The Stanford Undergraduate and the Mentor | Hacker News Reader

The Stanford Undergraduate and the Mentor

nytimes.com

80 pointssgustard26 comments

Here's what's scary: both could be right. Each interprets and constructs meaning from various gestures, actions, words, etc., through their own lens, especially retrospectively.

For example, guy and girl go out to dinner, have a great time, have a couple of glasses of wine. Girl goes back to guy's apartment; they are both light-headed, and end up having sex. Months later, after a breakup, the girl legitimately believes she was taken advantage of ('The asshole was using me all along; he plied me with wine and raped me'), while the guy legitimately believes that what happened was 100% consensual. It is obvious why after a tough break-up the girl may (choose to?) think this way. Also, she IS on some level right: the guy DID want to have sex with her, and the dinner and wine weren't a completely innocent gesture. But guess what: this is what relationships are like, and these situations are virtually impossible to avoid. Every relationship I've been in has had similar 'open to interpretation' moments.

Anyway, this is one reason why relationships today are sometimes an absolute hell; we live in a culture that encourages us to treat everything as means rather than end, including people, and at the same time we are obsessed with ourselves--obsessed with protecting our beautiful, world-deserving self, and are terrified that we might be being used, or that we might be using or accused of using others.

I'm surprised to haven't seen this mentioned yet, but based on the article and skimming the emails linked to, the woman was very religious, and the guy not at all (but went along with it anyway).

I'd argue that if you're an atheistic person, then the worst case scenario of dating a very religious person is something like that story. The amount of cognitive dissonance and self-imposed guilt and shame in religious people, especially when they're still young, is very likely to lead to messy situations like the one described. Young people are full of hormones and impulses that they want to act on, but the religion in their head tells them to feel bad about it. This can lead to absolutely absurd situations, where they're very happy to have sexual relationships but feel very guilty after them.

I dated a religious girl, and the emails exchanged by those 2 reminded me of my own relationship 7 or so years ago. Fortunately my story wasn't as messy as this one, but there were definitely a couple of hard earned lessons and very uncomfortable moments. Some of the stories that girl told me about her earlier life were quite unreal to me- for example, she and her ex boyfriend would have sex, then she'd feel guilty and go confess at church, and a day later they'd have sex again, etc. (if you're a priests, you must get to hear a lot of intimate stories from impressionable confused young people. And of course all priests are men... connect the dots as you will)

It's hard to draw any conclusions based on the article and material available - but to people that have found themselves in similar relationships, some of the interactions described aren't surprising. The lesson for me was, date people with world views similar to yours.

Nice way of writing the article -- the narrative in the first half makes us believe Clougherty's side, while the second half shows the other side of the story.

The author paints the therapist, Keith Saylor, in a really bad light imo. The whole piece flips so hard at that moment. The relationship seems mostly positive and normal, seemingly with evidence. Things get rocky then a therapist quickly encourages and hard reinforces an much different and extremely negative picture. It almost feels unethical to reinforce such a tale without a police investigation. Couple this with the recent NYTimes article about fabricated memories and therapist could make anyone honestly believe anything they wanted to. That's scary.

I didn't read the article but by reading your comment, The movie "Gone Girl" comes to my mind.

Steve Jobs met Laurene in a very similar fashion. Everyone knows that. He saw her during a class visit, and invited her out (although she was a graduate student).

Upon reading the emails from the plaintiff and her mother available at http://joelonsdalestatement.com/ , one gets the general impression that they were trying to throw themselves to JL.

As a 29 year old male myself, the of idea of dating a college undergraduate is just plain weird... particularly in this case, where there is such an obvious power imbalance. The outcome (though perhaps not the severity) should have been apparent from the get go.

People who are wealthy or extremely good looking have more options than us. If I were rich enough to realistically date young models then it might not be plain weird anymore.

Look at Patrick Stewart. How many 70 year olds would marry a woman in their 30s if they actually could?

What do you mean by, `than us'? Confront it, people working in the software industry are generally wealthier than the average Joe. We do have more options. (Of course, there's always a bigger fish.)

The gap between billionaires and the average software engineer is so large that it makes any such "confrontation" meaningless.

lots of devs make more than 200k a year, which is way higher than average. But wealthy people own yachts and rent villas in Europe.

> such an obvious power imbalance

you're implying that love is based on rational thought in the first place

I'm 33 and I can count on one hand the number of 26+ women I've dated in the past year (they all turned out to be married - perils of dating in India). The vast majority have been in college, the rest on their first job.

None of them have gone crazy like in this story and this outcome is hardly apparent. Most are nice women that I'm still friends with. Maybe it's more common in the American college scene - there certainly seems to be a moral panic going on there. If you take a lesson from this, it's probably closer to "avoid American women" than "avoid younger women".

As for whether it's "weird", it depends on how you look at things. A lot of folks are fairly restrictive in the categories of people they interact with - I know several people who can only deal with very intellectual sorts, for example. E.g., they'd never date an anti-intellectual type (religious, feminist, etc), an unintellectual woman who seeks to enjoy life, a woman of a different socioeconomic background or even a woman at a different stage of life.

I don't view things so restrictively so I can enjoy the company of all sorts of people. Then again I'm also pretty weird so for me being super restrictive might simply result in being forever alone.

"Your kindness, integrity, and desire to make the world a better place..."

That insipid disgusting phrase. "To make the world a better place." It is so devoid of meaning and so emblematic of the meanest circle jerk in silicon valley that it should probably be outlawed.

Every time I see the phrase "make the world a better place", my brain automatically adds "for me" at the end of it. It tends to enhance the truth of the statement.

I've called this out before on HN and was downvoted quite a lot for it. I don't remember the startup, but they did something mundane like Pinterest, and claimed they were doing it "to make the world a better place". It's weird that people here try to defend this sometimes.

There are so many sad broken people in Silicon Valley. Maybe it's a matter of people not being socialized well as they grow up and a somewhat insular community that feeds off itself.

I left about 10 years ago but still have strong ties (business and friends) to the area. Some of the stories from my friends dating are shocking, disturbing, and hilarious at the same time.

I'm happy to see this on the front page instead of flag-killed(?) like it was earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9036698

Ah so that's what was happening. I was trying to post it yesterday with no luck.

I wonder why the mods would block this link. I'll admit the article seems more intent on telling a sexy story than commenting broadly on the state of Silicon Valley gender issues.

As a tangent, I was appalled to read that Stanford undergrads can major in "management science". What happened to the high academic standards for which Stanford is famous?

"self-designed major in management science and neuroengineering" I would guess it is one of those programs where you kind of make up your title and path. Is neuroengineering more to your liking?

Adding in neuroengineering makes it sound even more pretentious and fake.

The number of companies in Silicon Valley that fail purely due to management incompetence should yield a bit of respect for people trying to improve the situation.

In any case, Management Science at Stanford is part of the "Management Science and Engineering" division.. You can see their areas of research here:

http://web.stanford.edu/dept/MSandE/cgi-bin/research/index.p...

Seems pretty relevant, no?

I know several Stanford graduates. MS&E (management science and engineering) is basically the Stanford equivalent of an undergraduate degree in business. So judged relative to other business programs it's not any better or any worse (although we can argue the merits of studying business in undergrad at all).

And to be fair, mismanagement is more likely to come from people who think that studying business in school qualifies them to manage people than it is from other sources.

Management Science & Engineering is a major that broadly tracks Operations Research at other schools - it's a mixture of statistics, business, finance, and optimization engineering. Stanford has no business undergrad major, so it's often a popular choice for those who want to try something different than Economics.

Good luck in the real world, where nobody gives a shit what your major was.

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