Tricked
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
Will he write a reply every time someone is wrong on the Internet? I am surprised Graham published it. The tone is very close to anger. He runs the risk of triggering the Streisand effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
The mistake seems minor enough that the folks at Y Combinator should be able to laugh about it and forget it. But if it gets under Graham's skin so much that he felt the need to write this essay, that raises the question of why it gets under his skin so much?
I don't think he meant it that way, but it's easy to put it in that context.
EDIT-
Found an essay about women founders by sama that references it as exactly that kind of problem
"A specific issue that came up is a belief that we look for founders that look like Mark Zuckerberg. Actually that meme began as a self-deprecating joke. "
http://blog.samaltman.com/what-ive-learned-from-female-found...
I do want to note, that on the face of it, it does not sound like pg was joking. Couple that with the fact that pg did say sometime ago that strong accents are a part of negative predictors. So following that up with the comment about Zuck-doppelgangers being more likely to succeed, the quote doesn't strike one as being a joke -- “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: ‘How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!’ ” So, YC did go on to fund this guy. Considering that YC is pretty competitive in choosing the right people and has a low acceptance rate... and this guy did get in, can it really be said that his looking like Zuck had zero sway?
I think pg & co. should just move on with this, not by trying to weasel out of this, but by saying they made a mistake and they'll try to do better.
This passage feels inappropriate to me. In fact, the tone of the entire blog post seems off.
Maybe if I make an app that locks people out of their computers after 9pm on Fridays, I can get Y-Combinator to fund me and solve the problem. I do have an unusually long neck, which I've heard helps.
Zuckerburg has a long neck.
Several years ago, Paul Graham — whom everybody calls P.G. — began to film the interviews he and his partners held with prospective Y.C. inductees. When reviewing the footage, he focused on the interviews with start-ups that ultimately failed. Like any savvy marketing executive, he wanted to isolate patterns that portended ill, which he called “negative predictors.” He was already aware of a few — investors tended to be biased against older founders, for instance. “The cutoff in investors’ heads is 32,” Graham says. “After 32, they start to be a little skeptical.” And Graham knew that he had his own biases. “I can be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. There was a guy once who we funded who was terrible. I said: ‘How could he be bad? He looks like Zuckerberg!’ ”
Watching the video footage, Graham noticed another correlation: the longer he took to decide a group’s fate, the less likely the group was to succeed. “When you have to talk yourself into something, it’s a bad sign — that’s true also of relationships, hiring and so many other parts of life.” (Graham has a rhetorical talent for moving swiftly from the valley to the universal.) But after ranking every Y.C. company by its valuation, Graham discovered a more significant correlation. “You have to go far down the list to find a C.E.O. with a strong foreign accent,” Graham told me. “Alarmingly far down — like 100th place.” I asked him to clarify. “You can sound like you’re from Russia,” he said, in the voice of an evil Soviet henchman. “It’s just fine, as long as everyone can understand you.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/magazine/y-combinator-sili...
It's pretty easy to see how the quote wasn't received as a joke.
It's hard to tell what so many people on HN disliked about the post that they flagged it into oblivion. Has that ever happened to one of pg's blog posts before?
By the way, I think HN would benefit from making users specify a reason for flagging, e.g., spam, duplicate, etc., each of which could be handled appropriately. The catch-all flag would then more transparently mirror a downvote, which is what people use the flag functionality for now.
Yes, and then someone reposted it with a space added at the end of the URL, and the repost ended up sorted higher because it hadn't picked up any flags.
But that's not "being tricked", that's looking for good investments.
Now, this is a very charitable statement. To be slightly less charitable, this could've been pg warning himself not to overfit -- "we know that Zuckerberg was incredibly successful, but that doesn't mean we should fund anyone with curly hair and a hoodie."
[1] "Had", that is, before this article. pg knows what pg means slightly better than I do.
For that matter, I think this was more of a response too: http://paulgraham.com/speak.html (written when suddenly the whole world seemed to be worried about pg saying um a lot). I think this article did calm those people a bit.
Sam Harris is often the victim of this sort of attack. He's become quite experienced at handling it, although he's had to spend significant time doing so. [1][2]
1. http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/on-the-mechanics-of-defam...
2. http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/response-to-controve...
I am not sure they care about believing it. I got the sense that they were just looking to distract from actual conversations that should be happening in which they have little to add.
Seems uncharacteristic of his previous essays.
[edit] I just noticed this was posted under "Responses" and not "Essays". Still an odd thing to post.