Well, pg has earned our trust and deserved the benefit of the doubt when something so off kilter as this is attributed to him. He did not get it here, and that is a sad testament to how crowd-inspired frenzies can bend our perceptions in such faulty ways. Let us only hope that we can learn some good lessons from 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. Indeed, the mob looks pretty much like an ass at this point and kudos to pg for his more-than-able defense. Very lawyer-like, in a way, but far more classy.
But jesus,
> 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.
What's with the almost cult-like reverence for this largely pseudo-intellectual entrepreneur?
You are seeing respect for Paul Graham because, as flawed as some of his opinions might be, he also has the experience backing them. Louis CK said this best:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXcWeFn-YYM (NSFW in the latter half)
If you're under 40, I'm largely uninterested in your take on the world. That includes my own; I know I still have things to learn and I make a proactive effort to listen more than I talk. I don't always succeed.
- Founded a successful web apps company back in the 1990s when that wasn't common, and sold it to Yahoo
- Founded Y Combinator to advise and invest in startups
- Smart investor with substantial success and track record (Dropbox, AirBnB, etc)
In other words, he's earned a reputation for doing some very smart things, and documenting them in clear, easily understood language, over the past 20 years.
I'm not being a mirer or a nuthugger here. I participate in HN because it benefits me and I learn useful things amidst the noise. (And of course pg started this site too.)
I'm frankly surprised you've been here for 2 years and never realised.
You see the ycombinator in news.ycombinator.com? In this website?
That's pg's company.
Do you know what ycombinator is? That he started the seed funding movement? That he was blogging about hacking startups before people even really realised you could hack startups? Before lean startup existed? That he's written his own dialect of LISP? That he started and sold his own startup in the early days of the web? And that, now this is some serious respect, it was actually written in LISP?
That's not cultish, it's earned respect and pg's got it in buckets around here.
Crikey.
Little drunk, but crikey, talk about having absolutely no fucking clue. The guy's a machine of intellectualism, most things he turns his mind to he de-constructs, encapsulates and then explains brilliantly. Yeah, occasionally he's wrong, especially when he tries to justify certain aspects of exploitative capitalism, but damn he's good. Very good.
And that response was classic pg as grellas said.
This is a nice demonstration of 'framing': you frame pg as not deserving cult-like reverence because of his 'pseudo-intellectuality' and people respond by explaining how he is a true intellectual. Except that the arguments they give for that assertion are wrong, because that is not the assertion for which they have arguments. Their arguments actually explain why pg is revered and they are now contorted to be arguments that seem to be meant to explain why is he is cult-like revered for his intellectuality.
The result is that it seem like people are tacitly acknowledging the 'cult-like reverence' and are giving completely ridiculous arguments in support. The ridiculousness of those arguments is pointed out and we get into pointless discussions about what things mean, completely losing sight of the original point.
The bottom line is: pg is revered and reasons for that reverence are given. There is nothing cult-like about the reverence and the pseudo-intellectual part of his writings (I would use another word to describe that quality of the writings, but that is beyond my current argument), are not the reason for the reverence.
It sounds like you disagree with his ideas; what qualifies someone as an intellectual in your book and not a pseudo-intellectual?
By making the comment you will assuredly elicit the response you expect, imply, but it is not necessarily for the reason you state.
pg was misrepresented and held out as a misogynist. We think highly of pg, why should we not defend what is merely slanderous nonsense?
I'm the first one to disagree with many ideas in our echo chamber ... That's healthy. But the idea that pg said anything wrong is ridiculous.
Who, pray tell, are the real intellectuals?
People worship and idolize their heroes all the time.
If you can do better, go for it.
Seriously, wtf. What does this even mean when talking about a person, and not a particular essay? Do you honestly not think that Paul Graham embodies a life of the intellect?
On a second note I'm also curious as to what exactly you're referring to when you say he has the credibility that should make us know that he isn't sexist. I'm not saying he is sexist, I'm just saying that all of his credibility lies in making good business decisions, not gender relations.
I agree. This willful blindness to bias and prejudice because smart people are not biased or prejudiced prevents us from examining our thoughts and behavior.
More importantly, it's not about some beloved leader besmirched by a drive-by interview. The focus is best on YC's track record — and what it'll do to fix it — not a quote/misquote.
Personally I don't trust anyone, I've been burned too many times. Yeah that makes me paranoid, but it comes from too many bad professional relationships were I was backstabbed by the other person to further their career goals. I must state that this does not happen in every organization, and that there are a few people I would trust if they showed some good faith and helped me out with things. But since nobody I know wants to help me out, and once I reached the age of 40 I get old I am too old for this industry.
But PG is worthy of my respect, he has paid his dues in this industry, he knows what he is talking about and has experience, he hasn't backstabbed anyone that I know of so he has credibility, yes he is one of the few that I would trust had he helped me out in some way.
Look there is a lot of jealousy in the industry for experienced people. We get called nerds, geeks, dorks, etc by all of the people in other industries. They claim they know how to use a computer, and sure maybe use a Wordprocessor and write on a blog using Wordpress, but every once in a while one of them gets a bad case of jealousy that 'hackers' or 'IT workers' know more than they do, so they lash out and do a hatchet job on someone who got some attention in the media. This is basically politics, and how one person can backstab another.
I've had my words taken out of context a lot as well. It is but just one way to backstab someone. It is not just the Internet trolls who do it but the news media and these people writing blogs that hate the startup community.
In street terms, these people are 'haters' if I used that term correctly.
My sister who got into discoranism calls such people as 'greyfaces' and here is the Urban Dictionary definition. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=greyface
You can use either the first or second definition, and it would define the person who did this to PG quite accurately.
I think that is what grellas means by "trust".
For example, how does the non-credibility of the press work? We all know from experience that the actual business of the press in general is to produce catchy headlines based on a forced interpretation of the "facts" (or based on no facts at all).
And yet, we're always ready to trust an article and get all upset as if the press was doing its theoretical job of uncovering some hidden truth (last sentence of PG's post: "even now I'm still fooled occasionally.")
Why is that? Why does the press still have any credibility left?
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 technology to change their voices so every voice sounds the same. I think it would be a really cool experiment to see if different types of companies or a more diverse founder set would get funded.
2) Publish more stats on the success of YC companies, and publish stats on % of female(, black, ...) founder applications submitted, % accepted, % funded after acceptance, etc. Of course, I'd fully expect that this would be "opt-in" from the founders as well--i.e. each set of founders would need to agree as part of the application to have their data anonymously shared. You could also share data on % who opted to not have their data shared. (Techstars is doing some great stuff with their stats here: http://www.techstars.com/companies/stats/ )
I've talked to many female founders and YC does have a reputation as a "frat house" (I told one of the YC partners that personally when he asked me to apply.) I decided to not apply to YC and instead was in the first Techstars Austin cohort, which was a fantastic program overall. Techstars definitely seemed more welcoming to women from my perspective as a geek-turned-tech-entrepreneur.
I'm hoping this is the start of breaking down the "frat house" reputation around YC and getting more women actively involved with it.
I'm not sure where this "frat house" thing comes from (scare quotes, not direct quotation). Have you ever been to a frat house? Believe me, they have nothing in common with a summer at YCombinator. I've described yc dinners as being "like a high school lunchroom where everyone is happy to see you and every table is the cool kid's table". Women are utterly and completely welcome. Minorities are welcome. Bring them your nerds, your socially inept, your ambitious hackers yearning to be free. Frat houses are all about pecking orders and childish humor. YC is genuinely about mutual support and an open exchange of ideas.
If "frat house" means that there aren't many women present, I can only guess as to why. There are a variety of social and cultural factors that push the majority of women away from hacking at a young age. I can't point the finger of blame at anyone in particular, but I can report on what I have observed. Women are generally underrepresented in computer science departments, engineering programs, computer clubs and yes, startup incubators. It has nothing to do with Paul Graham or the YC partners. We're all responsible as members of society at large.
I understand your reasons for not appliyng to YCombinator. TechStars is a great program, and I'm glad that you've thrived there. But there's something to be said for seeing things with your own eyes. I would be very unhappy if someone dismissed me out of hand because of something that they'd heard. I can only believe that YCombinator’s positive reputation will outweigh whatever negative reputation that they have fairly or unfairly received.
I don't think women have to even be pushed away. I would assert (and am more than happy to be proven wrong) that in many if not most undertakings where the ratio of hours of fun to non-fun (I wish I had a better way to describe what I'm thinking) are low, you will find a lack of females. One example is "hardcore" personal investing, I'm talking investing forums, twitter, etc - if you are familiar with them, once again you will notice it is a sausage-fest. Women aren't pushed out of these communities or discriminated against, they simply are just extremely disproportionately not present.
For whatever reason, I think woman who choose to excel in a field tend to focus on endeavors with clearer and more structured formal paths. For example, you will find plenty of female representation in finance in universities and as career professionals. But after quitting time, the people putting in the extra hours in forums and on twitter are disproportionately male, as are the people who have been coding multiple hours per day since under 10 years old, or multiple hours after quitting time once in their professional lives. These are simple facts. Only when race or gender is involved would anyone ever suggest this not relevant to success.
The person you responded to offered two doable action points. A litmus test is if YC moves on at least one of them. YC does not have the excuse that it doesn't have the technical know-how. And it would be a laughingstock if they didn't have the hacker spirit to figure out how to implement them.
Not just in tech, but in our entire culture. As noted elsewhere, Americans are sorting themselves by demographics.
It feels awkward to be a woman in a predominantly male organization. It feels awkward to be a republican in San Francisco. It feels awkward to be gay in Mississippi. It feels awkward to be black in Portland. And so we place ourselves in locations (and organizations) where it's less awkward to be ourselves, and the problem gets worse.
What's difficult about this problem is that it's nobody's fault. There's no conspiracy behind this trend. (In fact there is a conspiracy to try and reverse it! But to little avail.) Counterintuitively, perhaps it's the fault of the people who choose the comfort of sameness over diversity, but that feels too close to victim blaming.
Diversity begets diversity. The only way to do that is to set up systems and infrastructure that supports and enables that and it requires support from community leaders.
THIS. And this is the problem. People don't understand this. It HAS to be somebody's fault. It has to be black OR white. Gray is beyond the understanding of many.
Well, it's not really any one person's fault who set everything up. But we can change it. There are tools to undo the "death by a million cuts" that make it this way.
I would say that the people who don't do these things are partially at fault for not attempting to fix a broken system.
When you evaluate a team, you need to be able to judge their confidence, see how they interact with each other, get a feel for the trustworthiness, the way they look at you when they answer a question, and so on. If you can't see them, and their voice is distorted, then you might as well just ask for a slide deck and forgo an in-person interview altogether. Which doesn't seem like a good idea.
I've long wanted to see in general some more experimental testing of selection variations. What if YC (or some other funder's) candidates were just selected completely randomly from the applications? What if they were selected solely according to some dumb criterion, like take everyone with the most degrees, or the longest CV, or the most GitHub LoC? What if they were selected purely based on the applications (without the dumb-criterion requirement) but without interviews? For a few tens of thousands of $$, someone willing to try those kinds of things out could get some pretty interesting information on how reliable different selection methods are.
My own hypothesis is a negative one: that beyond screening out a few obviously-bad candidates and taking a few obviously-good candidates, the bulk of the YC selection process is randomly related to outcomes, and the YC mentoring/contacts/press/etc., rather than predictive value of the selection process, is the main driver of their generally strong outcomes. But I can't prove that. :)
2.) Paul has admitted to being susceptible to the Mark Zuckeberg effect, at least he was honest about that and should be respected for the fact that he realizes that. Most VC's i believe also fall into this trap but don't admit it.
3.) Now what are we going to do about this? Shrug our shoulders and just say this or that won't work or get to trying solutions and iterating on that?
I would disagree strongly in that YC has a measurable financial risk of excluding potentially profitable founders solely for meaningless cultural woo woo reasons. For example if some Finnish dudes conduct perfectly normal business transactions nude in the sauna, a prudish American who refuses to participate has an obvious measurable economic loss solely because of irrational cultural woo woo. Now extend that far out example into female communication style.
Now what would work, or at least would be interesting, is having a female partner interview female founders separately from the male partners then study the female partner's impression vs male partner impression. I don't suspect there would be a huge difference; but at least this would be a somewhat more effective way to test the proposed effect. For my ridiculous made up example, you'd need a Finnish partner; probably easier to run this test on the somewhat easier to acquire and categorize male vs female test subjects.
While I agree that blind applications would be somewhat tough for startup founders, conducting seems like a bad example. You could fairly easily judge the resulting music without being able to see the conductor.
What kind of pressure are you feeling about applying to funds now?
If you're unsure about applying, I recommend doing so. No matter what happens, you stand to benefit.
"Do at least one application cycle completely blind."
Sorry but this comes off as insulting (I know that wasn't your intention), you applaud and agree with him then turn around and pull a "but I still don't trust you". As if PG can't be trusted, or you think that he's secretly sexist and want him to change his successful interview process just to prove himself to you.
I'm positive that women get discriminated in many fields, I've heard my mother's own stories. There's something about seeing a strong woman succeed that makes men feel weak. But this assumption that women are absent or less represented at Y-combinator simply because they are subconsciously discriminated against by Paul and Jessica Livingston just seems absurd. Especially seeing has how politically correct everyone's trying to be now a days. Many people (especially those running Tech Crunch events) are purposely looking for that unicorn female developer to rid themselves of male guilt. The one that's worked on algorithms, programmed since a kid, and coded up numerous apps.
Rather than focus on discrimination ask yourself this: How many times have we seen a female coder's blog? How many frameworks/api/apps have we seen created by females? Is it discrimination or lack of ambition? Take a look at the 10 industries that women rule http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2009/01/26/10-industries-where-.... Are men being discriminated against (one can argue the day care industry) or do they lack the desire and ambition to get into these industries?
Just because we're in pg's house, it doesn't mean we have to treat him like a god. He's a fallible human being, just like the rest of us.
The whole point of a blind interview is to prevent implicit bias that the bearer might not even be aware of.
Fixed.
Right off the top I would say I don't like that for the simple reason that you can't tell confidence (and I will assume that is a factor) or even how full of shit someone is if you disguise their voice.
I do negotiating over the phone, in person, and by email. I dissect each and every nuance to try and determine what is under the hood. I've had good results with that. I make money that way. To me how someone sounds is important on many levels. If you are going to do this, why have them speak at all? (Not suggesting this.)
Along the sames lines I've had a theory for a long time that it is much harder to tell if someone is truthful if they have an accent (even american from a different regioin) that you are not used to because you can't tell nuance like you can with an accent that you know.
Bottom line is hiding the voice, for the purposes of getting diversity, is not the way to go. Especially for decision making that takes into account "the team" and/or "the individual" and not just the idea.
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?
To say it would be high risk / low volume / high cost service would be an understatement. And just defining success would be hard. But a hard problem is a good startup problem. And you could probably pivot into (or out of?) employee interviewing.
I guess you could bootstrap as some kind of outsourced HR lady to ask those annoying anxiety producing interview questions (you know the typical HR lady questions, like explain your worst attibute, or tell me about your greatest failure, or the classic when did you stop beating your wife? (kidding about the last one)). This is a legit business opportunity to help small biz do the "HR" questions at an interview and formalize the reporting of multiple candidates, and could pivot into this A/B testing of startup founders once some cash starts flowing.
I'm not kidding about this. Someone else with more spare time that me, take it and run.
I first met pg at SXSW several years ago, when he was swamped by hungry startup founders. The whole scene was intimidating to me--I hate crowds! I finally got to ask him a question, which I can't recall the exact content of now, but was something about women and YC. He suggested I email Jessica about it. I didn't do that--probably because I had been intimidated, and partly because I felt like he had punted on the question instead of giving me an actual answer (I now know that this was just part of his characteristic bluntness, and I definitely don't hold it against him especially given the environment in which the conversation happened, but at the time I didn't know pg and I found it offputting.)
Since then, I've had two good friends go through YC, both young white males. One of the companies is now "Internet famous" and shows up here on HN on a regular basis. The other one is still completely underground. Both of them enjoyed and recommended YC.
Another fellow entrepreneur here in Austin went through YC recently and we sat down and compared notes after he went through YC and I went through Techstars. Our conclusion: Techstars wins in terms of mentoring and support, but YC wins in terms of visibility and fundraising.
So, tl;dr I've met pg (briefly), I know one of the partners and a handful of YC founders, but they're not female. I didn't specifically seek out female founders who'd gone through YC, though now that you ask, I'm really curious to hear some of their viewpoints!
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.
There's a difference between "good idea" and "marketable business." As founders, we have to make that distinction. I'd like to see YC do blind interviews because I think it's a good idea for them to do so. I am not working on that myself because I can't see that good idea, in and of itself, turning into a business--a product a company could replicate and sell to others.
Perhaps other founders have the necessary domain expertise to turn something like what I suggested into a replicable, marketable business. If so, I support them in doing so.
> So if you care about this, why you don't take action?
I did. I took time away from my business to write this comment and make a suggestion. I hope YC takes it into account. I think it would make an awesome experiment for them.
> The "frat house" is working very well and there is no reason to change what works.
I suspect this might have been your real point. Sure, YC has worked well...but could it work better? Those are the questions we as hackers ask all the time. I think it's worth a shot to try something different and unique that could work even better than the status quo. Given the popularity of my comment here, I'm not the only one who thinks so. We'll see if YC (or any other accelerator) runs with this suggestion!
Yes. Y Combinator could very well decide that their current process is offputting to women, but that it is so successful that they don't care, and that they're perfectly happy to keep doing what they're doing even if it effectively excludes women.
But if this is the case, then their only two options are to lie about it or to stand up in public and say that they don't care about including women. The former has significant risk as a long-term strategy, and the latter is a PR debacle that could negatively impact their ability to attract a significant percentage of male founders -- which is to say, anyone who cares about gender equality.
Sorry, but this is a terrible route to go for YC as there's a huge risk of backlash to achieve nothing good. Say, for instance, that black co-founders had received more funding but achieved poorer returns on investment. A very simple interpretation of that data (not necessarily correct, but easy to formulate interpretation) would be that blacks are less successful than whites at getting a return on investment even with odds stacked in their favor. The conclusions and the data would then be deemed "racist" and YC would have shit all over its face. It doesn't even have to be right. There just has to be published data available for there to be a debate about race/sex, etc... leading to a toxic atmosphere around YC.
The reason data like this isn't collected is because VCs are interested in being politically neutral. Data on race and gender are a political powderkeg. PG said that women who haven't been hackers can't see the world as a hacker, and we see the shitstorm it's caused. Imagine if they were tracking stats based on race or gender? They'd be called nazis.
The last thing a successful female founder wants or needs is a quota or lower bar of entry for things like yc. Because once that happens, you're going to have to work twice as hard to get respect, because now you have to prove your place wasn't just because the quota needed to be filled. if you get picked fair and square, then being there is a strong signal that you are worthy.
There are times and places for intentionally creating diversity, but a start up incubator is a bad fit for that type of intervention.
I don't think anyone is arguing to lower the bar of entry for women in YC, instead (as far as I can tell) they are arguing for ways to increase the number of female applicants to YC.
This fratty culture certainly drives away slightly older founders (by that, I mean 25+!) and others who don't appreciate the atmosphere. Ultimately, I expect differentiation in the ecosystem, with different incubators forming to attract talent from different pools of talent.
Creating an atmosphere where your founders feel like they belong is a competitive advantage for an incubator. But no one incubator can make an atmosphere that appeals to everybody. If you make an atmosphere to appeal to 40-year-old females, someone else will lure the 19-year-old males away with beer pong, dorm living, and video game breaks.
The truly break-out companies founded in markets where customers are willing to pay, are started by entrepreneurs over 28. Age is not a hard rule but we talking about averages here. Steve blanks spoke well about how he started up his companies while still managing family life. Check quora for famous tech founders over 30 and their take on it.
An example about how a person over 30 starts a business from Quora:
Marc Bodnick, Co-Founder, Elevation Partners
We did it by starting with a profitable service line.
I was 34 when I founded Arcstone. We had three young kids (we now have four). I was coming off a VC salary of ~$250K, and yet didn't have much savings to speak of. I started Arcstone with $18K borrowed from my brother-in-law, and a couple credit cards to service revolving debt.
We started a service business targeting a specific, relevant pain point, which has a quick sales cycle. We became profitable immediately; with our profits we both fed ourselves and invested in technology and infrastructure. We were careful not to overbuild on our way up, though some expenditures (like our 5-year lease) were taken with a leap of faith.
Three+ years on, we are a nationally respected financial services firm (primarily in the valuation niche) with a healthy top (and bottom) line, and a very happy and dedicated team of seven.
Getting out of the Silicon Valley mindset -- Seed/A/B/C/Exit -- has been incredibly liberating.
The Information recently sat down with Mr. Graham. We covered a wide range of topics including “mass producing” startups, Mr. Graham’s controversial statements on founder accents, his wife and YC's secret weapon Jessica Livingston (link) and some little-known stories about YC alum Airbnb.
https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete...
…which implies that it was a formal interview. I don't have a subscription but something still doesn't quite mesh there. If I were PG I would be writing to them to demand that they change that lead-in to the story.
edit: Another part of this saga that stands out to me is how very few people commenting on it actually have a subscription to the supposedly first hand source at The Information. It was a bit strange that we had a scandal caused by a news report about a news report that most people don't have access to.
The only differences between The Information and The Register [1] are that the latter acknowledges its tabloid nature, and lacks the breathtaking presumption to peddle its tripe for four hundred dollars a year.
Nitasha Tiku made several negative blaming statements in her story. The one that stuck out to me as an obvious tell of a blaming statement was "That archetype, of course, is usually attached to a penis." In all fairness, I don't think that anyone wants to be addressed via 'being attached' to their private parts.
Here's a link on NVC if anyone is interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication. It's powerful stuff.
I would love it if this were true, but I think it's way too optimistic.
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; diversity of views isn't automatically beneficial as is commonly assumed (an extreme example: you wouldn't expect a conservative big-corporation suit-wearing type to benefit a two-founder startup team).
It also seems a bit arrogant to tell people 'you should stop pursuing X and learn coding instead'. I wonder what would have happened had someone convinced Marie Curie, Jane Austen, or Hillary Clinton to go into programming instead of their respective fields (yes, I realise computers weren't invented in the case of the former two, but I hope you understand my point).
Finally, why is all this restricted to women only? Should I start advocating for Arabs? Africans? Inuit? It very quickly turns into a lot of duplicated effort. What's wrong with treating everyone equally? Not to mention that special-casing also reinforces the idea of 'us' and 'them', which I don't feel is productive either.
(throwaway because I don't want to be burned at the stake for publicly asking such questions)
Does that mean 'do the same thing to everyone'? 'Equal' treatment can easily result in very unequal effects. For instance, if you put a staircase at the door to the classroom, everyone is being treated equally if they are all expected to go up the same staircase, even though that means some people can go in and others (people with crutches/wheelchairs/etc) can't. For another example, lets say public schools started charging every student the exact same fee of $10,000 per year: that would be equal treatment with a clearly unequal outcome, because some students started out in families that can afford the fee, and some didn't.
Also, advocacy is not 'restricted to women' - but there are a lot of people who feel it is valuable to spend their time and effort on programs for women. There are also programs for black teenage boys, for inner city kids, probably for Africans (and African-Americans), that get less attention. If you feel that you can see some disadvantaged group you'd like to advocate for, go ahead. If you feel that you don't want to advocate for anyone, also go ahead. But it doesn't make sense to say that because you don't want to advocate for a group/any group, or think the effort is not worth it for you, then everyone else has to agree not to do it either. (And besides, in many cases obstacles for one group affect other groups, so it doesn't have to be duplication of effort but shared effort that can be applied more widely - eg: increasing awareness that not everybody is likely to have a USA traditional-geek-boy-in-highschool background helps interviewers learn to avoid questions that rely on an assumption of that shared background, which helps everyone with non-mainstream backgrounds like women, homeschooled kids, and foreigners).
From an economic perspective, having any group not participate in a valuable activity is a waste.
Is that correct?
I think it's more of a class thing than a sex thing.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/15/things-i-learned-by-spe...
I think the best solution is to avoid most journalism altogether, and get news from blog posts by people who know what they're talking about, care about it, and have no reason to lie.
The discussion about women in startups has completely come to a halt now and has shifted to discussing whether Paul Graham is a sexist.
The most sickening part of this whole ordeal? That these shit-stirring "journalists" are praised and said to have some sort of talent by their respective circles for knowing how to "shake things up," and their higher-ups want nothing more but for them to continue.
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.
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.
The reason this kind of journalism works is simple: because there is a steady supply of new people who aren't resistant to it yet.
I don't think the work that Python/Django people are doing to get more women involved in the community can be easily ignored.
I doubt he would have tweeted any of it, if he had known this.
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.)
As for the trifecta, I can't help you out on "lynch mob", I'm afraid, but how about this for McCarthyism?
"The [tech industry] is infested with [sexists]. I have here in my hand [2] a list of [102] -- a list of [user]names that were made known to the [Github administrators] as being members of the [sexist majority] and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the [tech industry]." [3]
[1] https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/417776560603549696
[2] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:a3j7b1R...
(This link points to Google's cache of @ashedryden's tweet, because the tweet as originally hosted on Twitter has been deleted since I saw it last. I hope you'll agree that Google's cache is an acceptably authoritative source for what used to be hosted at that Twitter URL. The replies are more interesting than the original tweet, anyway.)
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy#Wheeling_speech
Believing men and women are equal is "sick" now? What a strange notion.
[1] The anti-harassment policies of Pycon are a gold-standard for the industry
Do you know that witch hunt still being a thing in some countries of the world?: http://www.eltiempo.com/colombia/medellin/ARTICULO-WEB-NEW_N... (title translated: Woman accused of being a witch in a town in Antioquia was burned)
This is a witch hunt: a woman was accused of being witch and _burned alive_, do you think that is even comparable with the tweets of Jacob Kaplan Moss?
For example, you say that you don't know how you'd convince 13 year old girls to be interested in programming. The normal interpretation is, 'Clearly 13 year old girls are very rarely interested in programming, and Paul Graham doesn't know how to change that.' The nasty interpretation is 'Paul Graham thinks that girls are intrinsically incapable of being interested in programming'.
It's easy to be offended by things. It's also obnoxious and often irresponsible.
"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 because they expected me to get offended at the slightest thing. I want people to treat me equally, but I don't want people to be afraid to come to work because I might sue them for looking at me. That's not what I'm about at all but unfortunately I'm pre-judged to lash out at people when I see something I don't like.
I want everyone to come to work and get fair treatment/compensation/etc. but I feel that incidents like this set all of us back. The discrimination is different now. People don't see me as incapable of STEM, they see me as incapable of working with other people. It sucks. A lot.
I for one care about when problematic or false things are said not because I am offended, but because falsehoods make it harder to accurately deal with problems like the low number of women in STEM careers, including tech startups.
I see a few points being made ("out of context"): - You want to start programming at 13 to be a hacker. - 13 year old girls are not interested in programming. - PG doesn't know how to make programming more attractive to this group.
As far as I can tell these are neutral observations and opinions. Even if his statement is plainly incorrect, simply being wrong doesn't make it offensive.
I really like when the move for more female participation in programming is more of removing barriers that would otherwise discourage females from participating (sexism, snickering, etc.) and less pushing females into programming.
As we all know, PG runs a company where his bottom dollar comes from the success rate of startups. It's not hard to draw the conclusion that people who naturally enjoy doing something are more successful at it on the whole than people who are pushed into doing something.
PG just happens to operate in a space dominated by males, because of this I imagine some people feel he has a responsibility to push the female programmer movement forward. I certainly don't imagine him holding female programmers back, with the female founders conf he's announced it sounds like he's trying to help. That said, I think PG is a "pull no punches" kind of guy, so while he is aware of the lack of female founders I don't think he's going to lose sleep over it as long YC continues to succeed.
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.
Data source: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjPFdCURhZvddHJ...
You are getting a glimpse of those people. Spend your days looking to be offended and, my God, it occasionally happens and you get your chance to rabble! Welcome to social justice warriors.
I used to think I wanted out of the industry too. Now I just keep a list and act accordingly when I am asked to hire. I've also learned to spot the signs, including certain phrases, retweeting of certain people consistently, linking to the Geek Feminism wiki because it's a wiki and it has facts, and so forth. A good example of a red flag tweet: https://twitter.com/jacobian/status/417775128831741952
The only difference is the persistent toxicity of extreme social justice and how they've invaded tech, for some reason. Perhaps because it's a big and booming field, but I've always found it odd how a lot of feminists decry geek culture as outcasts, losers and misogynists, yet simultaneously want desperately to be a part of it.
Ultimately, I think you'll do yourself good with a social media detox.
Writing nowadays is like playing football in a minefield.
Over Thanksgiving a friend of mine who is studying for his Masters in Philosophy introduced me to the formal concept of the 'Principle of Charity' [1] which is on the hearer's part a requirement of applying the most reasonable interpretation of the argument presented. When pg wrote this:
"Also (as we've seen), if you talk about controversial topics, the audience for an interview will include people who for various reasons want to misinterpret what you say, so you have to be careful not to leave them any room to, whereas in a conversation you can assume good faith and speak as loosely as you would in everyday life."
It connected with me that both in the interwebs and here on HN too often people do not apply this principle, either in prejudice or in ignorance, to the topics being discussed. That is really too bad, because it helps the quality of the discussion tremendously.
It's sad that pg feels he has to waste time doing these type of clarifications. Especially since he's not even holding any controversial opinions in either case, but is merely observing what he has seen at YC. I wish more people would be harder on the trolls with nothing but superficial criticism. Ignore them, and if they gain traction, despise them, the same way you despise spammers.
There's an asymmetry here. The trolls lose nothing on their vitrolic rants. For them it's a win either way, since at worst case they get some page views, whereas pg has to spend time dealing with bullshit. It would be more just if these trolls were punished, and pg weren't made to feel like he has to respond like this.
I'm guessing you meant "shouldn't" there?
Read http://jessicalessin.com/2013/12/31/on-the-information-and-h...
and the things I wrote elsewhere on this thread.
ValleyWag comes out looking terrible, of course.
The same thing happened again with this controversy. Here's at least one rebuttal from a leading female founder: https://t.co/1NbszBqlB1
Is it too much to ask of the press to at least look into a person's actions before piling on with criticism of a purported quote rehashed by a known instigator such as valleywag?
EDIT: I did read the article and know he was allegedly tricked, but my questions still stand. It was a long interview to just be a background about Jessica, and it was for a profile using the YC name to get $400 subscriptions. If they lied about the reasoning and then edited his words to say something completely different, I would have thought he'd be more outraged.
[1] http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html (see #3)
I think we could do with fewer of those stories on HN, truth be told. They seem to generate a lot of heat and little light, and are generally about "off-topic" subjects without being intellectually gratifying.
Moreover, anyone who has read pg knows this kerfuffle was likely spam. I'm just sad our culture has degenerated to convict first, ask questions later.
Shameless has supplanted shameful.
Ugh, how depressing.
1 - Most notably, as a gatekeeper in startup culture (<- this seems to be causing confusion: not a gatekeeper to doing a startup, but a gatekeeper to YC which can often be important in succeeding as a startup in my and many other people's opinions), it seems pretty willfully ignorant to assume that you'd know if you were biased against female founders because if you missed some you'd know. If women are a group that starts on the outside to, as a gatekeeper you'd need more than that to know if you're keeping the gates properly, since we it'd be pretty hard to argue the system as a whole isn't a boys club.
With that said, I do think that the moderation / upvoting / flagging of Hacker News is overwhelmingly male. I sometimes see sexist comments here, and there doesn't seem to be a good system for women to flag and remove those. This is a problem in my opinion.
Sexism is everyone's problem, regardless of gender expression.
Me too. And I will downvote, comment, or both. The system isn't perfect, but there are people who are trying.
I know things are taken out of context, and quotes/sound bites can be selected and presented out of sequence, but actively editing the quote seems absurd and beyond anyone who honestly thinks they are reporting something accurately.
PG picks the best.
it's time we step up to plate ladies. if we want to compete toe to toe with the gents then we have to be better than the ones we are up against. period. if you're better, trust me, he will pick you regardless of your gender.
it might even be in your favor if you just happen to be a woman on top of being better :)
I wonder why pg thinks being a programmer is a prerequisite for looking at the world through hacker eyes. The notion that Zuckerberg could have started Facebook as a non-technical co-founder doesn't seem unreasonable to me (and you could even argue Steve Jobs, while having some technical chops, wasn't the typical uber-hacker-has-been-doing-this-since-age-12 programmer). Or not?
It's important for all of us to remember that the incentives of the media and their subjects are not necessarily aligned, and that bombastic distortions such as this are common.
At what point does misquotation become libel? As much as I hate the idea of suing the press, lawsuits seem like the only defense. Real and lasting damage was done to pg's reputation here. Even with yc as his personal loudspeaker, I doubt pg will be able to set the record strait.
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 PyCon and open source committers, because it's really hard to get 13 year old girls interested in hacking.
It's completely clear when you read the transcript.
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".
PG has done a lot for the community and I think he deserves a conversation rather than a lynching. I'm calling for a more civil discourse on sexism. We could say that I'm baised bc my cofounder was similarly attacked by Valleywag, but it's very reasonable to say that these conversations could be handled more thoughtfully.
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?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Carlton ...
Carlton slumped in 1973, losing 20 games. The media's open questioning of his unusual training techniques led to an acrimonious relationship between them and Carlton, and he severed all ties with the media, refusing to answer press questions for the rest of his career with the Phillies.[13] This reached a point where, in 1981, while the Mexican rookie Fernando Valenzuela was achieving stardom with the Los Angeles Dodgers, a reporter remarked, "The two best pitchers in the National League don't speak English: Fernando Valenzuela and Steve Carlton."[14]
Sometimes I wonder if more people responded this way, "professional journalism" might actually have a chance.
It's sad that pg feels he has to waste time doing these type of clarifications. Especially since he's not even holding any controversial opinions in either case, but is merely observing what he has seen at YC.
I wish more people would be harder on the trolls with nothing but superficial criticism. Ignore them, and if they gain traction, despise them, the same way you despise spammers.
There's an asymmetry here. The trolls lose nothing on their vitrolic rants. For them it's a win either way, since at worst case they get some page views, whereas pg has to spend time dealing with bullshit. It would be more just if these trolls were punished, and pg weren't made to feel like he has to respond like this.
When I was a kid I was told a story as a means to communicate the gravity of telling lies. A lie, as the story goes, is like ripping open a feather pillow atop a mountain. Feathers fly everywhere. To undo a lie you have to collect every single feather, a task monumentally more difficult than telling the lie.
The Internet multiplies the power of the lie at every level. From a simple comments to blog posts to more established media outlets. Since the feathers can't be collected the damage can be extensive, permanent and even outlive the victim. Given this it would almost seem that the law needs to develop beyond liebel and slander (which I think might not be up to the task).
In your arc article: http://www.paulgraham.com/arc0.html
you have the following few sentences: I realize that supporting only Ascii is uninternational to a point that's almost offensive, like calling Beijing Peking, or Roma Rome (hmm, wait a minute). But the kind of people who would be offended by that wouldn't like Arc anyway.
Here's the issue: "the kind of people who would be offended by that" - I realize that "that" refers to ASCII only support, and I agree with your statement. But it took me two minutes to figure that out. Indeed "that" might as well refer to Chinese people being offended by the colonial label of Peking instead of using Beijing. I thought you might want to fix this infelicity of expression.
I think the only Chinese people who would be "outraged" by calling their capital Peking (the old southern way of pronouncing it) vs Beijing (the new northern way of pronouncing it) are the same types getting "outraged" over this ridiculous event - they were looking for something to get angry about anyway. For most I believe it is simply a historical name. Do New Yorkers get outraged if you sidle up to them and whisper "New Amsterdam"?
Anyway, it's still generally called Peking in plenty of languages, including Spanish, French, German and Japanese, and I don't see any great international incidents over that.
but that's just my opinion on the matter.
I see a link to https://www.theinformation.com/YC-s-Paul-Graham-The-Complete..., but there's no way I'm subscribing to this junk website.
This would be different if there were no context, but there is a lot of context.
Given the way my mother cooks, I can state that when it comes to food she totally can be a called a hacker :-)
I have some friends in top positions and the first thing they learn is about this techniques. There are predators out there wanting to eat your hardly earned reputation for their own benefit or agendas.
In some countries it's legal to record any conversation you're a part of without informing the other participants so many people are on their guard. Even in everyday life with people you know well, they or you might be carrying a mobile phone manufactured by certain company or running a certain OS that listens, even when turned off with the battery still in, on behalf of some party who'll never be prosecuted and often never even exposed, and there's a lot of those sorts of people out there. Perhaps even a higher than average percentage of Hacker News visitors are these sorts.
realizes there isn't a lot of substance to most of the comments
goes back to programming
" The controversy itself is an example of something interesting I'd been meaning to write about, incidentally. I was one of the first users of Reddit, and I couldn't believe the number of times I indignantly upvoted a story about some apparent misdeed or injustice, only to discover later it wasn't as it seemed. As one of the first to be exposed to this phenomenon, I was one of the first to develop an immunity to it. Now when I see something that seems too indignation-inducing to be true, my initial reaction is usually skepticism. But even now I'm still fooled occasionally."
just say whatever "they" want you to say (whatever is pc these days) and keep your head down and keep hacking.
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/129436-just-email-me/transcr...
Controversy is the product, not informed readers.
Would also be interested in seeing what the relative success/failures of investments with startup founders at 23 w/ 10 years experience (started programming in teams), vs 28 (who started programming at 18).
This has been true in academia for years.
It is difficult not to love things that you've discovered for yourself and learned to do as a kid. So the following:
> If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it on their own.
while not required, could be just an 'often encountered' case.
"wouldn't"?
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.
"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. "
While I 100% agree with your final above statement, I find it concerning that you would label everyone with a "CS major" as having motivations outside of a "hacker". I fail to see how they are mutually exclusive. I hope this was just a unfortunate choice of words.
To think that pg of all people fails to see the value in a CS degree is pretty hilarious though.
Many, many hackers enter CS programs precisely because they are hackers and want to learn more about computers. Others take a different path.
Some people in CS aren't into it because they love it, but because their parents want them to get a "useful" degree, or because they heard that they can get a good job. All reasonable motivations, but different from doing something due to intrinsic motivation.
Wasn't Mark Zuckerberg a CS major, and Graham praises him.
Go write some code instead.
I'm glad to see such a thorough, intelligent reply from PG. He is extremely careful and precise in his language, without coming across as robotic or inhuman. It's impressive.
But this kind of thing is going to continue to happen. There is no market for taking an honest man at his word without reading subtext into it. The opinion ecosystem is a cesspool of the worst pieces of humanity. "Reporting" on Silicon Valley from the east coast would be hubristic and a folly if the organs involved had any intention of doing so honestly.
PG is fortunate that he is self-employed which provides some barrier against the power of the easily-offended. Somehow the talkers have gained power over the doers, and it is wrong. We live in a time when a person lower in an organization could easily find himself out of a job for an off-handed remark.
Teddy Roosevelt most eloquently described what is wrong with Gawker:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
Agreed, although I don't think it's the talkers vs. the doers; it's the talkers' audiences vs. the doers.
Here's your "somehow": The lack of critical thinking skills in the general population (not new), combined with the power of instant global communication (new).
The lack of critical thinking skills leads people to seek absolutes, simplicity, and swift action in areas where shades of gray, nuance, and care should be called for. Again, nothing new here: mob justice is a well-understood, if regrettable, characteristic of human society.
Instant global communication much more swiftly connects 1) the easily-manipulated with 2) those who lack experience and maturity but who nevertheless possess the gift of persuasion.
In short, I blame the listeners, not the talkers. It would be a Good Thing(tm) if people were generally more skeptical of everything they heard and read, and even better if they knew how to ask the right questions to resolve that skepticism. It would make it harder for unworthy critics to hold power, and easier for worthy ones to be heard.
Here's another quote, from Joseph de Maistre: "Every nation gets the government it deserves." A similar thing could be said for culture and civil society.
And All Those Who Violate This Law Shall Be Marked "B" for Bigot. And Know Ye Well That Those Who Wear This Mark of B Shall Be Cast Out of Society and They Shall Be Demonized Forever....
Know Ye These Laws!
I mean, it's pretty clear that women excel at language acquisition over men, and these are just computer languages.
Let's say, ceteris paribus, 10,000 hours for adolescent boys, 8,000 hours for adolescent girls. Supposing this is the case, given the history of computer science, I doubt really any one of us is in a position to define credibility on solely that metric of time spent.
Clearly environment plays a very significant role here, and it goes without saying, given the larger cultural context of the West, that women have been excluded. I mean, Women's Suffrage was, like, a century ago.
I'm just going to assert that I'm quite postive more than half of you are talking jive, and that's not good.
Girls score better at boys in language, therefore they are biologically advantaged.
Girls score worse than boys at math, therefore they are being discriminated against and discouraged by society.
You can't argue with evidence.
What bothers me more is that damaging PG's public image is seemingly what it takes for him to prioritize writing an article about female founders.
I don't think YC needs to have affirmative action for gender; it would neither be fair or that effective. However, I think they're in the perfect position to inspire younger generations to start hacking. And this must specifically include girls.
My cofounder is a woman, who was contributing to Debian at age 15. Our first employee is a woman, with a MS from the operating systems group at MIT CSAIL.
There are lots of women hackers out there, but none of them are partners at YC. This press is disappointing, but not unexpected.
Anything about DongleGate
Anything about PronounGate
Anything about CPlusEqualityGate
But when They Came for Paul, then he wanted us to know what he said.
Sadly, I was already gone.
In fact what he did apparently was to take these sorts of threads down and encourage moderators to kill them.
Now of course, he abuses his power as publisher to host this thread where we can deify him, thank him, and and apologize to him.
Do you have evidence for this claim?
My understanding is that HN attempts to automatically detect all controversial topics and remove them from the front page. From what I saw, PronounGate got fair attention on HN, and so did CPlusEqaulityGate (relative to how much traction it got anywhere else).