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What I Didn't Say

paulgraham.com

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Re: What I Didn't Say

#131

Post by crassus »

actsasbuffoon wrote: post #51
yo-mf wrote: post #15

Truly unfortunate all around. PG getting slammed from every direction. Jessica Lessin's new venture gets a black eye for shoddy journalistic standards. Lots of invective going around for what appears to be liberties of interpretation. And of all of this, I am not sure this really does anything to address the very serious topic on the imbalance of men to women in technology jobs.

That's my biggest problem with this whole thing. I care deeply about trying to fix the gender imbalance, but these sorts of dishonest shenanigans make the whole movement look bad. At the risk of committing the No True Scotsman fallacy, I don't think the people responsible really care about gender equality. If they did then they would have checked their facts, rather than making people doubt them and the views they cl…

"Equality" movements are doomed to fail. I don't believe that in a perfectly fair world, men and women would equally participate in every profession. If you focus too much on outcome you are taking on an impossible task.

What's important is fairness and equality of opportunity.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#132

Post by bambax »

gingerlime wrote: post #23
bambax wrote: post #9

> whether we could, in effect, accept women we would have accepted if they had been hackers "wouldn't"?

It is a confusing sentence, but I think it's correct. I think it would be clearer if it said "whether we could, in effect, accept women (who are not hackers) we would have accepted if they had been hackers" The stuff I added in brackets is implied. The main question is accepting women who are not hackers, as if they were, given the (challenged) assumption that you can turn them into hackers in YC.

You may be right but if you are, it means being a hacker is a (necessary) criterium of the YC's approval process: is it?

Re: What I Didn't Say

#133

Post by Perihelion »

kremlin wrote: post #94
Perihelion wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a woman in this industry that has been programming since I was ~8, I wasn't offended in the slightest. In my opinion he said there was a problem that he'd have to think about before offering a solution. "It's easy to be offended by things. It's also obnoxious and often irresponsible." Personally, this sort of behavior affects my career. When I first started at my current job people were afraid to speak to me becau…

It is undeniably the case that men are more...cautious about what they say and how they behave around women, particularly in the workplace. As a man, I'd have to say that such caution has precedent - you may be an exception, but (this incident being a great example) in my experience women are much more easily offended. And I could see how that could make things less enjoyable for women who aren't so up tight; women w…

You're exactly the sort of person I'm talking about. People like you are afraid to be comfortable in a work environment for fear that they'll be fired for saying or doing the wrong thing. Provided you aren't a sexist/rapist, I see no reason why you need to be walking on eggshells all the time at a place where you spend a large percentage of your day. It makes me sad that my presence would make you uncomfortable when I haven't said or done anything to you. While you and you alone have the power to change your behavior (and it would be awesome if you gave women the benefit of the doubt because we're not all this way...promise), I really can't place 100% of the blame on you either. Events like this are conditioning people to be afraid of these issues, not solve them.

I just want to come to work, maybe draw stupid things on a white board, make cool shit, and go home. I'd really love it if my vagina wasn't the deciding factor in whether or not I was capable of STEM or whether or not I was capable of working around other human beings.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#134

Post by kyro »

MBCook wrote: post #114
kyro wrote: post #102

Something needs to change about this industry's obsession with sensationalist journalism. If this industry is truly as forward-thinking and progressive as it is, and hopes to make strides in issues like gender/minority equality, then we need to build defenses against severely twisted, unfounded, and intentionally heinous hit-pieces by nobody bloggers who are trying to break into the industry by being edgy and aggress…

> Something needs to change about this industry's obsession with sensationalist journalism. I don't think there is anything wrong with this industry. This seems to be how most 'news' is made these days. I'm guessing that people who closely follow a non-technical industry have seen similar sensationalism on other issues.

Agreed, this isn't specific to this industry. In fact, most humans flock to this sort of journalism. It's how gossip rags make their money.

But this industry is more forward-thinking and adept to rapidly changing than most, and is most capable of making progress in workplace equality, among other issues. To let trashy journalism get in the way to the point that it has is to severely hinder the potential for change.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#135

Post by runevault »

McKittrick wrote: post #112

Getting misquoted in an interview happens to almost everyone who has given an interview ever. It is a product of the interviewer trying to put an editorial spin on a story (i.e make it interesting) and human error (based on reporter time constraints). Being misquoted is the tax for using the interviewer's platform for marketing. For most people, the benefit of the publicity outweighs the tax. So you give the intervie…

The difference here is he was not supposed to be interviewed, he was offering background for an entirely different piece, and they turned the discussion into an "interview" after the fact when they presented pieces of said material claiming it to be an interview.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#136

Post by hyperpape »

throwaway135 wrote: post #118
hyperpape wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My response elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6985366 From an economic perspective, having any group not participate in a valuable activity is a waste.

You seem to be saying: since coding is a valuable activity, any group not coding is a waste. Is that correct?

Any group underrepresented in [valuable activity x]relative to its distribution of talent.

You can theoretically have a distribution in which natural aptitude is equal, the distribution is skewed (more men than women) and it's not horribly inefficient, but I think if you spell out the assumptions of such a distribution, it's not especially realistic.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#137

Post by Crito »

nashequilibrium wrote: post #116
crassus wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing that nobody is mentioning is that many "fratty" companies have been wildly successful. That's why VCs aren't cracking down on startups to make them more professional. (Although it is a good idea to become more professional as your startup grows, for cultural appeal to the median tech worker) This fratty culture certainly drives away slightly older founders (by that, I mean 25+!) and others who don't appreci…

lol.....25+ is considered old? This is why most of the big startups of this year are social like snapchat, tumblr, etc. The opportunities where customers are willing to spend shitloads of money like enterprise, hardware are not funded anywhere near as well as social. This is beacuse 19yr olds dont know much about HR or disrupting the Investment Banking software industry. This requires some exposure to the problems fi…

I would not say that 25+ is old, but I would say that it is slightly older. Slightly older than the people typically interested in a "fratty" culture.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#138

Post by theorique »

crassus wrote: post #107
rubiquity wrote: post #65

The passion for women/girls (referred to as females from this point on) representation in programming is so strong that they try and make villains out of the wrong people as if it will help their cause. From all of the reading I've done of PG's writings I think he has always taken a rather binary approach at whether you're the startup kind of person. I don't think he cares about sex at all. He wants people that are h…

I feel bad for the female children of HN. I imagine them thinking, "Why do all the adults in my life want me to be a computer programmer? I want to be a veterinarian or teacher, but daddy says that's a patriarchal stereotype." There's nothing wrong with offering people an easier onramp to hackerdom, of course. But there is a subtext of devaluing all female-dominated lines of work.

An earlier comment mentioned that all the different professional programs (law, medicine, business, etc) that lead to top, well-paid jobs, are competing over the same top-5% elite group of girls/women.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6981040

Adding CS/CE to this mix won't necessarily solve things. Improving the pipeline is a reasonable step, but it takes time for the effects of those efforts to be realized.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#139

Post by crassus »

throwaway135 wrote: post #80

Why is adding more women to the tech industry automatically assumed a laudable goal to throw resources behind? I'm Middle-Eastern (probably a smaller minority in the North-American tech scene compared to women), and while I (like most people) would certainly like to be surrounded by more of my brethren, it's not something I'd be comfortable spending resources on because the return on investment is so nebulous; divers…

I wonder if part of it is that hackers look down on female-dominated lines of work. We imagine that being like us is the best thing in the world. It is a decent line of work, mind you, but it has its downsides and not everybody is cut out for it.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#140

Post by bambax »

ericabiz wrote: post #32

As a female founder, I think this is a well-thought-out, articulate response, and I appreciate pg stepping up to say something about women in tech. In a similar vein, I'd love to see YC take on one or both of the following: 1) Do at least one application cycle completely blind. How could you accomplish this? Much like in the concert auditions where this was first tried, put people behind a curtain--and then use techn…

Yes. The whole problem of every controversy involving YC rests on the fact that there's no control population.

The great majority of YC alumni are young white males. Every time the issue is raised of some minority or another being under represented, the answer is invariably that the process is completely fair and that the problem lies somewhere upstream.

That may be so. But wouldn't it be interesting to have some proportion of YC selected purely randomly and see what happens?

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