So is YC going to stop working with KPCB anytime soon?
A Reminder To Investors
261–270 of 290 posts
Re: A Reminder To Investors
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and some of our most brilliant minds probably had ancestry that was the product of forced rape. End still doesn't justify the means.
Equating someone asking a business contact out on a date to "forced rape" is insane. You are the problem.
I'll admit the analogy was extreme, but dsirijus was acknowledging the abusive potential of scenarios that "obviously frequently including power-disbalanced positions". More than simple "business contacts".
Rather than forced rape, you could say "consensual" relationships with 13 year olds, which was once the norm.
Or for a safer analogy, Bill Gates gives millions of dollars to solve real problems, and today is a top humanitarian if you look at what he's doing. However, he attained his wealth through aggressive, unethical business practices, and there are probably many who had their financial well-being destroyed as collateral damage.
Re: A Reminder To Investors
#263Darn those sexy investors.
Re: A Reminder To Investors
#264You apply for a job or you build a startup and you want to be a professional. You want to do awesome things. Then someone else comes around, whether from a position of power or not and displays romantic or sexual interest towards you. No matter how polite it is, it irreversibly changes the previously professional relationship in a very discomforting way. It's a dick move and it's shit like this why many women shy awa…
Do you believe that this "dick move" is absent in other fields with lots of women? Specifically, do you believe doctors and lawyers ask each other out less than techies? If "shit like this" is present in every field, it's a poor explanation of why women avoid technology but no those other fields. Now if you want to rescue this hypothesis, you could point out that doctors aren't a bunch of low status nerds. But that's…
No, you haven't shown the explanation to be poor. You've implicitly invoked one possible reason why unprofessional behavior among men might create obstacles for women, rebutted it, and declared the debate over. If this was an argument over the right way to interpret statistics over a website optimization scheme, you'd laugh at you.
Considering only gender policy, what is the most significant difference between doctors and engineers? Obviously: distribution among genders in medicine is much more balanced than in technology.
Stipulate that romantic overtures are as common in medicine as in technology. What basis do you have for your implied claim that the impact of such an overture is the same in medicine as it is in technology? It seems straightforward and reasonable to presume that the impact of an unwanted overture is much more powerful for someone who is part of a small minority, for whom the overture comes from a member of the overwhelming majority.
Michael O. Church has conjured an entire ethos in which he's been oppressed not just by venture capitalists but the entire industry they fund. He believes it so strongly that he has advocated violence to address the problem. And he's a guy, who feels locked out of the industry not because of a gender bias that has persisted overtly through pretty much all of human history, but instead due to unfair performance reviews.
From your comment history, you strike me as someone who has in his life actually talked to a woman. But comments like this force me to remind myself of that. Have you not talked to one who was shaken by being hit on by a guy in a work setting? I am not the suave, athletic bachelor you obviously are, and I've managed to hear this story from actual women repeatedly. If you have heard this story before, how are you managing to handwave it away so easily?
Re: A Reminder To Investors
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you believe that this "dick move" is absent in other fields with lots of women? Specifically, do you believe doctors and lawyers ask each other out less than techies? If "shit like this" is present in every field, it's a poor explanation of why women avoid technology but no those other fields. Now if you want to rescue this hypothesis, you could point out that doctors aren't a bunch of low status nerds. But that's…
So, easy enough way of testing this is to go and compare, across fields, gender ratio and percent dating within that field. A different field might be, for example, perhaps nursing--traditionally a very female-heavy field. I'm not aware of any such dataset, unfortunately.
The problem is not dating within a field, but advances across a power imbalance.
Re: A Reminder To Investors
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comment was killed by user flags.
steveklabnik posted a good link for PG's take on downvotes--do we have a similar reference for flagging? I recall a couple of polls on it, but beyond that, nothing comes to mind.
Maybe it was hard to see with all the grey text, but I couldn't find a specific line where you supported the idea, but rather, you just wanted to discuss and dissect the merits of such an idea through breaking it down to promote discussion and to specifically call out pitfalls in taking things to an absurd degree. Shame people here have problems separating discussion and refutation of toxic ideas from the active support for toxic ideas.
Re: A Reminder To Investors
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
He was never accused of any misconduct beyond wearing sunglasses while disagreeing with feminists. This is self-evidently false, so much so that I'm confused as to how you could have written this comment.
I'm pretty sure you are confusing Pax Dickinson with someone else. http://valleywag.gawker.com/business-insider-ctos-is-your-ne... http://www.businessinsider.com/statement-2013-9 Just a bunch of tweets mocking feminists, liberals and Mel Gibson. [edit: Tom I really don't understand how you think this disagrees with what I said above. How do these links imply any misconduct, or anything other than disagreeing with fem…
> How do these links imply any misconduct, or anything other than disagreeing with feminists?
You're talking about these tweets with rape jokes, tweets where he's an asshole toward poors, and "ironic" use of the N-word?
...
Are you high?
Re: A Reminder To Investors
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then they're effectively "leaving money on the table" by avoiding female founders, because they're being too risk-averse. The risk of false accusations that will blow up are too small to worry about. If they're not outright bad investors, they are at least investing a suboptimal way.
I wonder if male investors are actually acting rationally leaving women out of their portfolios. I mean, we all know how a pretty face can scramble the thought processes of a male, and there actually are scientifically verified cognitive biases [1] that work against rational thinking in a multi-gender environment. Not saying, of course, that this justifies any kind of harassment, just that maybe some of these investo…
But the Halo Effect page that you linked says that males were influenced by the halo effect when rating both male and female subjects so this isn't a strong argument for not hiring/investing in women.
And in a MythBusters I watched the other night, they "Busted" the myth that men get dumber around an attractive female. I'm pretty sure it was from the newest season if you wanted to look it up.
Re: A Reminder To Investors
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you believe that this "dick move" is absent in other fields with lots of women? Specifically, do you believe doctors and lawyers ask each other out less than techies? If "shit like this" is present in every field, it's a poor explanation of why women avoid technology but no those other fields. Now if you want to rescue this hypothesis, you could point out that doctors aren't a bunch of low status nerds. But that's…
No, you haven't shown the explanation to be poor. You've implicitly invoked one possible reason why unprofessional behavior among men might create obstacles for women, rebutted it, and declared the debate over. If this was an argument over the right way to interpret statistics over a website optimization scheme, you'd laugh at you. Considering only gender policy, what is the most significant difference between doctor…
The OP's explanation is indeed poor. You can possibly add additional hypothesis which rescue it (I suggested one in the post you just responded to), but that doesn't mean the original hypothesis by itself isn't poor.
what is the most significant difference between doctors and engineers? Obviously: distribution among genders in medicine is much more balanced than in technology.
The key word here is "is". This was not true in the past. Yet somehow, medicine attracted women but tech didn't. At this historical point, did boy doctors not ask out girl doctors, but boy programmers did ask out girl programmers? Same for law, etc? Your "minority + asked out" theory predicts women can never escape minority status, which is evidently false.
If you want an explanation it needs to be specific to computing.
Have you not talked to one who was shaken by being hit on by a guy in a work setting? I am not the suave, athletic bachelor you obviously are...
I've heard this story before. I've heard of women being hit on in church gatherings also, yet church is full of women. Thus it fails as an explanation of why women are underrepresented in technology but not other fields.
Also, can I suggest leaving Michael O. Church alone? It's not necessary to drag him into a random conversation on topic completely unrelated to VC-istan.
Re: A Reminder To Investors
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty sure you are confusing Pax Dickinson with someone else. http://valleywag.gawker.com/business-insider-ctos-is-your-ne... http://www.businessinsider.com/statement-2013-9 Just a bunch of tweets mocking feminists, liberals and Mel Gibson. [edit: Tom I really don't understand how you think this disagrees with what I said above. How do these links imply any misconduct, or anything other than disagreeing with fem…
> How do these links imply any misconduct, or anything other than disagreeing with feminists? You're talking about these tweets with rape jokes, tweets where he's an asshole toward poors, and "ironic" use of the N-word? ... Are you high?
You realize the "rape joke" with the N-word is mocking Mel Gibson, right? See #2 on this list:
http://www.ranker.com/list/top-10-most-offensive-mel-gibson-...
As for the rest of it, if you want to argue that libertarianism rather than anti-feminism got him fired, square that viewpoint with Business Insider's statement about firing him. They didn't say he was too conservative, they said he disagreed with them on diversity.
Disagreeing with feminists and liberals is not misconduct. Neither is making fun of drunk celebrities.