The Disinformation

I guess their promise of high-quality tech coverage was a welcome change. Seems like a good idea; hopefully someone else will deliver it.

I, in turn, feel dumb asking, as I would have liked a subscription to a service like that. I wouldn't want to encourage this sort of nonsense, either.

I thought even without the word 'these', the conversational context suggested the topic was relative rates of an activity, or within an implied reference class (potential "but for this one factor" founders/YC-applicants).

It's often possible to clip phrases out of a discussion so that standing alone, they sound unqualified and extreme... when in fact the establishing context, perhaps paragraphs or pages earlier, set limits on what was meant and renders the words reasonable.

Yet, in the modern link/referral/social-news economy there are big rewards for removing context, adding new spin, and sending the result out for amplification (and further modification) by those already primed to express outrage.

What's interesting, at least on this thread, is that people aren't analyzing the raw transcript for themselves: (http://jessicalessin.com/2013/12/31/on-the-information-and-h...) Or did I miss someone doing that, under the weight of all the fluffy, useless rhetoric?

One poster's brief, lucid point about journalistic practices is buried by lots of useless rhetoric. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6989348)

Everyone should know this is true here even on technical topics. People commonly point out a lack of critical thinking on HN, weak at discussing tradeoffs.

Reading the raw transcript, seems to me Paul's comment about "these women" doesn't show him in a better light. But even if you disagree, doing the analysis is important, rather than echo Michael Arrington's and Paul Graham's rhetoric.

Like so many things, free press in general is being disintermediated, since "leaks" happen without it, outside of it, and many times despite its best efforts to ignore them.

Still, one can imagine there's value to the business of keeping the government accountable -- if the business gets done.

But in tech? What secrets are there to uncover? As this story shows, the only "secrets" left are those made up by the press to try and justify its existence.

"It's not that we were trying to be malicious. It's just that we're incapable of parsing spoken English"

Followed up in a tweet with "To clarify, even after reading several detailed explanations of the spoken English in question, we're still unable to parse it".

So either way, malicious or dim, it's hard to imagine considering them a trustworthy source of news after this.

[Note: some of the above quotes have been edited slightly for compactness and clarity, as is common practice in such things.]

It's just more of the same tech writing, wrapped in WSJ-like finance reporting.

He's telling you the story of, "If you bust your ass and don't sleep, you'll get rich" because the only way that people in his line of work get richer is if young, poorly-socialized, naive geniuses believe that story! Without those coat-tails to ride, VCs might have to work for a living. Once that kid burns out, they'll just slot a new one in.

Would you name some other ways to get rich with a reliability approaching that of starting a VC-funded startup?

The VCs may be in control, but at least it's a game that can be played. I'm not sure how it was disingenuous of Arrington to cite evidence of how hard jwz had to work. His point was that startups are hard. Jwz didn't seem to refute that, nor provide any hope of potentially escaping a lifetime of working for other people without doing a startup. Startup success is rare, but it seems more frequent than most of history has allowed.

Jamie's diary page (src: http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nscpdorm.html ) says at the top that the excerpts might serve as a cautionary tale about working in a startup (and Arrington also says in his infamous article (src: http://uncrunched.com/2011/11/27/startups-are-hard-so-work-m... ) that people who think they are working too hard or sacrificing too much should quit their startup), but aside from that it's a just a bunch of entries from a personal diary, not a rant with an overarching message or thesis statement. Arrington used the diary entries as evidence that the startup experience was hard in 1994, but (correct me if I'm wrong) he never modified jwz's quotes or tried to make it appear that jwz had an opinion that he didn't have.

Guy records a radio PSA saying "don't punch strangers in the nose". Later, it turns out that the guy has a history of punching strangers in the nose. Is the PSA wrong?

There's a way to write the comment that points out that Arrington's history here might be checkered. Unfortunately, the way you wrote your comment isn't that way, because it calls the message into question along with the messenger, and the message here seems valuable.

* Publicly shame as many top males for anything possible to make room for women - assume the worst and don't try to resolve possible misunderstanding privately, but instead immediately engage in public smear campaigns. The little shitlord nerds don't deserve anything.

* Smashing the patriarchy requires getting men out of positions of power, because they didn't earn any of it, and so the best, most capable men must be pushed out. Meritocracies create inequality, and so are evil. Women are only not in tech because of deliberate, institutionalized sexism. There is no other reason. Not because more men were shut-in nerds ostracized by society who were hungry for something interesting to work on. That's not it at all. There is no reason for men to compete with each other for well paying jobs other than them being sexist jerks.

* Remove all male identity, because if men don't exist then women can feel better about not doing things they don't want to. All gendered words must be wiped clean, because you don't know who could be reading your own words even in an industry mostly built, maintained, and ran by men. Any word with "man" must be changed to "person" and if there are none available then invent new words, because men do not deserve identity (because of their male privilege). Why are men more interested in getting into tech on their own? Obviously it's the patriarchy which pushes men into challenging STEM jobs, and women into psychology. If there were no gendered words in tech then women would stop going into psychology so much and instead get into STEM

* Make places where men can talk openly safe for women's feelings, because that's the only reason women are not in tech. This means no fun allowed, no jokes allowed. If there are mostly men in a group then it's obviously anti-women, uninviting to women, and most likely a bunch of women hating frat boys. Humor is problematic. Brave white knights (people who defend some by attacking (being bullies toward) others at all costs by default when they do not even understand what is going on (see: people attacking PG on twitter)) treat women as children without agency, which means creating Codes of Conduct which hilariously favor women, and allow women to get any male kicked out for any reason if they feel like making something up, which will totally make more guys want to associate with women at groups and not distance themselves even more.

* Make the good men who want to see equality, would be very happy if more women were in tech to walk on eggshells, or not even say anything, because they are afraid if they ask questions (if you practice the Socratic method then you are a sexist pig) or think things through logically (feels > facts; Social Justice Warrior Misandrist theory is 100% correct and if you disagree you're a misogynist) they will be attacked, publicly misquoted, and have their character assassinated.

* If any man tries to help feminist issues he is really just trying to put the spotlight on himself. He should STFU and listen, because he's a privileged, cis, white male, and he knows nothing. He's not allowed to ask questions either. He can google, and it's not anyone's job to educate him.

Not hyperbole. I have talked with serious people who gleefully hold these sickening views.

That's not what pg is saying at all.

Eric's question wasn't if female founders can be found. Eric is asking if there are non-hackers out there, just waiting to be found, so they can start the next Facebook. pg is saying you can't just go out and find non-hackers and turn them into the next Mark Zuckerberg.

On a side note, I think the transcript is poorly transcribed. Many sentences are missing keywords allowing sentences to be easily interpreted in different ways.

The VCs want to be working on billion-dollar private equity deals and crashing third-world currencies, not flipping measly $200-million startups. They're happy with their $17-million California mansions... until they go to their MBA-school reunions and are the only ones in their social groups without private jets and who don't live in New York or London.

The founders want to be VCs, the engineers want to be founders. Neither transition is likely at all. The non-engineers want to be engineers. Where that transition is likely, watch out.

The tech press is pretty light on ethics because of the false poverty effect. Few people in tech proper are poor, but they all feel poor, and when you conceive of yourself as poor, pissed-on, and generally cheated, you're more willing to do some cheating yourself.

That is why there are so many unethical and shoddy people in VC-funded technology. Watching total fucking idiots like Lucas Duplan get million-dollar welfare checks only adds to it.

Then there are the stray weirdos like me who are in tech because we really like the work, but we don't last long in VC-istan.

Are you sure we ever actually had the paradise we lost?

Yellow journalism is still a problem. Most people who read some little quote about women in tech from some guy they've never heard of move on. For the core group of people who are interested, the best way to learn about pg's opinions is from pg himself and that is easy to do.

New standards need to emerge. Publishing transcripts or recordings would be a good place to start. But the ability of misquoted individuals to respond is itself a disruption.