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Comment by tomhoward | Hacker News Reader

The claim we’re addressing in this subthread is that in 2012 YC knowingly invested in a company that intended to be predatory towards military personnel, such that it would end up being shut down by regulators, implying that YC was both deeply unethical and deeply stupid. Are we really to believe that YC was being as unethical and stupid as this claim requires us to?

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"Knowing," "intended [at the time]", "would end up being shut down by regulators" are all your embellishments. The claim is "YC funded a payday lender that targeted active duty military service members." As far as I can tell, that is true, regardless of how pure anyone's intentions were at the time. The defense on offer is that the founders left the company between funding and now, but it is not very compelling given the timelines.

The last part of that comment is quite obtuse. Can you state simply and clearly, what, if anything, YC did that was unethical?

"Unethical" again another embellishment. Perhaps this was simply a case of poor judgment, which isn't unethical to have.

OK then. You weren't the root commenter, but it's pretty clear the root comment and the reply to dang were attempting to pin an accusation of unethical conduct on YC. But never mind.

There of course is another possibility: the founding team in 2011 was proposing a concept that seemed ethical and an improvement over payday lending options that existed at the time, but over time the company's idea or execution changed for some reason, in which case, there was neither poor ethics nor poor judgement on YC's part.

Occam's razor would require us to accept this explanation unless there was substantive evidence for another scenario.

I don’t see the Occam’s razor requires us to accept that over someone simply misrepresenting what their plans were.

By definition, Occam's razor requires us to believe that founders sincerely intended to do what they said they planned to do, unless there is evidence to the contrary.

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