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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

I have to thank Valleywag for doing me the favor of helping me prune people who lack reading comprehension from twitter. I'm still kind of amazed how so many people un-ironically cited valleywag in their tweets.

It's pretty obvious what pg was saying in this particular "smoking gun" quote: that figuring out a way to get more girls interested in programming at 13 is an incredibly important and hard problem. The willingness for people to quickly swallow and parrot a 1-dimensional narrative of "Paul Graham, sexist pig" based upon a few quotes taken out of context in a highly edited, 3rd hand rage-blog by fucking Vallywag is the type of behavior I expect from political spinmeister hacks trotted out on the 24 hour news channels, not from smart people who I respect.

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I agree, and it strikes me as ironic the massive tidal wave of hate that arises whenever anyone violates a What You Can't Say in our industry. I understand the reasons for it in general, and sometimes it's even deserved (eg confirmed cases of sexual harassment at conferences).

But it seems to me to be directly counter productive to the stated goals. We want to be more accepting and open as an industry? How about having some fucking maturity!? How about calmly discussing ideas with people that mean well? Even if they're wrong?

Even Hacker News, once the bastion of calm, rational discussion, has devolved into a bar room brawl whenever gender issues are talked about. Hundreds of posts to a topic, many really fucking mean and almost all black and white strawman bullshit, within an hour before it's manually killed off by a moderator.

There are plenty of smart, competent women (and men) in college who have the pick of their field. My sister was one. They could easily learn to code (or already do) and come here. But if we act like children at a drop of a hat, why on earth would they want to?

Your closing question really seems like the wrong one to ask to me. The bottom line is that some people do learn to code and come here nevertheless. Why on earth do they want to, and why is it that their reasoning isn't equally applicable for the complementary set of women-(and-men) you speak of?

My post was only intended to critique a very specific toxic behavior, and the closing question an attempt to demonstrate its severity.

I agree that it's the wrong question to ask in order to attempt to solve the problem in general.

But valleywag's point -- in the new, unfortunately Owen Thomas less incarnation -- is to find a quote from an engineer or executive associated with silicon valley that could be construed as sexist, or racist, or discriminatory to someone (and no worries if said quote must be taken wildly out of context) then pitch a fit about it. For a perfect example from [1], see [2]. So Nitashu happened upon Paul wondering about the low presence of women in the engineer pipeline and it was perfect. They are people who stole the fox news business model and pointed it at silicon valley.

Even when the complaints are legitimate, there's plenty to complain about in the valley, but characterizing us via the worst examples you can find is their stock in trade. A good 2014 resolution is to stop hoping Sam or Nitashu will turn into Owen and to ignore gawker.

[1] http://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-de...

[2] http://valleywag.gawker.com/twitter-employees-dont-talk-abou...

Right, but when he had a chance to comment again to defend his statements, he instead went after the angle of saving himself rather than addressing the issue at the core.

He could have talked about the work he's doing to help girls learn to code. He could have talked about others' work to help girls learn code. He could have talked about how he is not biased towards men.

Instead, he just attacked journalists in general and didn't bother to address the root problem. It's all about saving oneself.

Where did this happen? This article is a blog by Fred Wilson.

The root problem is that when he tried talking about the root problem, his words were taken out of context and used against him. There's no way to win with character assassins and tabloids, and calling them out as people who don't discuss issues in good faith is the best you can do.

I always cringe when someone famous gets attacked by the political correctness Nazis -- usually the reaction by them is appeasement, which only makes the general cultural situation worse.

Nazi is the correct term, because political correctness is really just a tool, a fascist like device, to shut down discourse and debate.

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