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Female Founders

paulgraham.com

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Re: Female Founders

#311

Post by argonaut »

Karunamon wrote: post #290
mcantelon wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying you're anti-leftist, simply quoting someone's take on the psychology behind P.C. bullying. Not everything has to involve left/right-wing tribalism.

You say as you post a paragraph from a (whoops: not dead) terrorist's tirade against liberals. I don't think you could have possibly picked a worse example to hold up as not involving tribalism...

You are mistaken. The Unabomber is and was a horrible person. Yet I found mcantelon's quote from him to be very insightful, even if I don't agree with it in its entirety.

Judge the quote on its content, not the messenger. The only instance in which shooting the messenger is valid is when we rely on the messenger's credibility in evaluating the opinion, which is not the case here, at least for me.

Re: Female Founders

#312

Post by Karunamon »

mcantelon wrote: post #307
Karunamon wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to be in the opposite of a group to spew hate against that group. And I see very little "reasoning" in that quote, just lots of eloquently-worded polemic which weakly attempts to cast negative aspersions on an entire political view. Some of it is outright false. In other words, it's content that wouldn't look at all out of place on a right-leaning website's "This is why liberals are bad" section.

Criticism and hate seem to be increasingly conflated these days. I don't see anything in that quote that would quality as hateful.

Well, the difference is that the first one is usually fact based and best delivered neutrally. The second one is usually emotion based and delivered with harsh invective, and additionally usually doesn't concern itself with facts.

Re: Female Founders

#313

Post by avenger123 »

mikeleeorg wrote: post #213

My main takeaway from reading this article and the comments here is: The awareness of this problem is still very nascent and more & more solutions are emerging, as are criticisms of people who are beginning to acknowledge this problem. To hopefully steer this in another direction, and because I have a little girl, what are some resources you all have seen that can help girls become interested and go into technical di…

Just started looking at this but could be really great:

Super Scratch Programming Adventure!

http://www.nostarch.com/scratch

Re: Female Founders

#315

Post by Karunamon »

nether wrote: post #308
Karunamon wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to be in the opposite of a group to spew hate against that group. And I see very little "reasoning" in that quote, just lots of eloquently-worded polemic which weakly attempts to cast negative aspersions on an entire political view. Some of it is outright false. In other words, it's content that wouldn't look at all out of place on a right-leaning website's "This is why liberals are bad" section.

That's true, but that's just one quote of his (he's still alive btw). Here's another: > The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects…

Mm. But notice the difference in delivery of those two quotes. This one concerns itself with a straight true statement (progress is at odds with tradition). The worst you can say here is that he says conservatives "whine".

Much unlike the other one which implies that leftists are all about power as opposed to what they say they are.

Re: Female Founders

#316

Post by Crito »

001sky wrote: post #295
Crito wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PG is asserting that these particular women, Jessica, Kirsty, and Carolynn, are not sexists. Responding with statistics about women in general, rather than relevant information about those particular women, is problematic.

Crito - Your confusing statistics with Logic. Notwithstanding the merits of either side, you are (1) structurally mis-understanding the nature of the argument. (2) baiting an HN commenter to personally disparage [persons x, y, and z]; and (3) making a veiled threat. None of this is relevant to the discussion at hand. The [persons X,Y,Z] are not representative employees at firm Q [0,1]. None of the men overlap in expe…

> "Your confusing statistics with Logic."

The "appeal to statistics" is just re-proposed racist talking points. You would not accept it in a discussion involving race, and you should not accept it in a discussion involving sex or gender.

> Notwithstanding the merits of either side, you are (1) structurally mis-understanding the nature of the argument. (2) baiting an HN commenter to personally disparage [persons x, y, and z]; and (3) making a veiled threat.

1) See above.

2) I am not baiting anybody into disparaging these women, and do not see how my comments could honestly be misconstrued as such. I don't want @zorpner to insult these women, I want zorpner to realize that unless they have specific information about these specific women, then there is no justification for assuming such disparaging things about these women.

3) I have made absolutely no threats, veiled or otherwise. Where the hell are you getting this from?

> "The [persons X,Y,Z] are not representative employees at firm Q [0,1]..." "[0] HR/Ops specialist, a Lawyer, and an Accountant..."

This has been addressed in this discussion by one of the women in question, I am genuinely stunned that you are repeating it.

Re: Female Founders

#317

Post by prutschman »

dictum wrote: post #91
chadwickthebold wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't upvotes a measure of interest? I would argue that the lack of upvotes on sexism-related posts indicates a lack of interest in discussing these issues on the part of the general population of HN. What you get is a small group of vocal people eager to discuss the topic while everyone else simply avoids the post. This is similar behavior to what is seen in a flamewar, but could we agree that there might possibly…

I don't have a strong opinion on (the lack of) women in tech. I don't feel strongly either way, so I'd be more moved to change the status quo if I could be presented with a good case that women are being held back. Sorry for being insensitive, but complaints about presentation slides mentioning porn stars (unnecessarily edgy IMO, but not misogynistic unless you stretch the definitions of freedom/dignity/exploitation…

I don't mean any of the following as flame-war type criticism, so I hope you are able to find a way not to take it that way.

Stories by women* about their perceptions of the hostile sexualization of many work and conference environments are themselves part of the case being made that women are being held back.

(You would perhaps be shocked how many men share many of the same concerns, and not just out of solidarity with women.)

Ambivalence of the sort you claim and the concomitant disinclination to engage and try to understand things like the late night coffee invitation incident is part of what is holding women back.

I'm not* saying that you're actively choosing to make the world a worse place. Further, as beings of finite attention and lifespan it's quite true that we can't possibly pay attention to everything.

In your writing I do hear a bit of something that makes me thing you might want to understand what the big deal is, but it just hasn't "clicked" for you. Perhaps this is because you find the existing discussions off-putting, or perhaps because the things you read about are about situations that wouldn't be a big deal for you personally.

If you're interested in understanding more, I'm wiling to continue the conversation here or elsewhere.

Even if not, I'd encourage you to keep dipping your toes in the conversation from time to time.

Re: Female Founders

#318

Post by csallen »

alecdbrooks wrote: post #293
crassus wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody can ever account for all unconscious bias. It's the original sin doctrine of the social justice warrior community.

"Nobody can ever account for all bugs. It's the original sin doctrine of the programming community." I'm not saying Graham should drop everything until every last bias is gone. I'm saying he shouldn't act as though sexism is a solved problem at YCombinator just because the percentage of female founders is up and it has women as partners.

How is he acting as though sexism is a "solved problem"?

Re: Female Founders

#319

Post by dragonwriter »

Crito wrote: post #217
dragonwriter wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For instance, if I were accused of hiring practices that are biased against black people, pointing out that I have only hired black people would be evidence [...] that the accusations are false. Without information about the external constraints on your hiring, I'm not sure it would really constitute meaningful evidence (e.g., if the entire available employment pool was black, hiring only blacks wouldn't be evidenc…

I suppose my hangup here is what I perceive to be the difference between evidence and proof. It is entirely possible to find evidence of things that turn out to be false. For example, you could take the seemingly chaotic retrograde motion of the planets in the night sky as evidence of the existence of gods with self-determination. We know know that isn't true, we have better explanations for that phenomenon (notably…

Evidence for or against bias on a particular axis is something that tends to indicate the presence or absence of differential treatment basis on that axis.

Facts which do not provide a basis for comparisons of how different values on that axis are treated are not much evidence for or against bias, this include facts about outcome (e.g., all the people I hired are black, etc.) without additional information from which the expected outcome in the absence of bias can be inferred.

Re: Female Founders

#320

Post by pbhjpbhj »

comicjk wrote: post #168
jasallen wrote: post #109

I think Paul nails it. And I think there are a lot of really misguided social engineers in these comments. Treat people well and fairly, all along and throughout life, and let nature take it's course. Are things imbalanced right now? Absolutely. Is it because of unfairness in the past? Absolutely. Can we speed things to being better by being unfair the other way now? Absolutely not. We create a Frankenstein of a 'bet…

> Can we speed things to being better by being unfair the other way now? Absolutely not. Do you have any evidence for this? Because prima facie, reaching out to women does get some of them into tech fields, and we know that young women who grow up around women in tech are more likely to become such themselves. Are you claiming that we can't actually influence the number of women in tech by discriminating in their fav…

Are you prepared to argue that because my mother was discriminated against in the past based on her sex it's now moral to discriminate against me (male) because of my sex?

Either I quash your argument by showing you how my grandfather was sexual discriminated against (which would by the logic that made such an argument above make discriminating against my mother justified) or we have to say that it's OK to discriminate against my daughter because of her sex.

That may be a false dichotomy (please add alternatives) but I'm nonetheless not prepared to follow the route that leads to continued discrimination based on irrelevant characteristics.

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