Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paul Graham is assumed guilty of being sexist and he's probably unaware of it. Got it.
Given that PG is a human living in America, psychological studies suggest that is statistically very likely.
[citation needed]
What I Didn't Say
181–190 of 601 posts
Re: What I Didn't Say
#182I've said it before and I will say it again: Gawker is simply professional trolls. They exist only to shit on everything, the farther away from their rigid liberal ideals the better. I wish people would ignore them completely.
Liberal != left/progressive. Liberals were people that supported free exchange of ideas, believing that truth would be discovered through open argument (think John Stuart Mill). Progressives are pretty much the opposite of that.
Re: What I Didn't Say
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>>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's been my experience that when men feel like they're walking on eggshells around women in the workplace it's because they're normally comfortable making sexists/rape jokes and/or have sexist beliefs. The feeling of eggshell walking is them trying to cover that up. I say this as a guy who has seen other male coworkers' behavior when there are no women around and how difficult it is for them to clean up their act when there is a lady in the room.
Re: What I Didn't Say
#184The 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.
You should feel bad for anyone who gets pushed into any career they don't really love. I strongly doubt it's at epidemic levels for the daughters of HN.
I'm not applying any pressure at all to my daughter, I'm telling her she can practice any kind of medicine she wants.
Re: What I Didn't Say
#185"I was explaining the distinction between a CS major and a hacker..." "What I was talking about here is the idea that to do something well you have to be interested in it for its own sake, not just because you had to pick something as a major.So this is the message to take away: If you want to be really good at programming, you have to love it for itself. " Labeling "CS major"'s as non hackers, good to know as someon…
Most CS graduates I know did the bare minimum to earn their major credits and that's it, avoiding any challenging courses like the plague. They'd rather study some unrelated intro-level elective than computation theory. No actual interest in the field, no passion, no imagination. You're damn right they're not hackers. They're here for the gold rush and nothing more, they won't be the ones advancing this industry. They're the copy-paste from Stack Overflow types, they're the ones that get hired because their uncle works at the company, and they're the ones leaving knots behind them for others to sort out.
Re: What I Didn't Say
#186Getting 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.
if you talk to a reporter for a story, you're being interviewed. Let me rephrase, if I was talking to a reporter and the conversation was being recorded, I would presume I was being interviewed. If the reporter told me it was off the record, I would not consider it an interview.
Re: What I Didn't Say
#187As 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…
As a founder, with due respect, why you don't do anything about it?
I think they are good ideas. So how is that you expect someone else to do the work for you?
As a founder I know how hard is to make an idea a reality, and my ideas had relative success(I managed to get things done and most people look to me now like "all I have was given" to me, or that what I created was obvious and easy, as it is obvious now, but the same person was arguing to me how it "was never going to work" in the past). Most people are not that lucky, but they try anyway.
So if you care about this, why you don't take action?
You expect someone else, who is a man (and does not care, there are more urgent problems to them), to do something you should be doing in my opinion.
The "frat house" is working very well and there is no reason to change what works. Different systems could work, but with different people, and different focus.
You could start working on this. It is impossible to do it alone, but organizing with others there is nothing imposible.
Re: What I Didn't Say
#188This is a good essay, but I was disappointed it wasn't a followup to his classic essay "What You Can't Say" http://paulgraham.com/say.html
Re: What I Didn't Say
#189Jakob Kaplan Moss owes PG a public apology for his behavior. The witch hunt tweets that were coming out of him without getting the facts straight are downright disheartening.
So far seems he hasn't; he's explained why, and all the more power to him. BTW, I'm disappointed that only "witch hunt" (terrorism against women) is used in this particular thread so far. Where's "lynch mob" and "McCarthyism", to round out the irony trifecta? (Hilariously sick when men liken themselves to women, whites to blacks, and capitalists to communists.)
Both men and women were killed during the Salem Witch Trials. A "witch hunt" isn't terrorism against women.
Re: What I Didn't Say
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
blind applications would make me more comfortable to consider applying What kind of pressure are you feeling about applying to funds now?
The pressure of not being a 25 year old guy, basically. Or 25 for that matter.
This raises a good point, but informal inferences about age, ethnicity, and sex can be made from other parts of the application. Statistics on the discrimination of Ivy league schools show that (east) Asian face a stacked deck in college applications at "selective" schools[0]. Its plausible that much of this is inferred from ethnic names. To the extent it impacts the short-lists for interviews (ie, before candidates are seen in person), it's obviously detrimental.
Which brings up another point: it would be interesting to see a YC batch where the colleges/universities' names were redacted from the screening process.[1] Again, I don;t think this will ever happen...but as a thought experiment I would likely be of equal interest in terms of "opening" access. At some stage, business is as much about trading favours as it is about measuring "competence". There are some good game-theoretic reasons for this (ie, establishing trust in sequential repeated games), but there is more to the story than that.[2]
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[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/ivy-league-discriminates-agai...
[1] Even if this was replaced by a sort of rating system, eg. that placed X schools into N buckets. This could be done so that the information was recorded but never made visible (say by online application). And the data could still be verified later prior as part of due-dilligence/ affadavit to avoid a problem with gaming the system.
[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-30/jpmorgan-s-mistake-...