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Female Founders

paulgraham.com

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Re: Female Founders

#541

Post by Helianthus »

nl wrote: post #460
angersock wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you driving at? Have some guts and stop beating about the bush.

Apparently Helianthus think's PG should have both said nothing at all (eg, Because by engaging the toxic, he's cementing his role in the toxic. ) and said something radical ( the section of moderate feminists that are inherently sympathetic to YC; the concerns of those outside that layer, even the valid ones, are simply not important to PG ) Not entirely sure what the author thinks they are achieving.

Not both; either of those would have been more interesting and less prone to hypocrisy.

Perhaps I am less critical of Paul as much as I am the crude politics of it all--thus critical of Paul by extension.

(Before you think I am directly calling Paul a hypocrite, what I mean is that the toxic flame wars are, by their nature, hypocritical, and it takes care to interact with them without appearing hypocritical yourself--care that I do not think Paul managed.)

Re: Female Founders

#542

Post by kirtijthorat »

Too Long; But Read (i.e. TL;BR which is exactly opposite of standard TL;DR). I gotta admit this is an excellent read. If this was not from "Paul Graham" I would not have read even the half of it. One thing is for sure that, I don't care what media and others (haters) think. Paul has done so much for the tech start-up world. Just see the "Thanks" section at the bottom of the page and you will see the names of women entrepreneurs names and do a Google search on them and you will see their start-up venture. Some of them have been aqua-hired by notch firms. That's matters. Period.

Re: Female Founders

#543

Post by Crito »

crassus wrote: post #391
theorique wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pg is neither a racist nor a sexist, but because he does not jump to support every pet cause of every self-described "social justice jihadi", he is lambasted as such. Well, guess what? pg is his own person. He's just a guy who invests in startups, not some sort of idol upon whom you can project all your transformational, social-justice dreams for the tech industry. Is there racism and sexism in tech? Sure. Is that pg…

Everybody is a little racist and sexist. It's quite normal for you to react differently depending on the visible characteristics of a person you are talking to, it's ingrained through millions of years of evolution. What's important is that you're not a dick about it, and you give people a fair shot in situations where those characteristics shouldn't matter. The cashier at the local taco shop speaks to people in Span…

> Everybody is a little racist and sexist.

I don't think we can assume that is the case if we are using the "power + prejudice" definition of racist or sexist. As far as I can tell, this is the prefered definition of racist and sexist among social justice warriors. If to be racist you must be prejudiced and have power over those that you are prejudiced against, then there are some people who literally cannot be racist.

Typically this definition seems to only be used to shield SJWs from 'friendly fire'.

Re: Female Founders

#544

Post by wpietri »

theorique wrote: post #531
crassus wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the liberal white guys growing up to middle class parents in California read that and say "I guess I should feel really guilty for all I've been given in life". All the white guys that grew up in the poor rural South and fought to learn about tech read that and say "fuck off, Scalzi". And then they spend the rest of their lives hearing from the other white guys about how their accomplishments are hollow for the r…

Asians throw the "white privilege" theory for a loop, because they face the same challenges as other people of color, and yet still manage to succeed admirably. Victim-lovers don't like them for that very reason, because they don't play very good racial victims - they are too busy succeeding.

Not at all. That one group has privilege doesn't mean no other group can. Here, for example, is a programmer talking about how he was privileged for looking like an Asian guy: http://pgbovine.net/tech-privilege.htm

White privilege by the way, isn't a theory. It's a fact. E.g.: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

Or, more entertainingly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4f9zR5yzY

Re: Female Founders

#545

Post by Crito »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #484
alecdbrooks wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 supposed to "fix" sexism at YC when no one is capable of identifying instances of it? Gender distributions isn't proof of sexism _at YC_. As PG has stated, YC is too far removed from the problem to be useful in combating sexism as shown by imbalanced gender distributions. So what do you expect YC to do in this case?

> "So what do you expect YC to do in this case?"

I believe the standard request is:

> "If there was just the pro-activity line of attack, if it was like, "OK, yes, women aren't set up to be startup founders at the level we want." What would be lost if Y Combinator was more proactive about it? About lowering standards or something like that? Or recruiting women or something, like any of those options?"

Re: Female Founders

#546

Post by Crito »

dragonwriter wrote: post #511
sbov wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that it changes your overall point, but note that California no longer has a majority population along racial lines.

(Sorry, accidental downvote while attempting to select text) > Not that it changes your overall point, but note that California no longer has a majority population along racial lines. California still has a very substantial White racial majority (74.0% as of the 2010 census), it just doesn't appear to when people of Hispanic ethnicity are counted as a separate group from their race (non-Hispanic Whites were only 39.7…

It makes sense to divide Hispanic and non-Hispanic White if we are performing this categorization for the purpose of analysing discrimination. This is because traditionally Hispanics have been discriminated against by non-Hispanic Whites. The same could be said for the Irish, or Catholics... but Protestant/Catholic discrimination seems to have simmered down in the US.

Or to put it simply: Does a Hispanic in California currently experience White privilege? If no, then they should be counted separately.

Re: Female Founders

#547

Post by Crake »

asksol wrote: post #518
reinhardt wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's embarrassing is that this self-righteous, guilt-tripped social justice douchebag is a BDFL of Django. I wouldn't be surprised if some current or potential Django users or contributors get sick of his jihad and turn to to a different developer community.

Could you please educate the rest of us what is so upsetting about these tweets (other than the fact that he received death threats)? Jacob is doing a fantastic job at making people of all types feel welcome, which I believe is more likely to make the Django developer community thrive (as it already is). Also, the footnote mentioned where pg writes that he enjoys that startups can freely discriminate is worrying. It…

As a minority, I would not be comfortable around a sjw. I've been told way too many times by sjws what it's really like to be [minority category X], when I am very clearly minority category X and they are not.

I don't know anything about this Django contributor aside from the tweets I've just read, but the phrasing and verbiage are very similar to the sjws I've had experiences with similar to what I wrote above. It makes me wary. SJWs do not have my best interests in mind--99% of it's a show to demonstrate how pious and dedicated they are to being a morally superior person, and it seems that a lot of times that demands you ignore and steamroll over the very disadvantaged people you somehow have self-appointed yourself the designated speaker for. SJWs complain about marginalizing, othering, and silencing voices of minorities, but they're quickly becoming some of the biggest offenders.

Re: Female Founders

#548

Post by wpietri »

crassus wrote: post #525
aaren wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the link to scalzi [1] - "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is". It was a really good read. [1]: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...

All the liberal white guys growing up to middle class parents in California read that and say "I guess I should feel really guilty for all I've been given in life". All the white guys that grew up in the poor rural South and fought to learn about tech read that and say "fuck off, Scalzi". And then they spend the rest of their lives hearing from the other white guys about how their accomplishments are hollow for the r…

I'm certainly not saying that anybody's accomplishments are hollow, and I'm not saying anybody should feel guilty. Neither I nor Scalzi feels guilty about having privilege. The question for us is what we do with it.

Re: Female Founders

#549

Post by Crake »

aaren wrote: post #483
wpietri wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's such a shame then that they promote themselves as only caring for the part of their community that has a particular colour of skin. I honestly can't tell if you're trolling here. In case you aren't: that is not what they are doing, and it also isn't a shame. Helping out people who are historically disadvantaged and face current discrimination is nothing to be ashamed about. The goal is to level the playing field…

Thanks for the link to scalzi [1] - "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is". It was a really good read. [1]: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...

I'm not a SWM and I think this stupid article has done a lot to damage the cause of equality. It is tactically, morally, and ethically stupid. I wish people would stop linking it, but sjws gonna sjw, I guess. Getting an angry response from disadvantaged people is more entertaining than doing the dull dreary or the high risk scary work of actually helping underprivileged succeed.

Ugh.

Re: Female Founders

#550

Post by Crake »

wpietri wrote: post #506
jimzvz wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, I see that you are still posting links to that scalzi crap.

And as long as guys are still acting in ignorance of their privilege, I'll keep posting that and similar resources. But as long as we're talking about it, you might benefit by reading his FAQ in response to the post: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/17/lowest-difficulty-sett... He's mainly addressing the straight white males of the Internet who thought the piece was crap, so it's basically for you.

How do you know he's a straight white male? Can you tell race, genitalia, and sexual orientation by typing style? Are you going to tell me to check my male privilege next?
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