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I think the possibility that YC is discriminating against women is worthy of discussing. If they are, it would be beneficial for both YC and the world at large if they did something to address it. If they are not, it's still interesting and possibly valuable to attempt to figure out why the list looks like it does.

Of course there is a huge bias against men in the justice system. That should be obvious to anyone, and is also confirmed by many studies. For example, from the US federal system:

> It finds large gender gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution (averaging over 60%), conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Female arrestees are also significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.

https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

And the UK:

> We find significantly harsher sentences imposed on male offenders even after controlling for most case characteristics, including mitigating factors such as ‘caring responsibilities’. Specifically, the odds ratios of receiving a custodial sentence for offences of assault, burglary and drugs committed by a man as opposed to a woman are 2.84, 1.89 and 2.72

https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/154388/

Also see this article regarding the huge gap between the prevalence of sexual violence perpetrated by women against men and the prosecution of those crimes: https://malesurvivorbop.nz/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Stempl...

I wonder to what extent that is due to women being discriminated against after they apply, or women being less likely to apply. If there is a significant difference in the acceptance rate, they should consider concealing characteristics like gender as much as possible in the process and maybe inviting people with more diverse perspectives to assess candidates. If there is no significant difference, they should consider advertising YC places where they may reach a different audience and publish statistics that reassure applicants that they will be treated equally.

I'm not objecting to talking about racism. I'm objecting to seeing race as a significant part of what makes a person. It's possible to do one without the other.

I don't see how it's useful to note that something didn't work when there is no evidence to suggest that the alternative works any better. I don't understand how talking more about race as a characteristic could possibly help to reduce racism or racial inequality. It seems to me much more likely to do the opposite.

I agree, both male privilege and female privilege are real and very serious problems. The existence of one doesn't negate the other. They are often interlinked, such as the male privilege of not getting lower pay and fewer career opportunities just because you have a child and the female privilege of being allowed to take more time away from work to raise that child and not being treated as a secondary parent. You can't solve one without solving the other.

The things you mention are not necessarily in that category, but seem to be because people are taught not to care about men as much. The flip-side could be our society's infantilization of women, but the harms of that are more subtle than the result of our society's indifference towards men, such as men receiving higher sentences for the same crimes and being refused help in situations where help is offered to women. Perhaps having fewer people encouraging women to take risks and fewer people being willing to invest in women is one of those harms.

People are subject to criminal penalties (and other kinds of violence) for political reasons, and for refusing to participate in politics. Voting can be seen as a ritual similar to other religious rituals, and not participating is a crime in some countries.

I'm not suggesting Mars should go to war with or colonize Earth after such an event, just that there may be value in our cultures and civilization continuing to exist somewhere. I could imagine how Mars may choose to do that, but I would consider that to be a bad thing.

Perhaps it would be better if our civilization ends in the event it destroys itself on Earth, but why should we assume what comes next will be better? How would being born out of an apocalypse affect a civilization?

I agree, and I would extend that to sex and gender as well, and say that we should treat every person equally and according to their character.

What makes you think talking more about race works any better or should be considered to be "social progress" rather than the opposite? Would that study have better results if done today? I'm not American, but I don't see why you are so sure today's America is not closer to the Jim Crow Era than 2005 was.

I'm a black person who grew up in Sweden in the 00s and early 10s, and I'm very glad race was never relevant or talked about outside of social science class. Almost everyone at my school was white, and I never felt like I was different because of my skin color. The first person who ever told me that my race or skin color was relevant to anything was an American. The worst thing about American culture (and what keeps me from moving to the US even though I could make much more money there) is that so many Americans are insisting on considering race (and other arbitrary categorizations like ethnicity, sex and gender) to be such a large part of what makes a person, overshadowing that person's unique attributes and identity.

I think it's easy to imagine how something like a meteor or nuclear war could end our civilization without killing all humans on earth. A new civilization would almost certainly arise, and it could be better or worse, but it would probably be very alien to us. At least as alien as Ancient Rome. A settlement on Mars could conceivably preserve our cultures and current civilization in the face of such an event.

I don't think that's true. What is the alleged treaty called? The Antarctic Treaty binds the contracting states to prohibit individuals from doing various things in Antarctica, the Outer Space Treaty doesn't really do that, and arguably does the opposite by prohibiting territorial claims. Regardless, I don't think any treaty should be taken very seriously. They will both be violated whenever it's expedient to violate them.

I don't think legitimacy is a meaningful concept in this context. I would use the chain with the greatest utility, which is determined by whether I like the rules, whether the rules are consistently and predictably enforced, and whether other people I want to interact with are using that chain. Whether the people who use the chain have more Ether or more computer power compared to the people who use a competing chain doesn't affect utility.

While I don't think it's meaningful to say that one chain is more legitimate than another, if I was forced to make such a deamination in this case, I would consider the chain where the rules are consistently and predictably enforced in a way that leads to predictable outcomes more legitimate than a chain where validators have colluded to arbitrarily subvert the enforcement of the rules.

With Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash (and Ethereum and Ethereum Classic), it's no different from a demerger from the perspective of a company shareholder. You own a greater number of shares because the company has split in two, but they are not the same shares. They are shares in different companies that have the same origin but will go in different directions. Same with those currencies. The current version of Ethereum works a bit differently, as explained elsewhere in this comment section.

There may be other solutions or defence mechanisms, but one solution would be to fork again and remove the Ether those validators have staked from your chain as part of your fork.

A chain is defined by a set of rules that everyone on the chain agrees to abide by. Braking the rules damages the economic utility of the chain, so the Ether on the chain where the validators colluded to break the rules would be worth less, as a result of their actions. The validators are locked on that chain (as they can't prevent a fork from excluding them), so they have a strong incentive against harming the chain. Ethereum is not majoritarian. I don't have to abide by the will of the majority. I only need to come to a consensus about the rules and state of the chain with the people with whom I want to share the chain.

PoS makes it much easier to escape a malicious majority compared to PoW where the hashing power majority can follow the minority anywhere unless the minority is willing to switch to a different hashing algorithm. Even then, the majority could sell their mining equipment and buy new equipment that will work on the new chain on the same terms as that chain's honest minority can. With PoS, the malicious majority would need to buy new Ether from the honest minority who can then just fork again after having made a profit on the attack, and can continue to do that until the malicious majority runs out of resources or realizes that they cannot censor a fork in Ethereum's PoS system.

That's a good thing. Cryptocurrencies are supposed to operate by consent, and that includes the ability to separate when consent for a ruleset can no longer be maintained. One of the main problems with PoW is that those who support the stronger fork can attack those who support the weaker fork if they are willing to expend the resources. Ethereum's PoS solves that and ensures that every user has an equal technical ability to withdraw their consent and take their money to a chain with rules they support.

The key is in the fact that violating the rules on Ethereum's PoS causes you to lose Ether, which means you eventually lose all your Ether and can no longer sabotage the chain. This is in contrast with PoW systems, where your mining hardware doesn't deteriorate any faster just because you are mining empty or invalid blocks, so you can do that forever and effectively shut down a chain that is small enough relative to your computer power. The only defence a PoW fork has against such an attack is to switch to a different algorithm that is less compatible to the attacker's hardware, but that harms non-attacking miners just as much. PoW has an element of "might make right" while PoS is completely consensual.