ambitious hackers yearning to be free. Frat houses are all about pecking orders and childish humor. YC is genuinely about mutual support and an open exchange of ideas.
If "frat house" means that there aren't many women present, I can only guess as to why. There are a variety of social and cultural factors that push the majority of women away from hacking at a young age. I can't point the finger of blame at anyone in particular, but I can report on what I have observed. Women are generally underrepresented in computer science departments, engineering programs, computer clubs and yes, startup incubators. It has nothing to do with Paul Graham or the YC partners. We're all responsible as members of society at large.
I understand your reasons for not appliyng to YCombinator. TechStars is a great program, and I'm glad that you've thrived there. But there's something to be said for seeing things with your own eyes. I would be very unhappy if someone dismissed me out of hand because of something that they'd heard. I can only believe that YCombinator’s positive reputation will outweigh whatever negative reputation that they have fairly or unfairly received.
The person you responded to offered two doable action points. A litmus test is if YC moves on at least one of them. YC does not have the excuse that it doesn't have the technical know-how. And it would be a laughingstock if they didn't have the hacker spirit to figure out how to implement them.
Second, a perfect excuse was provided: for science! Its not that they think they are sexist, but an untested hypothesis is less strong then a tested one.
Source? Also, universities are much different than ycombinator so I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
Or, are we talking solely about the lack of females accepted, and explicitly disallowing discussion of what they brought to the table?
I honestly don't know, but if there's a controversy with no specific examples, at least for me, it's pretty hard to take seriously.
Well, that's not actually true, because she didn't apply to yc to begin with, so we don't know whether or not the choice would have been available.
Oddly enough, I think I met ericabiz (hello ;), she briefly stayed at my house through airbnb. I totally agree that she is talented, and that if people like her are not even applying because of such a perception, it is a problem. I feel it's a false perception, but not well-addressed by statistics trying to prove or disprove a lack of bias (as she had suggested).
But, really, it's a one page form and it was designed to be useful for founders whether or not you are accepted. The worst outcome (which 95%+ of applications receive) is not getting an interview. So apply! (erica and every other female, male, white, black, green, 40-something etc in this thread).
Fear of rejection (not just from YC) is simply a dumb fear if you think about it, particularly if your doing a startup. Because you are going to be rejected over and over anyway, and ultimately no one can save you from building something no-one wants (the only rejection that means anything in this context).
1. Being accepted, signing over equity and giving up on the chance to move to another accelerator.
2. Getting to YCombinator and realising that all of the group bonding indeed happens over heavy late-night boozing sessions.
3. Trying to find a way to remain part of the group experience without participating in the boozing, but failing and becoming disillusioned and demoralised.
4. Abandoning your startup because you can't join another accelerator anymore and are afraid having to explain why YCombinator didn't work for you.
Erica: "I've talked to many female founders and YC does have a reputation as a "frat house"
"Genuine question: Did you reach out to any female founders who went through YC to ask about their experience?"
Erica: "The straight answer is no. Here's a slightly longer version of the story..." goes on to ramble about unrelated bs.
(just to get more tangled the fact that she was accepted into a well known accelerator probably means she's not in the 'so low" category of acceptance)
The acceptance rate is now ~1%, so according to you nearly all those applying are irrational (the vast majority of even high quality applications will have a less than 80% chance).
The order just doesn't make any sense. Even the best students don't assume they are going to get into a particular dream school (MIT, Stanford etc), unless they are nuts. And those have about 5-10 times the accept rate of YC.
So the decision you're facing as you're applying, knowing what you know, having the conversations you've had, is not "Will I get in?", but "Do I really want to do this?" And that's when I found the frat-house aspect of YC to be discouraging.
(Edit: I suppose I should expand on that since people will invariably have questions. I'm a 32-year-old female. I'm in a different stage of my life than a 22-year-old who just got out of college. I didn't really want to deal with keggers full of falling-over-drunk guys, jokes about "chicks", guys hitting on me, etc. I'm just kind of over all that, and I'm weary of fighting battles I have no inclination to fight over casual sexism--I'd rather focus on growing my business, so I choose not to be around those types of people. Yes, you could say I'm painting YC with a wide and potentially unfair brush, but that was my impression.)
This year, I decided to do Techstars instead, and have no regrets about that.
Today, having gone through one accelerator with my company, I'm done with accelerators for this business and I'm moving on to doing a seed round. If I have another business that might be a good fit for YC, and they've made an effort to change (this article by pg is a good first step), I'd potentially consider it again.
This is weird. What should YC change? Tech Stars doesn't do blind apps or publish all the stats you request so that's not it.
"I didn't really want to deal with keggers full of falling-over-drunk guys, jokes about "chicks", guys hitting on me, etc." "I have no inclination to fight over casual sexism"
Very difficult to work with if you're concerned about imaginary things or looking to read into things that aren't there. This sounds much more about you than YC. Good luck.
Ugh .. disappointing to say the least.
I'm going to repeat what I said above: "There's not much more I can say that I haven't already said, as some of the conversations I've had were explicitly off the record." I'm not going to repeat things that aren't true or that I don't have data for. But I also can't break the trust of people who've spoken with me privately. I will say I did my homework on YC. I've reached the limit of what I can say publicly.
I don't think women have to even be pushed away. I would assert (and am more than happy to be proven wrong) that in many if not most undertakings where the ratio of hours of fun to non-fun (I wish I had a better way to describe what I'm thinking) are low, you will find a lack of females. One example is "hardcore" personal investing, I'm talking investing forums, twitter, etc - if you are familiar with them, once again you will notice it is a sausage-fest. Women aren't pushed out of these communities or discriminated against, they simply are just extremely disproportionately not present.
For whatever reason, I think woman who choose to excel in a field tend to focus on endeavors with clearer and more structured formal paths. For example, you will find plenty of female representation in finance in universities and as career professionals. But after quitting time, the people putting in the extra hours in forums and on twitter are disproportionately male, as are the people who have been coding multiple hours per day since under 10 years old, or multiple hours after quitting time once in their professional lives. These are simple facts. Only when race or gender is involved would anyone ever suggest this not relevant to success.
Not just in tech, but in our entire culture. As noted elsewhere, Americans are sorting themselves by demographics.
It feels awkward to be a woman in a predominantly male organization. It feels awkward to be a republican in San Francisco. It feels awkward to be gay in Mississippi. It feels awkward to be black in Portland. And so we place ourselves in locations (and organizations) where it's less awkward to be ourselves, and the problem gets worse.
What's difficult about this problem is that it's nobody's fault. There's no conspiracy behind this trend. (In fact there is a conspiracy to try and reverse it! But to little avail.) Counterintuitively, perhaps it's the fault of the people who choose the comfort of sameness over diversity, but that feels too close to victim blaming.
Diversity begets diversity. The only way to do that is to set up systems and infrastructure that supports and enables that and it requires support from community leaders.
I think nerds and geeks are acutely aware of the costs of being outcasts. The period of their life when they typically turn to computers and programming is the same as the period in which they are socially marginalized (middle school / high school).
An example: I'm a gay atheist from Idaho. I have extended family members that look like they belong on Duck Dynasty. Each family event, me and my husband are presented with a choice: we can skip the event and its awkwardness, or we can join the event and face it head on.
Each time we attend these events, we leave with the same impression. "That wasn't so bad," and from my husband, "Your family is actually super nice." And because of this interaction, they become less homophobic, and I grow to understand redneck values a bit better.
Besides, I've learned over time that what I think they're thinking about me is actually much worse than what they're actually thinking about me.
But each time I'm invited to one of these events, my first gut instinct is not to go, because it's work, and it can be awkward, and it's much easier for me to spend time around people who are more like me.
THIS. And this is the problem. People don't understand this. It HAS to be somebody's fault. It has to be black OR white. Gray is beyond the understanding of many.
Well, it's not really any one person's fault who set everything up. But we can change it. There are tools to undo the "death by a million cuts" that make it this way.
I would say that the people who don't do these things are partially at fault for not attempting to fix a broken system.
I think they are good ideas. So how is that you expect someone else to do the work for you?
As a founder I know how hard is to make an idea a reality, and my ideas had relative success(I managed to get things done and most people look to me now like "all I have was given" to me, or that what I created was obvious and easy, as it is obvious now, but the same person was arguing to me how it "was never going to work" in the past). Most people are not that lucky, but they try anyway.
So if you care about this, why you don't take action?
You expect someone else, who is a man (and does not care, there are more urgent problems to them), to do something you should be doing in my opinion.
The "frat house" is working very well and there is no reason to change what works. Different systems could work, but with different people, and different focus.
You could start working on this. It is impossible to do it alone, but organizing with others there is nothing imposible.
There's a difference between "good idea" and "marketable business." As founders, we have to make that distinction. I'd like to see YC do blind interviews because I think it's a good idea for them to do so. I am not working on that myself because I can't see that good idea, in and of itself, turning into a business--a product a company could replicate and sell to others.
Perhaps other founders have the necessary domain expertise to turn something like what I suggested into a replicable, marketable business. If so, I support them in doing so.
> So if you care about this, why you don't take action?
I did. I took time away from my business to write this comment and make a suggestion. I hope YC takes it into account. I think it would make an awesome experiment for them.
> The "frat house" is working very well and there is no reason to change what works.
I suspect this might have been your real point. Sure, YC has worked well...but could it work better? Those are the questions we as hackers ask all the time. I think it's worth a shot to try something different and unique that could work even better than the status quo. Given the popularity of my comment here, I'm not the only one who thinks so. We'll see if YC (or any other accelerator) runs with this suggestion!
Yes. Y Combinator could very well decide that their current process is offputting to women, but that it is so successful that they don't care, and that they're perfectly happy to keep doing what they're doing even if it effectively excludes women.
But if this is the case, then their only two options are to lie about it or to stand up in public and say that they don't care about including women. The former has significant risk as a long-term strategy, and the latter is a PR debacle that could negatively impact their ability to attract a significant percentage of male founders -- which is to say, anyone who cares about gender equality.
Right off the top I would say I don't like that for the simple reason that you can't tell confidence (and I will assume that is a factor) or even how full of shit someone is if you disguise their voice.
I do negotiating over the phone, in person, and by email. I dissect each and every nuance to try and determine what is under the hood. I've had good results with that. I make money that way. To me how someone sounds is important on many levels. If you are going to do this, why have them speak at all? (Not suggesting this.)
Along the sames lines I've had a theory for a long time that it is much harder to tell if someone is truthful if they have an accent (even american from a different regioin) that you are not used to because you can't tell nuance like you can with an accent that you know.
Bottom line is hiding the voice, for the purposes of getting diversity, is not the way to go. Especially for decision making that takes into account "the team" and/or "the individual" and not just the idea.
The last thing a successful female founder wants or needs is a quota or lower bar of entry for things like yc. Because once that happens, you're going to have to work twice as hard to get respect, because now you have to prove your place wasn't just because the quota needed to be filled. if you get picked fair and square, then being there is a strong signal that you are worthy.
There are times and places for intentionally creating diversity, but a start up incubator is a bad fit for that type of intervention.
I don't think anyone is arguing to lower the bar of entry for women in YC, instead (as far as I can tell) they are arguing for ways to increase the number of female applicants to YC.
Sorry, but this is a terrible route to go for YC as there's a huge risk of backlash to achieve nothing good. Say, for instance, that black co-founders had received more funding but achieved poorer returns on investment. A very simple interpretation of that data (not necessarily correct, but easy to formulate interpretation) would be that blacks are less successful than whites at getting a return on investment even with odds stacked in their favor. The conclusions and the data would then be deemed "racist" and YC would have shit all over its face. It doesn't even have to be right. There just has to be published data available for there to be a debate about race/sex, etc... leading to a toxic atmosphere around YC.
The reason data like this isn't collected is because VCs are interested in being politically neutral. Data on race and gender are a political powderkeg. PG said that women who haven't been hackers can't see the world as a hacker, and we see the shitstorm it's caused. Imagine if they were tracking stats based on race or gender? They'd be called nazis.
I would love it if this were true, but I think it's way too optimistic.
Nitasha Tiku made several negative blaming statements in her story. The one that stuck out to me as an obvious tell of a blaming statement was "That archetype, of course, is usually attached to a penis." In all fairness, I don't think that anyone wants to be addressed via 'being attached' to their private parts.
Here's a link on NVC if anyone is interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication. It's powerful stuff.
The Information recently sat down with Mr. Graham. We covered a wide range of topics including “mass producing” startups, Mr. Graham’s controversial statements on founder accents, his wife and YC's secret weapon Jessica Livingston (link) and some little-known stories about YC alum Airbnb.
https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete...
…which implies that it was a formal interview. I don't have a subscription but something still doesn't quite mesh there. If I were PG I would be writing to them to demand that they change that lead-in to the story.
edit: Another part of this saga that stands out to me is how very few people commenting on it actually have a subscription to the supposedly first hand source at The Information. It was a bit strange that we had a scandal caused by a news report about a news report that most people don't have access to.
The only differences between The Information and The Register [1] are that the latter acknowledges its tabloid nature, and lacks the breathtaking presumption to peddle its tripe for four hundred dollars a year.
I'm Middle-Eastern (probably a smaller minority in the North-American tech scene compared to women), and while I (like most people) would certainly like to be surrounded by more of my brethren, it's not something I'd be comfortable spending resources on because the return on investment is so nebulous; diversity of views isn't automatically beneficial as is commonly assumed (an extreme example: you wouldn't expect a conservative big-corporation suit-wearing type to benefit a two-founder startup team).
It also seems a bit arrogant to tell people 'you should stop pursuing X and learn coding instead'. I wonder what would have happened had someone convinced Marie Curie, Jane Austen, or Hillary Clinton to go into programming instead of their respective fields (yes, I realise computers weren't invented in the case of the former two, but I hope you understand my point).
Finally, why is all this restricted to women only? Should I start advocating for Arabs? Africans? Inuit? It very quickly turns into a lot of duplicated effort. What's wrong with treating everyone equally? Not to mention that special-casing also reinforces the idea of 'us' and 'them', which I don't feel is productive either.
(throwaway because I don't want to be burned at the stake for publicly asking such questions)
From an economic perspective, having any group not participate in a valuable activity is a waste.
Is that correct?
You can theoretically have a distribution in which natural aptitude is equal, the distribution is skewed (more men than women) and it's not horribly inefficient, but I think if you spell out the assumptions of such a distribution, it's not especially realistic.
[1] https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7DMQCP3v6SZQUw1MnNWbXBUV3M/...
[2] http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-hug...
I think it's more of a class thing than a sex thing.
Does that mean 'do the same thing to everyone'? 'Equal' treatment can easily result in very unequal effects. For instance, if you put a staircase at the door to the classroom, everyone is being treated equally if they are all expected to go up the same staircase, even though that means some people can go in and others (people with crutches/wheelchairs/etc) can't. For another example, lets say public schools started charging every student the exact same fee of $10,000 per year: that would be equal treatment with a clearly unequal outcome, because some students started out in families that can afford the fee, and some didn't.
Also, advocacy is not 'restricted to women' - but there are a lot of people who feel it is valuable to spend their time and effort on programs for women. There are also programs for black teenage boys, for inner city kids, probably for Africans (and African-Americans), that get less attention. If you feel that you can see some disadvantaged group you'd like to advocate for, go ahead. If you feel that you don't want to advocate for anyone, also go ahead. But it doesn't make sense to say that because you don't want to advocate for a group/any group, or think the effort is not worth it for you, then everyone else has to agree not to do it either. (And besides, in many cases obstacles for one group affect other groups, so it doesn't have to be duplication of effort but shared effort that can be applied more widely - eg: increasing awareness that not everybody is likely to have a USA traditional-geek-boy-in-highschool background helps interviewers learn to avoid questions that rely on an assumption of that shared background, which helps everyone with non-mainstream backgrounds like women, homeschooled kids, and foreigners).
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/15/things-i-learned-by-spe...
I think the best solution is to avoid most journalism altogether, and get news from blog posts by people who know what they're talking about, care about it, and have no reason to lie.
The discussion about women in startups has completely come to a halt now and has shifted to discussing whether Paul Graham is a sexist.
The most sickening part of this whole ordeal? That these shit-stirring "journalists" are praised and said to have some sort of talent by their respective circles for knowing how to "shake things up," and their higher-ups want nothing more but for them to continue.
I don't think there is anything wrong with this industry. This seems to be how most 'news' is made these days. I'm guessing that people who closely follow a non-technical industry have seen similar sensationalism on other issues.
But this industry is more forward-thinking and adept to rapidly changing than most, and is most capable of making progress in workplace equality, among other issues. To let trashy journalism get in the way to the point that it has is to severely hinder the potential for change.
The reason this kind of journalism works is simple: because there is a steady supply of new people who aren't resistant to it yet.
[1] The anti-harassment policies of Pycon are a gold-standard for the industry
And no, Jacob is already bitching about pg's essay on his Twitter.
I doubt he would have tweeted any of it, if he had known this.
I took a few minutes to catch up on what JKB is saying and
A) His primary concern seem to be to promote all of the work he's done for women in IT and to make himself seem like a victim because of the backlash from his ramblings about PG.
B) he's completely ignoring PG's side of the story and continuing to promote the ideas mentioned in A.
I'm so sick of the insanity surrounding the issue of the lack of women in IT. Yes, it's a real problem and steps should be taken to fix it but the tsunami of hate that is aimed at anyone who is portrayed as remotely uncaring / oblivious to the issue is beyond disgusting. This is not how to make things better.
BTW, I'm disappointed that only "witch hunt" (terrorism against women) is used in this particular thread so far. Where's "lynch mob" and "McCarthyism", to round out the irony trifecta? (Hilariously sick when men liken themselves to women, whites to blacks, and capitalists to communists.)
Bertrand Guilladot and Louis Debaraz come to mind.
Anyhow, that completely misses the point - that witch trials were based on a presumption of guilt against which no defense could be made. Much like the way certain media sites attack people.
As for the trifecta, I can't help you out on "lynch mob", I'm afraid, but how about this for McCarthyism?
"The [tech industry] is infested with [sexists]. I have here in my hand [2] a list of [102] -- a list of [user]names that were made known to the [Github administrators] as being members of the [sexist majority] and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the [tech industry]." [3]
[1] https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/417776560603549696
[2] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a3j7b1R...
(This link points to Google's cache of @ashedryden's tweet, because the tweet as originally hosted on Twitter has been deleted since I saw it last. I hope you'll agree that Google's cache is an acceptably authoritative source for what used to be hosted at that Twitter URL. The replies are more interesting than the original tweet, anyway.)
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy#Wheeling_speech
Believing men and women are equal is "sick" now? What a strange notion.
Do you know that witch hunt still being a thing in some countries of the world?: http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/medellin/ARTICULO-WEB-NEW_N... (title translated: Woman accused of being a witch in a town in Antioquia was burned)
This is a witch hunt: a woman was accused of being witch and _burned alive_, do you think that is even comparable with the tweets of Jacob Kaplan Moss?
I'll start using this metaphor from now on, just to annoy PC-nazis like you.
witch hunt (n): the act of unfairly looking for and punishing people who are accused of having opinions that are believed to be dangerous or evil
Sounds like proper usage of the word to me.
Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible, a play about a literal witch hunt, as an allegory for McCarthyism. Do you think that he thought that blacklisting actors was literally as bad as crushing somebody to death with stones over several days?
Of course he didn't. It was fucking allegorical. Do you really not understand the basic premise of a metaphor? I think you do. I think you are trolling.
^ little is due.
I don't think the work that Python/Django people are doing to get more women involved in the community can be easily ignored.
For example, you say that you don't know how you'd convince 13 year old girls to be interested in programming. The normal interpretation is, 'Clearly 13 year old girls are very rarely interested in programming, and Paul Graham doesn't know how to change that.' The nasty interpretation is 'Paul Graham thinks that girls are intrinsically incapable of being interested in programming'.
It's easy to be offended by things. It's also obnoxious and often irresponsible.
"It's easy to be offended by things. It's also obnoxious and often irresponsible."
Personally, this sort of behavior affects my career. When I first started at my current job people were afraid to speak to me because they expected me to get offended at the slightest thing. I want people to treat me equally, but I don't want people to be afraid to come to work because I might sue them for looking at me. That's not what I'm about at all but unfortunately I'm pre-judged to lash out at people when I see something I don't like.
I want everyone to come to work and get fair treatment/compensation/etc. but I feel that incidents like this set all of us back. The discrimination is different now. People don't see me as incapable of STEM, they see me as incapable of working with other people. It sucks. A lot.
And I could see how that could make things less enjoyable for women who aren't so up tight; women who are easy going and just want to get along with their co-workers and share a laugh and get good work done.
It is unfortunate.
I just want to come to work, maybe draw stupid things on a white board, make cool shit, and go home. I'd really love it if my vagina wasn't the deciding factor in whether or not I was capable of STEM or whether or not I was capable of working around other human beings.
Yet this seems to imply that you place most of the blame on him... though it seems that you are both (potential) victims here.
WRT calling him out on his behavior, all I was trying to say is that I disagree and wish he would consider changing his mentality going forward. I'm not mad at him for it, I'm sad that the actions of a few have caused him to think this. At the same time I was hoping to imply that I won't twist his arm because I see where he's coming from. No malice intended!
Please read some of the other things I said -- I'm actually on the same side as him.
This seems to contradict when you previously wrote that it is up to him, and him alone, to change his behavior, when here it seems to be actually a needed tactic bourn of forces outside of his control. Allocating 50% blame doesn't seem terribly sympathetic, either.
But never mind, I have probably nitpicked more than my fair share for today.
I didn't feel that this warranted more or less blame on anyone's part. He seems like he might assume a woman is up tight based on his experiences -- I can't change how he feels about that. Unfortunately I also can't change the women that caused him to feel that way. All I can do is try my hardest to not be like the women he speaks of and ask him to reconsider his position.
I appreciate the nitpicking fwiw. I think you misinterpreted what I said, possibly due to the fact that I sometimes suck with words.
It's been my experience that when men feel like they're walking on eggshells around women in the workplace it's because they're normally comfortable making sexists/rape jokes and/or have sexist beliefs. The feeling of eggshell walking is them trying to cover that up. I say this as a guy who has seen other male coworkers' behavior when there are no women around and how difficult it is for them to clean up their act when there is a lady in the room.
Don't take this to mean that I think I can say/do whatever I want in this industry on account of being female -- no one is bulletproof. It just seems men are vilified more than women when it comes to these sorts of things. Maybe that's just my world view.
For the tech-world, I guess a black lesbian would be a triple-concern? I would say that is a problem. Not sure how to fix it, but that's a problem. I personally don't have to change my behavior or speech when a lady is in the room. But then again, I'm probably unique in that... I never, ever use profanity and never make jokes that wouldn't be safe on the Disney channel. I don't know anyone who can claim that besides me. But, I will say compared to my time at at&t... the men there seemed to be less frat-housey than the SV-startup-culture. The men at at&t seemed to be more "gentlemanly", more socially acceptable. SV-startup-culture I think allows the frat-house/bro-grammer attitude to grow thus making it more difficult to the men who are use to that to clean up when a lady is around. At least, that's what I've seen.
It's not just a tech problem either. This stuff is going on all around the world. I don't claim to have solutions to these problems, but I would appreciate it if the public shaming and witch hunts would stop. I'm tired, SV. So very tired.
I've never worked at AT&T but I'd wager the same stuff went on. Perhaps you experienced the same sort of thing I did where people assumed you wouldn't appreciate their words/actions and elected to avoid you?
Being a black male myself, it saddens me to think that you're probably right in more ways than one....
I think men are less concerned about their ability to tell rape jokes and more concerned that anything can be blown out of proportion and taken to social media. This sort of stuff can ruin lives and I think THAT is why many men walk on eggshells. In this case, people went after pg without even hearing his side of things, and a quick browse of Twitter leads me to believe that even though he's stated his side of things people are still unwilling to change their stance on this. Instead, they'd rather be pissed off and label him as part of the problem.
In some cases what you said is probably true, but based on what I've seen they seem to be a minority. I don't think your average person honestly thinks that rape is okay, even if they find humor in rape jokes.
translated - "If you're afraid of being labeled a witch, you're probably a witch."
Well, rapist is easy. But me and you may have very different ideas as what constitutes a "sexist". That's the crux of the problem; that's what causes men to walk on eggshells.
>it would be awesome if you gave women the benefit of the doubt because we're not all this way
Most people are not willing to risk their job to find out.
And that's the part that makes me sad about all of this. People are all about "Consider the woman's feelings here!" but no one wants to consider how men feel about it because they're "privileged."
I'm talking more about the tone of jokes (non-individually directed) and things like that. Stuff that you don't need to remember to hide when clients or the Board of Directors come to the office, and that doesn't turn up in an email log that will be reviewed later on by regulators. Stuff that you can switch off right away when you need to go in to "serious professional mode".
I see a few points being made ("out of context"): - You want to start programming at 13 to be a hacker. - 13 year old girls are not interested in programming. - PG doesn't know how to make programming more attractive to this group.
As far as I can tell these are neutral observations and opinions. Even if his statement is plainly incorrect, simply being wrong doesn't make it offensive.
I for one care about when problematic or false things are said not because I am offended, but because falsehoods make it harder to accurately deal with problems like the low number of women in STEM careers, including tech startups.
That's a quote that, when I read it the first time, I tried to interpret charitably. It's one that I read as, 'Women generally (but with exceptions) don't start hacking at the age of 13, and there's nothing we can do to make these women see the world through hacker eyes.'
Rather than, 'There's no such thing as a woman who's hacked since she was 13, and thus no woman can see the world through hacker eyes.'
Saying the quote is 'problematic' and that it needs clarifying -- I have no problem with that, and in fact I totally agree. What I don't like is how large swaths of the blog-o-sphere didn't even consider the first interpretation; they talk as if the second interpretation is just clearly without qualifiers what he must have meant.
I really like when the move for more female participation in programming is more of removing barriers that would otherwise discourage females from participating (sexism, snickering, etc.) and less pushing females into programming.
As we all know, PG runs a company where his bottom dollar comes from the success rate of startups. It's not hard to draw the conclusion that people who naturally enjoy doing something are more successful at it on the whole than people who are pushed into doing something.
PG just happens to operate in a space dominated by males, because of this I imagine some people feel he has a responsibility to push the female programmer movement forward. I certainly don't imagine him holding female programmers back, with the female founders conf he's announced it sounds like he's trying to help. That said, I think PG is a "pull no punches" kind of guy, so while he is aware of the lack of female founders I don't think he's going to lose sleep over it as long YC continues to succeed.
There's nothing wrong with offering people an easier onramp to hackerdom, of course. But there is a subtext of devaluing all female-dominated lines of work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6981040
Adding CS/CE to this mix won't necessarily solve things. Improving the pipeline is a reasonable step, but it takes time for the effects of those efforts to be realized.
I'm not applying any pressure at all to my daughter, I'm telling her she can practice any kind of medicine she wants.
This gave me a much needed laugh.
Data source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjPFdCURhZvddHJ...
Writing nowadays is like playing football in a minefield.
The only difference is the persistent toxicity of extreme social justice and how they've invaded tech, for some reason. Perhaps because it's a big and booming field, but I've always found it odd how a lot of feminists decry geek culture as outcasts, losers and misogynists, yet simultaneously want desperately to be a part of it.
Ultimately, I think you'll do yourself good with a social media detox.
You are getting a glimpse of those people. Spend your days looking to be offended and, my God, it occasionally happens and you get your chance to rabble! Welcome to social justice warriors.
I used to think I wanted out of the industry too. Now I just keep a list and act accordingly when I am asked to hire. I've also learned to spot the signs, including certain phrases, retweeting of certain people consistently, linking to the Geek Feminism wiki because it's a wiki and it has facts, and so forth. A good example of a red flag tweet: https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/417775128831741952
"Anyone can become angry -- that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way -- this is not easy."- Aristotle
The problem is that these things are set up to be unfalsifiable, and claiming that perhaps situation A or B was not in fact influenced by some hidden, systemic, nefarious thing like the patriarchy sets you up to be labeled at best ignorant and at worst sexist/racist/intolerant/etc. Simple explanations for cause and effect events in society are by definition suspect, if they cannot be tied to some larger scale societal struggle and narrative. It's basically a intellectual framework that has built up immunity from criticism via built-in argumentative tricks, similar to various forms of pseudo-science.
This is not to say there aren't plenty of places where discrimination happens and needs to be confronted. But it is not always the answer, and it is certainly not always the dominant factor in our day to day lives. Folks like the one you posted above seem to see everything in life through this lens, and it colors their opinions on everything, from the important to the mundane.
Indeed. Here's a reply to my comment[1] from yesterday:
https://twitter.com/ashedryden/status/417475900850974720
There is no racism, misogyny, or meritocracy worship anywhere in my comment. To be clear, after that comment, a person who has never met me felt the appropriate conclusion was "that guy hates people who aren't white, hates women, and worships meritocracy." Which, for anybody that knows me, is an asinine thing to say.
People from that group like to trot out horrible things (like "this guy came up to me at a conference and asked to fuck me," which is fucking awful, and I hope it was dealt with appropriately), then condemn a huge swath of people with that experience, then put people that disagree with them in the same bucket and accuse them of supporting horrible behavior. Because disagreeing with a method of discourse is literally the same as sexual assault, right?
I'm past being afraid of these people. The last 24 hours have helped a great deal. I e-mailed several people who said awful things and they all clammed up real fast (or asked me to take the conversation back to public forums, so that they'd have help), including one person who asked me to e-mail her.
So is her hair.
See, when they talk about dicks who have dicks, they're talking about you. You are illustrating exactly what they (and I) are so fed up with. Now the rest of us look bad because you had to piss your tripe in the comments.
I'm done with this account and I've said what I mean to say.
You are dealing with a mob of righteous indignation that refuses to ever consider that they might be wrong. If you think the appropriate response is to perpetually tiptoe around them and apologize profusely, you are sorely mistaken.
They are toxic, and should be labeled as such until they themselves grow up.
The fact that all these SJWs seem to care so much about their appearance that their impeccably groomed avatars rotate faster than the seasons makes it a doubly delicious burn.
Also, Moldbug: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/09/technol...
Search for "Offence trolling" and read that section please (the whole article in general is good, but that section talks specifically about what you are talking about).
Over Thanksgiving a friend of mine who is studying for his Masters in Philosophy introduced me to the formal concept of the 'Principle of Charity' [1] which is on the hearer's part a requirement of applying the most reasonable interpretation of the argument presented. When pg wrote this:
"Also (as we've seen), if you talk about controversial topics, the audience for an interview will include people who for various reasons want to misinterpret what you say, so you have to be careful not to leave them any room to, whereas in a conversation you can assume good faith and speak as loosely as you would in everyday life."
It connected with me that both in the interwebs and here on HN too often people do not apply this principle, either in prejudice or in ignorance, to the topics being discussed. That is really too bad, because it helps the quality of the discussion tremendously.
It's sad that pg feels he has to waste time doing these type of clarifications. Especially since he's not even holding any controversial opinions in either case, but is merely observing what he has seen at YC. I wish more people would be harder on the trolls with nothing but superficial criticism. Ignore them, and if they gain traction, despise them, the same way you despise spammers.
There's an asymmetry here. The trolls lose nothing on their vitrolic rants. For them it's a win either way, since at worst case they get some page views, whereas pg has to spend time dealing with bullshit. It would be more just if these trolls were punished, and pg weren't made to feel like he has to respond like this.
I'm guessing you meant "shouldn't" there?
What's important is fairness and equality of opportunity.
But the real point is that if we believe that jobs will be more technical in nature and that deeper knowledge of technology and coding will be required, maybe we should be concerned with the current ratio. Thus we not only create a skills divide, but one that grows into an economic divide as the better paying jobs are technology jobs. Maybe this is an "equality" movement worth putting some energy into.
I think that kind of is No True Scotsman, because it's an unreasonable conflation of two attributes ('really caring about x' and 'being careful with sourcing in debate/arguments'). I know lots of people who care deeply about various causes but are terrible about research, sourcing and verification in general. And some people might care deeply about a cause but do damage to it by being involved (deeply unpleasant so that nobody wants to work with them and the volunteer group falls apart, that kind of thing). Level of caring is not, in my opinion, strongly correlated with a person's value as an advocate :)
Read http://jessicalessin.com/2013/12/31/on-the-information-and-h...
and the things I wrote elsewhere on this thread.
ValleyWag comes out looking terrible, of course.
The same thing happened again with this controversy. Here's at least one rebuttal from a leading female founder: https://t.co/1NbszBqlB1
Is it too much to ask of the press to at least look into a person's actions before piling on with criticism of a purported quote rehashed by a known instigator such as valleywag?
EDIT: I did read the article and know he was allegedly tricked, but my questions still stand. It was a long interview to just be a background about Jessica, and it was for a profile using the YC name to get $400 subscriptions. If they lied about the reasoning and then edited his words to say something completely different, I would have thought he'd be more outraged.
[1] http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html (see #3)
Publishing remarks made as part of background for a completely different topic, in such a way as to make it seem as though they were made during an actual interview on the topic quoted, is unethical, IMO. And since that's what happened, I stand by my remark.
So, you're just wrong about this. Filed under: Ethics - Human Sources: "'On background' is a kind of limited license to print what the source gives you without using the source's name."
http://journalism.nyu.edu/publishing/ethics-handbook/human-s...
And, knowing many journalists, none of them would ever print something given to them on background with the source's name attached. It is unethical.
EDIT: Found it: https://www.theinformation.com/When-Founders-Fight-They-Call...
I think we could do with fewer of those stories on HN, truth be told. They seem to generate a lot of heat and little light, and are generally about "off-topic" subjects without being intellectually gratifying.
Moreover, anyone who has read pg knows this kerfuffle was likely spam. I'm just sad our culture has degenerated to convict first, ask questions later.
Shameless has supplanted shameful.
Ugh, how depressing.
1 - Most notably, as a gatekeeper in startup culture (<- this seems to be causing confusion: not a gatekeeper to doing a startup, but a gatekeeper to YC which can often be important in succeeding as a startup in my and many other people's opinions), it seems pretty willfully ignorant to assume that you'd know if you were biased against female founders because if you missed some you'd know. If women are a group that starts on the outside to, as a gatekeeper you'd need more than that to know if you're keeping the gates properly, since we it'd be pretty hard to argue the system as a whole isn't a boys club.
I would personally argue it's a large one, but it certainly IS one.
1. That's what YC almost always does, invest as the first and only investor in their own round where they take 7%-ish equity in exchange for a bit of money and all the other things they do. There are rare occasions where that's not what happens, but that's the norm. There's also a follow up from the YC fund that is convertible debt of some kind and always comes from the investors, but that's still 100% based on YC's decision
2. Gatekeeper might not be the perfect term, but it's darn close. YC is a gate, they are the keepers of the gate, and it's an important gate. Not the gate TO doing a startup but a gate IN startupdome.
Edited original comment to be more clear, I can see how the insinuation the being in YC is a gate you must cross to do a startup would cause confusion.
It's not about an attitude about life - I don't worry about gatekeepers at because practically you can't. You've got to give gatekeepers no choice - give YC no choice but to accept you, Techcrunch no choice but to write about you, etc. etc. But as a matter or discussing how our SOCIETY should work, gatekeepers need to examine their biases, strongly and often.
YC is one of those ways, arguably a very significant one.
If Google drops you from search-results, game over!
If YC accepts you, game on!
With that said, I do think that the moderation / upvoting / flagging of Hacker News is overwhelmingly male. I sometimes see sexist comments here, and there doesn't seem to be a good system for women to flag and remove those. This is a problem in my opinion.
Me too. And I will downvote, comment, or both. The system isn't perfect, but there are people who are trying.
Sexism is everyone's problem, regardless of gender expression.
I know things are taken out of context, and quotes/sound bites can be selected and presented out of sequence, but actively editing the quote seems absurd and beyond anyone who honestly thinks they are reporting something accurately.
PG picks the best.
it's time we step up to plate ladies. if we want to compete toe to toe with the gents then we have to be better than the ones we are up against. period. if you're better, trust me, he will pick you regardless of your gender.
it might even be in your favor if you just happen to be a woman on top of being better :)
I wonder why pg thinks being a programmer is a prerequisite for looking at the world through hacker eyes. The notion that Zuckerberg could have started Facebook as a non-technical co-founder doesn't seem unreasonable to me (and you could even argue Steve Jobs, while having some technical chops, wasn't the typical uber-hacker-has-been-doing-this-since-age-12 programmer). Or not?
It's important for all of us to remember that the incentives of the media and their subjects are not necessarily aligned, and that bombastic distortions such as this are common.
At what point does misquotation become libel? As much as I hate the idea of suing the press, lawsuits seem like the only defense. Real and lasting damage was done to pg's reputation here. Even with yc as his personal loudspeaker, I doubt pg will be able to set the record strait.
He did only refer to programmers. That's true.
But what he left out is that, he defined programmers as the "pool of potential startup founders". (You have to read the full transcript to notice that.)
So he is not actually referring to a subset of women. He very clearly says women as a whole are underrepresented as founders because they haven't been hacking since age 13 like the attendees of PyCon and open source committers, because it's really hard to get 13 year old girls interested in hacking.
It's completely clear when you read the transcript.
I'm not saying that PG is necessarily sexist or a bad person for saying all of this. But he did basically say that there aren't a lot of twenty-something females who have been hacking for 10+ years. And then he seems to sort of back away from that statement in "What I Didn't Say". In the original interview, he said "We can't make [these] women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years." In "What I Didn't Say" he says "When I saw [the above quote] myself I wasn't sure what I was even supposed to be saying. That women aren't hackers? That they can't be taught to be hackers? Either one seems ridiculous." Basically, he was saying a less-crazy version of the first statement. Namely, that there aren't that many 20-something female hackers.
In summary, it seems like PG stated an inconvenient and perhaps unfortunate truth (and implicitly declined to get into what he could perhaps do to make this truth untrue), The Information reported it in a responsible way, and then ValleyWag re-reported it in a misleading and sensationalistic way. And then PG somewhat disingenuously claimed that he didn't say what he actually said.
Also, the irony is rich that all of this involves the guy that wrote "What You Can't Say".
The bigger problem with pg's statement is not the 13 year old girl claim. It's that he fully blames them and middle school curriculum while giving YC, PyCon and the startup industry a pass. His stance is we already have an open door and are self-selected, so the problem must be up the line.
You're right, he dodged the question of whether we need to be more proactive, not just open.
Are those boys to blame for their decision? If not, why are you campaigning to only push money in the direction of girls?
And I'm not campaigning to push money in any direction. That's a separate issue.
I agree that it's not obviously a bad thing if all these people who didn't become hackers (female or male) became something else that is socially valuable and makes them happy. But I'm also willing to consider the possibility that some women would have been happier and contributed more to society if they had become hackers, but didn't because they felt out of place or unwelcome when they tried to. And that if that's the case, then I'm at least willing to consider that maybe we as a society should do something about it.
So perhaps our industry could make a greater effort to spotlight and support our very best examples of female hackers, and put them in closer touch with 13 year old girls. And to dial down the bro-iness of events and startup office cultures.
Those are examples of being proactive that have nothing to do with lowering standards. Pointing fingers elsewhere in the system is not that different from defending the status quo, because it's an interdependent system.
I also want to point out on the lowering standards front, I'm a female hacker who's been coding since age 6, and I was rejected from YC. I'm actually proud of that fact in the light of this discussion. I'd hate the whole foundation of my startup to be the source of such rabid debate, and for folks to think I just got in because I'm a unicorn and we need more unicorns in tech.
PG has done a lot for the community and I think he deserves a conversation rather than a lynching. I'm calling for a more civil discourse on sexism. We could say that I'm baised bc my cofounder was similarly attacked by Valleywag, but it's very reasonable to say that these conversations could be handled more thoughtfully.
And despite PG and YC giving every indication of wanting to change the situation, a simple statement of the situation (if it's out-of-context or not) makes people pick up their pitchforks?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Carlton ...
Carlton slumped in 1973, losing 20 games. The media's open questioning of his unusual training techniques led to an acrimonious relationship between them and Carlton, and he severed all ties with the media, refusing to answer press questions for the rest of his career with the Phillies.[13] This reached a point where, in 1981, while the Mexican rookie Fernando Valenzuela was achieving stardom with the Los Angeles Dodgers, a reporter remarked, "The two best pitchers in the National League don't speak English: Fernando Valenzuela and Steve Carlton."[14]
Sometimes I wonder if more people responded this way, "professional journalism" might actually have a chance.
It's sad that pg feels he has to waste time doing these type of clarifications. Especially since he's not even holding any controversial opinions in either case, but is merely observing what he has seen at YC.
I wish more people would be harder on the trolls with nothing but superficial criticism. Ignore them, and if they gain traction, despise them, the same way you despise spammers.
There's an asymmetry here. The trolls lose nothing on their vitrolic rants. For them it's a win either way, since at worst case they get some page views, whereas pg has to spend time dealing with bullshit. It would be more just if these trolls were punished, and pg weren't made to feel like he has to respond like this.
When I was a kid I was told a story as a means to communicate the gravity of telling lies. A lie, as the story goes, is like ripping open a feather pillow atop a mountain. Feathers fly everywhere. To undo a lie you have to collect every single feather, a task monumentally more difficult than telling the lie.
The Internet multiplies the power of the lie at every level. From a simple comments to blog posts to more established media outlets. Since the feathers can't be collected the damage can be extensive, permanent and even outlive the victim. Given this it would almost seem that the law needs to develop beyond liebel and slander (which I think might not be up to the task).
In your arc article: http://www.paulgraham.com/arc0.html
you have the following few sentences: I realize that supporting only Ascii is uninternational to a point that's almost offensive, like calling Beijing Peking, or Roma Rome (hmm, wait a minute). But the kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn't like Arc anyway.
Here's the issue: "the kind of people who would be offended by that" - I realize that "that" refers to ASCII only support, and I agree with your statement. But it took me two minutes to figure that out. Indeed "that" might as well refer to Chinese people being offended by the colonial label of Peking instead of using Beijing. I thought you might want to fix this infelicity of expression.
I think the only Chinese people who would be "outraged" by calling their capital Peking (the old southern way of pronouncing it) vs Beijing (the new northern way of pronouncing it) are the same types getting "outraged" over this ridiculous event - they were looking for something to get angry about anyway. For most I believe it is simply a historical name. Do New Yorkers get outraged if you sidle up to them and whisper "New Amsterdam"?
Anyway, it's still generally called Peking in plenty of languages, including Spanish, French, German and Japanese, and I don't see any great international incidents over that.
but that's just my opinion on the matter.
I see a link to https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete..., but there's no way I'm subscribing to this junk website.
This would be different if there were no context, but there is a lot of context.
Given the way my mother cooks, I can state that when it comes to food she totally can be a called a hacker :-)
I have some friends in top positions and the first thing they learn is about this techniques. There are predators out there wanting to eat your hardly earned reputation for their own benefit or agendas.
In some countries it's legal to record any conversation you're a part of without informing the other participants so many people are on their guard. Even in everyday life with people you know well, they or you might be carrying a mobile phone manufactured by certain company or running a certain OS that listens, even when turned off with the battery still in, on behalf of some party who'll never be prosecuted and often never even exposed, and there's a lot of those sorts of people out there. Perhaps even a higher than average percentage of Hacker News visitors are these sorts.
realizes there isn't a lot of substance to most of the comments
goes back to programming
" The controversy itself is an example of something interesting I'd been meaning to write about, incidentally. I was one of the first users of Reddit, and I couldn't believe the number of times I indignantly upvoted a story about some apparent misdeed or injustice, only to discover later it wasn't as it seemed. As one of the first to be exposed to this phenomenon, I was one of the first to develop an immunity to it. Now when I see something that seems too indignation-inducing to be true, my initial reaction is usually skepticism. But even now I'm still fooled occasionally."
just say whatever "they" want you to say (whatever is pc these days) and keep your head down and keep hacking.
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/129436-just-email-me/transcr...
Controversy is the product, not informed readers.
Would also be interested in seeing what the relative success/failures of investments with startup founders at 23 w/ 10 years experience (started programming in teams), vs 28 (who started programming at 18).
This has been true in academia for years.
It is difficult not to love things that you've discovered for yourself and learned to do as a kid. So the following:
> If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own.
while not required, could be just an 'often encountered' case.
"wouldn't"?
The stuff I added in brackets is implied. The main question is accepting women who are not hackers, as if they were, given the (challenged) assumption that you can turn them into hackers in YC.
It is if you are seeking funding for a startup based on hacking. The context in the article makes it clear that this condition was implied.
"What I was talking about here is the idea that to do something well you have to be interested in it for its own sake, not just because you had to pick something as a major.So this is the message to take away:
If you want to be really good at programming, you have to love it for itself. "
While I 100% agree with your final above statement, I find it concerning that you would label everyone with a "CS major" as having motivations outside of a "hacker". I fail to see how they are mutually exclusive. I hope this was just a unfortunate choice of words.
What's amazing is how many people continue to do this, even though they have many times felt the aggravation of others doing it to their public posts.
I understand what hes trying to say, I just find it really odd that he would go about it by labeling a group of people as if they were intrinsically different.
Wasn't Mark Zuckerberg a CS major, and Graham praises him.
To think that pg of all people fails to see the value in a CS degree is pretty hilarious though.
Many, many hackers enter CS programs precisely because they are hackers and want to learn more about computers. Others take a different path.
Some people in CS aren't into it because they love it, but because their parents want them to get a "useful" degree, or because they heard that they can get a good job. All reasonable motivations, but different from doing something due to intrinsic motivation.
Go write some code instead.
I'm glad to see such a thorough, intelligent reply from PG. He is extremely careful and precise in his language, without coming across as robotic or inhuman. It's impressive.
But this kind of thing is going to continue to happen. There is no market for taking an honest man at his word without reading subtext into it. The opinion ecosystem is a cesspool of the worst pieces of humanity. "Reporting" on Silicon Valley from the east coast would be hubristic and a folly if the organs involved had any intention of doing so honestly.
PG is fortunate that he is self-employed which provides some barrier against the power of the easily-offended. Somehow the talkers have gained power over the doers, and it is wrong. We live in a time when a person lower in an organization could easily find himself out of a job for an off-handed remark.
Teddy Roosevelt most eloquently described what is wrong with Gawker:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Agreed, although I don't think it's the talkers vs. the doers; it's the talkers' audiences vs. the doers.
Here's your "somehow": The lack of critical thinking skills in the general population (not new), combined with the power of instant global communication (new).
The lack of critical thinking skills leads people to seek absolutes, simplicity, and swift action in areas where shades of gray, nuance, and care should be called for. Again, nothing new here: mob justice is a well-understood, if regrettable, characteristic of human society.
Instant global communication much more swiftly connects 1) the easily-manipulated with 2) those who lack experience and maturity but who nevertheless possess the gift of persuasion.
In short, I blame the listeners, not the talkers. It would be a Good Thing(tm) if people were generally more skeptical of everything they heard and read, and even better if they knew how to ask the right questions to resolve that skepticism. It would make it harder for unworthy critics to hold power, and easier for worthy ones to be heard.
Here's another quote, from Joseph de Maistre: "Every nation gets the government it deserves." A similar thing could be said for culture and civil society.
I blame both. The listeners for not exercising critical thinking, as you say, and the talkers for spending their time and effort (not to mention sucking in the time and effort of many other people) on these useless witch hunts instead of adding actual value.
I disagree:
- If the talkers are the problem, then the solution is... less speech? Muzzling/censorship? I'll pass, thanks. Better to have the frenzied finger-pointers grow hoarse blathering to a crowd that's ignoring them, than to give them the very attention that they crave and that drives their fortunes.
- I didn't mention solutions to the problem because my post was already long enough.
Solutions would involve (at least):
- Persuading people to take their media viewership and loyalty away from the worst offenders (MSNBC, Fox News, etc.). Hit them where it hurts, in the pocketbook. Do this by pointing out the emperor's nakedness. - Persuading people to give their media viewership to sources and outlets that don't pander to them (not quite the opposite of the first point). This gives influence (money) to media voices who, eventually, can credibly call our leaders to task for their race-to-the-bottom mentality. - Improved critical thinking curricula in formal education at all levels.
The above improvements would have gradual second-order effects on civic life, e.g. you might eventually end up with real town hall meetings instead of staged, scripted tripe. It really wouldn't take much overt change to see results -- you don't have to boil the ocean.
And All Those Who Violate This Law Shall Be Marked "B" for Bigot. And Know Ye Well That Those Who Wear This Mark of B Shall Be Cast Out of Society and They Shall Be Demonized Forever....
Know Ye These Laws!
I mean, it's pretty clear that women excel at language acquisition over men, and these are just computer languages.
Let's say, ceteris paribus, 10,000 hours for adolescent boys, 8,000 hours for adolescent girls. Supposing this is the case, given the history of computer science, I doubt really any one of us is in a position to define credibility on solely that metric of time spent.
Clearly environment plays a very significant role here, and it goes without saying, given the larger cultural context of the West, that women have been excluded. I mean, Women's Suffrage was, like, a century ago.
I'm just going to assert that I'm quite postive more than half of you are talking jive, and that's not good.
Girls score better at boys in language, therefore they are biologically advantaged.
Girls score worse than boys at math, therefore they are being discriminated against and discouraged by society.
You can't argue with evidence.
Does "environment" mean "nature" to you between "nature/nurture"?
Granted, I'm making big assumptions, but they don't have anything to do with biology.
What bothers me more is that damaging PG's public image is seemingly what it takes for him to prioritize writing an article about female founders.
I don't think YC needs to have affirmative action for gender; it would neither be fair or that effective. However, I think they're in the perfect position to inspire younger generations to start hacking. And this must specifically include girls.
My cofounder is a woman, who was contributing to Debian at age 15. Our first employee is a woman, with a MS from the operating systems group at MIT CSAIL.
There are lots of women hackers out there, but none of them are partners at YC. This press is disappointing, but not unexpected.
Carolynn is a lawyer, with a bachelors is in political science.
Jessica previously worked at an investment bank, and has a BA in English.
Kirsty is an accountant, and although she holds an MEng in electrical and information sciences, it's not clear that she ever worked as an engineer.
This discussion is about young girls hacking with computers, which (I'm assuming, given their bios) none of these women did at that age.
I'm just disappointed that YC doesn't have a woman partner with a CS degree of any sort.
FWIW, pg can be described in a similar (limited) manner to argue that he's not a hacker: a venture capitalist with a degree in philosophy.
And I don't think pg meant that you have to be hacking since age 13 to be a "hacker" (it was an extreme example), but that you have to be passionate about it.
From his essay:
> What I was talking about here is the idea that to do something well you have to be interested in it for its own sake, not just because you had to pick something as a major.
Anything about DongleGate
Anything about PronounGate
Anything about CPlusEqualityGate
But when They Came for Paul, then he wanted us to know what he said.
Sadly, I was already gone.
In fact what he did apparently was to take these sorts of threads down and encourage moderators to kill them.
Now of course, he abuses his power as publisher to host this thread where we can deify him, thank him, and and apologize to him.
I think this is made worse when he runs Hacker News, and lets that platform be used in a very similar case to defend himself.
My original post references "First They Came" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...) That's not to suggest feminist bullying is anything close to Nazi Germany, but to suggest we all have moral duties to speak out for the powerless and abused.
PG 'throwing in' during "Donglegate" would not have done anything to improve the situation.
2. Paul runs a press that specializes in topics in tech
3. Paul and his mods goes out of their way to kill threads that discuss this topic when it deals with other people, people who are almost entirely powerless to defend themselves and so rely on the crowdsourced power of others to defend them and discuss the topic
4. Paul then uses the same press to complain how he was treated.
Draw your own conclusions regarding Paul's relative complicity in what happened to others and himself.
And there are of course far more incidents than the three I mention.
Do you have evidence for this claim?
My understanding is that HN attempts to automatically detect all controversial topics and remove them from the front page. From what I saw, PronounGate got fair attention on HN, and so did CPlusEqaulityGate (relative to how much traction it got anywhere else).