What I Didn't Say • Hacker News Board

Re: What I Didn't Say

#551

Post by jcromartie » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 6:44 PM UTC

Why is anybody even offended at what he didn't say? What is wrong with the statement that women aren't making Facebook because they haven't been hacking for ten years? In a statistical sense this is true. The proportion of girls spending their formative years hacking away at technology is miniscule compared to the proportion of boys. The odds of a female Mark Zuckerberg are skewed for this simple reason.

And despite PG and YC giving every indication of wanting to change the situation, a simple statement of the situation (if it's out-of-context or not) makes people pick up their pitchforks?

Re: What I Didn't Say

#552

Post by ThomPete » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 7:00 PM UTC

commandar wrote: post #547

rimantas wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did Einstein say something profound about social issues or people interactions when he was younger than 40? I don't say I agree that younger people have nothing of value to say in these areas, but I think you are mixing a bit different things there, experience in some field and life experience. And while age has some correlation with life experience it does not mean that someone older will be wiser at all.

>Did Einstein say something profound about social issues or people interactions when he was younger than 40? Jefferson was 33 when he penned the Declaration of Independence. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed when he was 39. Marx published The Communist Manifesto when he was 30. Seriously, this list could go on for ages. Dismissing the perspective of youth is as indicative of an ignorance of history as youthful naive…

Most people are not Jefferson, MLK or Marx.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#553

Post by throwawaykf03 » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 7:09 PM UTC

Crito wrote: post #465

throwawaykf03 wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pg spent weeks on each of his early essays. He spent a solid month writing What You Can't Say. He spent at least a couple days writing this one. Stephenie Meyer spent years writing the Twilight books. Time spent on a work is in no way indicative on the quality of that work.

How are we measuring "quality"? Reaction from literary critics? Reaction from the target audience? Financial success? It seems to me that by two of those standards Stephenie Meyer knocked the ball out of the park. It is not clear to me why we should care about the other standard of quality.

Analogously, pg's essays being very popular with a number of people in no way translates to other standards of quality :-) They may resonate with people, but without solid grounding in reality, they may be no better than "pop philosophy".

Personally, I agree with some of his essays, but on some others he's way off the mark. For instance, his writings on anything Hollywood or copyright-related betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what artists sell. Yet those essays were extremely popular simply because they confirmed people's biases (hence "pop philosophy"). However, if you check the so-called "blogosphere", you can find many others who have posted well-reasoned criticisms of those (and other) essays.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#554

Post by gwwfps1 » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 7:21 PM UTC

ThomPete wrote: post #552

commandar wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Did Einstein say something profound about social issues or people interactions when he was younger than 40? Jefferson was 33 when he penned the Declaration of Independence. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed when he was 39. Marx published The Communist Manifesto when he was 30. Seriously, this list could go on for ages. Dismissing the perspective of youth is as indicative of an ignorance of history as youthful naive…

Most people are not Jefferson, MLK or Marx.

Nor will they turn into those figures upon their 40th birthday.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#555

Post by ryguytilidie » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 7:33 PM UTC

Gigablah wrote: post #483

ryguytilidie wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to get in the way of your hyperbole, but the person above you seemed to have no objection to "respecting" pg, he was taking issue with this: "pg's response is actually priceless: it is like a soft-spoken witness upending a bullying lawyer who had just viciously attacked him, leaving the attacker reeling for all to see." Which you don't mention at all in your response... "If you're under 40, I'm largely u…

> I don't mean to be harsh but this could be the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. If that's the case, then you're a very sheltered person. Lay off the hyperbole next time.

A day later I see no hyperbole here. If the logic one uses is:

-Should I listen to anything this person has to say or take value from their life experiences?

-Well I dunno, have they turned 40 yet.

Is very certainly in the top 5 dumbest things I've ever heard if not the dumbest. A human being going well out of their way to avoid learning things and gaining more experience. But thanks for contributing with the random insult. Hope it helped rebuild your self esteem?

Re: What I Didn't Say

#556

Post by Crito » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 7:53 PM UTC

throwawaykf03 wrote: post #553

Crito wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are we measuring "quality"? Reaction from literary critics? Reaction from the target audience? Financial success? It seems to me that by two of those standards Stephenie Meyer knocked the ball out of the park. It is not clear to me why we should care about the other standard of quality.

Analogously, pg's essays being very popular with a number of people in no way translates to other standards of quality :-) They may resonate with people, but without solid grounding in reality, they may be no better than "pop philosophy". Personally, I agree with some of his essays, but on some others he's way off the mark. For instance, his writings on anything Hollywood or copyright-related betray a fundamental mis…

You won't have an argument from me there. I don't count myself among the PG fans.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#557

Post by nycticorax » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 8:17 PM UTC

abalone wrote: post #416

pg is being disingenuous. He did only refer to programmers. That's true. But what he left out is that, he defined programmers as the "pool of potential startup founders". (You have to read the full transcript to notice that.) So he is not actually referring to a subset of women. He very clearly says women as a whole are underrepresented as founders because they haven't been hacking since age 13 like the attendees of…

I agree with this completely. PG basically said that the reason there are not many females in YC is that not that many qualified females apply. The interviewer then asked "what would be lost" if YC either lowered their standards for female applicants, or did more to encourage qualified females to apply. And PG basically (and perhaps unintentionally) dodged the question, and reiterated that there aren't as many qualified female applicants as male ones, because in some sense YC's 'ideal' candidate is a twenty-something who's been hacking for 10+ years, and more of those are male than female.

I'm not saying that PG is necessarily sexist or a bad person for saying all of this. But he did basically say that there aren't a lot of twenty-something females who have been hacking for 10+ years. And then he seems to sort of back away from that statement in "What I Didn't Say". In the original interview, he said "We can't make [these] women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years." In "What I Didn't Say" he says "When I saw [the above quote] myself I wasn't sure what I was even supposed to be saying. That women aren't hackers? That they can't be taught to be hackers? Either one seems ridiculous." Basically, he was saying a less-crazy version of the first statement. Namely, that there aren't that many 20-something female hackers.

In summary, it seems like PG stated an inconvenient and perhaps unfortunate truth (and implicitly declined to get into what he could perhaps do to make this truth untrue), The Information reported it in a responsible way, and then ValleyWag re-reported it in a misleading and sensationalistic way. And then PG somewhat disingenuously claimed that he didn't say what he actually said.

Also, the irony is rich that all of this involves the guy that wrote "What You Can't Say".

Re: What I Didn't Say

#558

Post by ChrisNorstrom » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 8:38 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #248

ChrisNorstrom wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paul Graham is assumed guilty of being sexist and he's probably unaware of it. Got it.

There are many studies showing that nearly everyone has unconscious biases including minorities . This is normal . I assume it's true of you and I assume it's true of me. It's a sensible prior, not an insult. [1] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/between-the-lines/201204...

THAT is a really good point. Thank you for bringing it up. Even after considering your evidence as truth I still have one question left.

1. Isn't a woman, Jessica Livingston (Paul Graham's wife) on the interviewer panel and a part of the application process? It's not just Paul Graham himself.

I'm quick to defend Paul in the same way others are quick to blame him. It seems we as a diverse society are so conditioned to enforcing equal extremism that any time we don't see an industry, a workforce, or a group equally divided between male/female, black/white, gay/straight we immediately sound off the alarm and go on a witch hunt. All of this without considering that certain groups of people are better at something than others. For instance, African Americans make up only 12-14% of the population but over 60% of the NFL. Jewish people make up less than 6% of the population yet they make up almost 100% of entertainment industry executives (see Joel Stein article in the New York Times if you don't believe me). We hold up the majority to a level of standards that the minority cannot even reach. There's this stigma that if you have nice things, you cheated to get them, didn't earn them, and must divide them and share them with everyone else or else you are sexist/racist.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#559

Post by bluekeybox » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 8:58 PM UTC

davidp wrote: post #444

bluekeybox wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To blame the listeners is one step short of accepting things as they are. In this case, it is most certainly the talkers, since it is they who immediately profit from their deeds. Don't forget that every listener is also a talker (I bet there is a Nietzsche quote about it somewhere).

> To blame the listeners is one step short of accepting things as they are. I disagree: - If the talkers are the problem, then the solution is... less speech? Muzzling/censorship? I'll pass, thanks. Better to have the frenzied finger-pointers grow hoarse blathering to a crowd that's ignoring them, than to give them the very attention that they crave and that drives their fortunes. - I didn't mention solutions to the…

No one is talking about Soviet-style suppression of free speech. To see my direction, compare media-enabled witch-hunts and mob politics to an immune reaction of an organism. A small, appropriate dose of it is good for the body. A disproportionate immune reaction (like what we're seeing here), is an inflammation, and should probably call for administration of cortisone (while a Soviet-style reaction would be cutting out the whole inflamed tissue and harming everything in the process). It gets worse. If left unchecked, we can have an auto-immune disease. Someone has to be watching the watchers.

Re: What I Didn't Say

#560

Post by ericabiz » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 9:10 PM UTC

argumentum wrote: post #527

ericabiz wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those statements don't conflict. Not surprisingly, the female founders I talked to who felt that YC is a "frat house" did not apply or go to YC.

What does YC being a "frat house" have to do with applying though? I can understand why that perception may discourage someone from participating in YC, but the acceptance rate is so low that it seems like premature optimization to think beyond the application.

There's not much more I can say that I haven't already said, as some of the conversations I've had were explicitly off the record. But I can say this, in a generic sense: All of the top accelerators will seek out people they want to attend and encourage them to apply. When this happens to you, as a founder, you're well aware that if you apply, you're very likely to get an interview and also very likely to get in. I can say on the record that this happened for me with Techstars Austin.

So the decision you're facing as you're applying, knowing what you know, having the conversations you've had, is not "Will I get in?", but "Do I really want to do this?" And that's when I found the frat-house aspect of YC to be discouraging.

(Edit: I suppose I should expand on that since people will invariably have questions. I'm a 32-year-old female. I'm in a different stage of my life than a 22-year-old who just got out of college. I didn't really want to deal with keggers full of falling-over-drunk guys, jokes about "chicks", guys hitting on me, etc. I'm just kind of over all that, and I'm weary of fighting battles I have no inclination to fight over casual sexism--I'd rather focus on growing my business, so I choose not to be around those types of people. Yes, you could say I'm painting YC with a wide and potentially unfair brush, but that was my impression.)

This year, I decided to do Techstars instead, and have no regrets about that.

Today, having gone through one accelerator with my company, I'm done with accelerators for this business and I'm moving on to doing a seed round. If I have another business that might be a good fit for YC, and they've made an effort to change (this article by pg is a good first step), I'd potentially consider it again.