Paul Graham & Sexism: Just One More Distraction From Real Work
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As I recall last time PG was honest about founders with heavy accents not doing well due to communication problems he attacked as well. American culture (founded on freedom of expression) has turned into a culture of witch hunts and public shaming. Leading more people to simply stop talking about important and many times controversial topics. From freedom of expression to fear of expression, who's the witch hunt's next victim?
I think my wife is pretty awesome and capable of things I would not be able to do. Am I sexist for talking about it?
I think in the source PG even says that women are good (maybe better) than men at business focused startups. Or will the world not be balanced until just as many women are making hot or not for XYZ in the off hours
Bone-headed people say bone-headed things and try to back them up with "common knowledge" that's just misinformation rooted in traditional views.
In regards to your wife, that can be different. I assume you're aren't saying things like "she's good at juggling because she's a woman" and instead just "she's good at juggling because she, as one individual, is good at juggling." My wife is amazing at art. It's not because she's a woman but because she's spent time practicing.
As much as I believe in the 'nurture' argument, given that our brains are wired very differently based on gender, I find it difficult to believe that this won't cause differences in both desire and aptitude. It seems absurd to me that so many smart people have to make the nurture XOR nature argument, and that there are so few people making nurture AND nature arguments.
Adjunct to this is that old chestnut about how we socialise girls to like toys they can care for and boys to like cars. Here we also now have evidence that suggests that we are born this way and the socialisation is just on top of what we started with [1].
I'm not trying to make the argument that it is more nature than nurture or that I know the precise underpinnings of a decent model. I just think that we needlessly politicise something which in my opinion will eventually be in the reach of empiricism.
I hope that the open-minded liberals will fare better than traditionalists in managing the separation between science and their own values.
[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/12/male-and-f...
You do realize that brains change in response to their experiences, right? That there are differences says nothing about whether the differences come from being treated differently by society.
And regardless, to the extent that there are genetic differences (as there certainly are), we still have no credible way to map those differences to phenotypes as complex and deep into development as "ability to program".
That said, if programming involved a lot of playing with toy cars, you might have the beginnings of an argument.
You are setting up a non-falsifiable belief system that asserts that men and women cannot be different above the neck. If that's what lets you sleep at night, who am I to deny you your comforting faith?
But you are fighting against mountains of evidence for cognitive differences between men and women. Are they all cultural? I'm friends with a few post-treatment transgendered people, and I'm inclined to believe at least that hormones have a powerful impact on personality.
Just because we haven't found a falsifiable way to test a hypothesis doesn't mean you can take "mountains" of research that make very specific conclusions and randomly apply them to whatever generalization you want to.
I posted this (admittedly incomplete) list of resources down the page, but let it not be said that I did not do my anti-progressive duty today: http://jaymans.wordpress.com/hbd-fundamentals/#sex
>> You do realize that brains change in response to their experiences, right?
I made the argument that it's a combination of both nurture and nature. To quote myself: "It seems absurd to me that [...] there are so few people making nurture AND nature arguments."
What does the nurture argument mean to you other than the idea that are brains change as a result of experience?
I simply disagree that nurture and nature are mutually exclusive. Nature means that there might also be gene differences which cause different brains to start with or the later production of brain-altering hormones.
>> we still have no credible way to map those differences to phenotypes as complex and deep into development as "ability to program".
Likewise, I already said: "I'm not trying to make the argument that [...] I know the precise underpinnings of a decent model."
>> That said, if programming involved a lot of playing with toy cars, you might have the beginnings of an argument.
Why are you so obtuse? I did not make the argument that programming has anything to do with toy cars. I responded to a post which implies the differences between men and women are all stereotypes and that the differences which do exist are individual and bear no relation to their gender.
My argument is this:
1. Our brains are physically different.
2. Given that our brains are wired differently, it's highly unlikely for there to not also be differences in personality, desire and aptitude.
3. I agree with the nurture argument.
4. I also agree with the nature argument.
5. I think the burden of proof is with those that believe these are mutually exclusive to prove that this is the case.
6. In this context, I believe that both nature and nurture cause differences in society.
7. It looks like there are brain differences in boy/girl infants previous to socialisation not just in humans but also in monkeys.
8. I make a point that there is not enough empirical evidence right now for anybody to create a precise model of what is happening.
9. I make the point that we needlessly politicise the argument when we should just wait for science to come to some kind of agreement.
10. I make the point that it's not just traditionalists that are having difficulty with ingesting scientific results. I value those that can stop and change their value system based on any facts that they receive.
This we can both agree with. I'd like to leave it at that.
It may not be obvious to you, but there is a huge amount of uncertainty about the actual amount and severity of differences. One of the many problems with even ascertaining the nature of those differences is the inherent difficulty of separating culture from biology, and in biology interpreting the actual meaning of physical differences. Combine that with the fact that most studies conducted in these areas have a huge bias in one way or the other and are designed to mostly further the agendas of certain interest groups, or in the absence of that: to make for interesting headlines in popular magazines.
The "pointing out of differences" is mostly an act of voicing a certain kind of opinion at best, sometimes this opinion is disguised as fact-like by meaningless cave-dweller analogies and other unscientific bullshit that is usually trotted out to support the status quo of gender separation. But even if, by some miracle, you could obtain absolutely untainted data on this, it would still be a matter of statistics and there are still way too many variables involved.
The insidious nature of differences between men and women is that they become whatever society says they should be. In this way the expectation that CS is uncool and unsuited for women becomes fact simply by virtue of being declared a fact. Social expectations and feedback statistically play a huge role in people's choices.
> I think my wife is pretty awesome and capable of things I would not be able to do.
This isn't about your wife, but since you brought it up: not all women are good at the things your wife is good at. Conversely, not all men are like you. You are both a product of not only genetics, but also social pressures and expectations, internal mental states, and subject to different kinds of support for capabilities your environment deems appropriate for your roles in society. Even things where you might be convinced they are down to gender differences might conceivably be very different if you had grown up in a different culture.
> Am I sexist for talking about it?
You are certainly someone with strong opinions about what traits are linked to which gender, so yes, you are sexist in a way that you impose an artificial segregation unto the world that lines up with your values. It seems (although implicitly) that you are more likely to support people doing things you deem to be gender-appropriate and more likely to discourage people from doing something which you judge to be not a good fit because of your sex.
If you look at cultures of segregation historically, they often did attribute certain core skills even to the out-group. It was judged that non-whites, non-arians, females, homosexuals, or whatever group was defined as "different" did in fact have certain hard-wired capabilities (although not always good ones).
> I think in the source PG even says that women are good (maybe better) than men at business focused startups.
It may not sound problematic to have this view, unless you are a woman hacker standing in front of a VC who is predisposed against accepting your company into the program on account of judging you unfit to program. But meeting someone with the power to make decisions about your future who explicitly declared these views beforehand is not even the worst case. The worst case would be meeting someone who holds these views but isn't conscious of them.
But, to make sure, this is not a comment intended to be about Paul Graham specifically. I think as far as that interview is concerned, this whole discussion is a huge waste of time.
> Or will the world not be balanced until just as many women are making hot or not for XYZ in the off hours
It's not just a matter of balance. It's about two things mainly. First, many people (including me) would prefer a world where certain voices and talents are not missing or even actively silenced. Could a world without women hackers succeed? Certainly. By the same token, so could a world without black hackers, gay hackers, or non-american hackers. It's just not the world I'd like to live in, and I do believe such a segregated world would miss out on a lot of important developments.
Secondly, taking up the point from above, even in a world where a myriad cultural factors are stacked against them, sometimes women hackers emerge and do make it to critical junctions. At these points it's hugely disappointing to be turned back because they don't fit the profile for some superficial reason.
Is severity the right word here? It seems like you entered the conversation with this implication that heterogeneity was a bad thing - but I can't tell whether this was accidental.
>> Combine that with the fact that most studies conducted in these areas have a huge bias in one way or the other and are designed to mostly further the agendas of certain interest groups, or in the absence of that: to make for interesting headlines in popular magazines.
That's interesting if it's true. However, it's the sort of allegation that reminds me of this acquired derogatory meaning which the term "conspiracy theory" took on. May you expand? Is this just a feeling you have, or do you have concrete samples from the scientific world, or even somebody that shares this view who may be trusted on matters such as this?
Probably not. You can replace it with "amplitude" or "magnitude" if you like.
Speaking of poor word choices, I strongly disagree with your usage of heterogeneity ;)
> Is this just a feeling you have, or do you have concrete samples from the scientific world, or even somebody that shares this view who may be trusted on matters such as this?
There is some material that can be googled with terms like "gender bias in research" on similar terms. For a popularized take on a part of the dynamic, start here: http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/421746.article
But an even better method would be to simply engage in critical observation. The next time a big study announces (and most likely confirms already expected) gender differences, look at who is doing the study. Check whether the methodology is even half-way sound, if there were enough test subjects and look at how they were recruited. Especially in psychological studies, search for ways the study might have been primed. Also, what's the track record of the researchers themselves, is this a study to follow up on previously uttered extreme claims? Look for cultural bias. Look for warning signs such as the invocation of fictitious prehistorical "facts". Look at the assumptions behind the study, and at the way the media spins the results to conform with accepted stereotypes.
In the end, no, you will probably choose to trust people and researchers who already agree with you. But it's worth a shot taking a look behind the scenes of these big "scientific explanations" that seem to be evolutionary (=pop) psychological justifications for convenient cultural norms.
I am somewhat pessimistic about finding common ground if you self-identify as a religious or conservative person, however, this is a point where we might start:
Discard science and evidence, discard models and reasoning, discard culture. Let's just talk about people. In the parent post I already talked about female programmers being saddled with additional hurdles. Obviously we can agree that this is a bad thing. The only other thing we should probably agree on is the idea that female voices are somewhat missing in our hacker culture, based on the assertion it'd be a richer and more prolific culture if we worked even a little bit on seizing the incessant discouragement of women to enter this profession. That's really it, the whole thing. I'm not even talking about this controversial notion of active encouragement, let's just stop the discouragement.
Is it really wrong to say that brunettes could be better or worse (in general) at one thing or another? Is it haircolourist to even point out that blondes and brunettes are different?
I think my brunette life partner is pretty awesome and capable of things I would not be able to do. Am I haircolourist for talking about it?
If we truly were post-sexism, it would be as weird as that ^ to divide people by gender when talking about things that have absolutely nothing to do with their gender. Like programming.
Hair color, as far as we know, is just about pigment. Sex differences go much, much deeper.
Yes to both questions. On the other hand, it's science[1][2]! There's lots of proven differences in personality and ability between the sexes.
When the official ideology is against reality, you have to choose between being a "good person" and a good scientist. It's best for your career to choose the first.
[1] http://jaymans.wordpress.com/hbd-fundamentals/#sex
[2] http://www.aei-ideas.org/2012/09/2012-sat-test-results-a-hug...
Unless your career is in something like insurance, medicine, or any field where those differences actually matter.
Yes, there are differences between the genders recorded by science - but you don't have to choose between science and being a good person. Science doesn't compel anyone to attempt to apply statistical differences over a large group to individuals.
Furthermore, a difference that is proven now proves nothing other than the current state of affairs. It doesn't dictate what things would be if playing fields were more level, nor does it dictate how things should be or how things will be.
Who knows. But is that something PG actually said?
Doesn't quite sound like it, from my reading of the interview excerpt.
About the interview as a whole? Sadly, I think the whole interview was pretty boring, and the discrimination stuff was the most interesting part of it. Everything else Graham had to say, it seemed like he had said elsewhere before. I'm not criticizing Paul Graham here: I think he made the rest of his points effectively and was well-tuned to the audience.
Ironically, Graham spends some time later in the interview talking about "reputation as potential energy" (which rings true to me), and how that energy is part of what makes people "attack" him and YC --- presumably, he means that the energy he has captured is threatening to people. I wonder if he had fielded that question first, before the discrimination thing, if he might have said something different about women in tech.
I'm joking of course (about the barn boss) but the truth is it's a good sign when you get to the point where people analyze and give a shit about every word that comes out of your mouth. You can then move the needle. I say ignore the controversy and use it to your advantage.
[1] Remember the dweeb that built the radio and took down the goon with an explosion?
The "'hell hath no fury like a woman scored' thing"? That's an offensive thing to say in this context.
From PG's interview:
>Does YC discriminate against female founders?
>I'm almost certain that we don't discriminate against female founders because I would know from looking at the ones we missed. [...]
That's not evidence, because YC boosts the success rate of those who get in.
That said, I agree with the idea that hacker culture is not something a CS major can impart, and that it helps to have an early start.
I think Graham would have been better off saying "I don't think we discriminate, here's why, and I don't know why the gender imbalance exists". Instead, he overexplained.
Well it depends what age group you're talking about. He says the gender imbalance in 20 somethings is due to a gender imbalance in teens (which just assumes that time spent in your teens is predictive of career choice and skill level), and he doesn't know why the teen imbalance exists, but it needs to be fixed.
I don't see how that's over explaining. If you didn't study math or science in highschool, you probably won't be a physicist either.
You can also become a physicist later in life, but it's rare.
Hacker culture isn't ageist. Hacker culture doesn't give a shit whether you're male, female, 86 or 15.
Technology didn't develop an ageism problem on its own. It inherited the narcissism and chickenhawking of the old-style MBA culture that colonized it. I get into it in this blog post: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/12/14/vc-istan-6-t...
Age discrimination didn't come from us, not originally. It was imposed on us by a bunch of clueless, uncultured moneymen who somehow decided it shouldn't be socially acceptable to be old and a full-time programmer. That age discrimination works immensely to the benefit of the leading VCs, as well, because of the time pressure that an artificially shortened career imposes.
STRONG DISAGREE.
Speaking as someone who got a home computer at eight, back when it was still extremely uncommon, and who never stopped programming, I actually think we vastly overvalue this whole "you have to have been hacking since age 13" angle. There are so many other elements that go into actually delivering solid product that I just don't think we can point to that as the issue to focus on.
This is a symptom of a problem, not a qualification of proficiency.
I'm a woman and at age 13 I was, if not actually "hacking", at least teaching myself to code simple games/graphics. However, "delivering solid product" is a very big leap from that. I'll never be an elite ninja rock star coder or a big name entrepreneur.
Conversely, there are plenty of posts on HN from people, mostly 20-something and male, saying they just taught themselves to code from scratch within the past year. Some of those people are already doing pretty damn awesome things, and thankfully they usually get encouraging feedback rather than told they'll never make it because they weren't geeky enough in junior high.
(And I was a big nerd all through school, so believe me, I'd love that to be a meaningful qualification!)
Never let a good crisis go to waste as the saying goes.
On another note, I just realized that Medium.com is absolutely inundated with blog entries about pg's statements. Wow.
The author says founders can be much older than 23, so given that we have a ten year lag time, we can start with people will over 13.
pg: x=13 y=23 Therefore z=y-x=10.
Author: No, y=40 Therefore x=y-10=30.
There's a pretty clear flaw in the author's reasoning here. Why say x=10 when you've just rejected the value from which that ten was calculated?
Given equal exposure to the subject matter, I fail to see how a male or female subject would react differently to the idea of learning that subject. This, of course, assuming that both the male and female subjects got to that moment in time with a similar educational and perhaps even cultural frame of reference.
If a mother only ever bought a little girl frilly pink and shiny things, well, it is probably unlikely that as a teenage girl or an adult woman she would even remotely show interest in learning more technical subjects. She will probably be a dancer and go into the arts or some other less "brainy" occupation. That's not to say that there aren't exceptions to this, but they are probably few and far between.
The same is true of boys. If they are brought-up in front of a playstation, shooting at things, playing sports, and well outside of more academically focused areas he will probably grow up to be a jock and then move on to careers that do well when you use half your brain. Hell, he might even go into sales!
Things are vastly different if you feed your kids a constant diet of what they should be learning in order to operate at a different level when they are older. My teenage son finished MIT's CS 6.00.1x course just a few weeks ago. That did not happen magically. That was a lot of work. For me and for him! And that also required a lot of work to get to the point where he could even be shoved into that end of the pool.
My little girl is too young to think about formal learning of these kinds of subject, but this year she got introduced to Lego robotics and is starting to like it. Yet, the situation is exactly the same: It requires a ton of time and dedication on my part --as the designated nerd at home-- to keep her exposed to such subjects and make it fun. I have to get silly while teaching something useful. I have to figure out ways to make robotics fun, silly, exciting and something she wants to do. We don't buy lots of silly frilly things for her. That said, I have to tell you, it is hard to fight both genetics and exposure to such things through her peers.
I guess my message is that parents needs to be very engaged and active in bringing up a child into the sciences and technology. It will not happen by osmosis. And, I really don't think gender makes a huge difference. It might change the approach, but I don't think it is the primary determinant of success or failure.
One way I've explained this in the past to friends who marvel at what my kids are doing is that this is like a Formula 1 car drafting a car in front of them. You need to drive well and use a lot of effort to get close enough to be within the zone where drafting happens. Up until that point you are using a lot more energy to chase the car in front of you. Once you get into the drafting zone you need less power to maintain the same speed. Yet, you still need that foot solidly planted on the accelerator.
With kids you have to push, push, push. I have navigated through really frustrating moments when I've gotten angry because I couldn't understand why he (my oldest son) didn't just grab that book I bought for him and launched himself into software development nirvana. Of course, I always reflected upon these things and never externalized them --not much of a motivator to yell and scream at your kid about learning something-- and realized that (a) he is still young and (b) we are not in the "draft zone" yet. It'll take a lot more effort --and this is different from kid to kid-- to get him into the "draft zone". Once we reach that zone it will require a lot less energy on my part and, if interested, he will ultimately need virtually no support from me.
This is where I look at some of the things being said about STEM education and can't help but think we are just throwing money into a big bonfire. You can't force people into learning anything. A lot of my kid's friends are, well, jocks or exhibit no interest in anything at all. They are navigating through school with no guidance or encouragement in any direction whatsoever. You can't just throw money at that and expect things to change. For most kids it requires far more work than can be done during the time they are at school. Yes, of course, there are a few kids in every sample group that need almost zero work. These kids get hooked on a subject like programming and just go, go , go. Most kids are not like that. Just like most successful businesses did not get launched with a long coding session over a weekend while eating popcorn.
Going back to my little girl, she is not seriously exposed to Lego robotics. In fact, our living room table is an official FLL table with the official field mat and everything. Yes, we are serious about this. I'd rather have a learning environment in my living room than a fancy dinning room table.
As far as why there aren't more women in tech today. I don't have the answer for that. I only know that when I was a teenager girls mostly did different stuff. Not because they were being forced away from tech, they simply showed no interest in what we were doing. My guess is that it all came from home. So, as our culture changes so will that aspect of things.
Evolution?
I'm not PG's biggest fan, although I admire his Lisp chops. Still, this attack on him is ridiculous. The interview shows him as a decent guy admitting he can't solve a difficult and complicated problem. Really, my feeling is, "Nothing to see here, move along".
The truth is that even if Paul Graham were sexist, that wouldn't be such a big deal if the startup industry were healthy, because the biases of one influential individual shouldn't matter.
Rather, the VC-funded world is seriously and systemically ill-- and the rarity of female founders is a symptom of that sickness-- and PG is just being made (completely unreasonably, IMO) a lightning rod, even though he's clearly one of the more reasonable (and probably one of the less sexist/racist/classist) investors out there.
It's something about software development in general; it's not the fault of VCs (which I'm not a fan of either).
One of the issues that software development has, I think, is the combination of hard-to-audit work with a short audit cycle. Most professionals get a couple years of work done before they're subjected to a serious, "are you capable of moving up?" audit. Lawyers are tracked for partnership or out at 4 years, which means they get a large number of chances to prove that they're partner material, and the long audit cycle takes out a lot of the noise. In software engineering, especially with the fast-firing culture, there's less time to prove oneself, and you have to start beating your chest and looking impressive before you have time to actually do something impressive. This tends to favor people with large egos, which turns a lot of women off to the industry.
Are also less likely to need what YC offers. I know this because I am one of the people that help those younger people because of what I know already that they don't.
I've actually run into people that I've helped that pay my bill by using a bookeeping service that they hire and outsource. While I am sure there are many reasons to do this (investors demand etc.) that was something that when you are bootstrapping (with the amount of bills you have to pay) you can just do in a few hours on the side generally. (This is separate from a payroll service which is something that is time consuming and a pain for sure.)
I do think that PG has been tied in (probably not through any fault of his own) with the age-discrimination culture of the Valley. But that's not PG's fault and he can't really do anything about it anyway.
Something ugly is happening in America. If Paul Graham worked for someone else, he'd be fired by now[1]. That's sad, as everything he's said has been thoughtful and in good faith. None of it should be out of bounds for adult discussion.
We live in a time when it's best to shut up if you know what's good for you. And that's sad.
[1] http://handleshaus.wordpress.com/2013/12/26/bullied-and-badg...
Secondly, I agree it is useful to introspect into tech culture and hiring practices to make sure we are not turning away good candidates. But we cannot judge the fairness of a hiring process solely by results because the hiring process doesn't control the larger culture that a person grows up in. If the cartoons kids watch at age 8 only have pimply male geeks in tech roles and as a result your startup has a skewed gender ratio 14 years later, that doesn't make the startup founders a witch, oops I mean sexist.
Changing the culture is a monumental task, but the startup community is not shying away from it. They are investing in early childhood education and other initiatives to give all people the opportunity to code. But the fruits of these projects will be long-term.
In the meantime, I want people to be able to discuss the issue openly and honestly without being attacked/fired, because I believe that makes us most effective and I believe that is what is right. The SJWs looking to burn witches aren't adding anything and they can go to hell.
It is simply not true that cartoon representations of computer programmers are a necessary component of an effective startup hacker.
Changing the culture is indeed a monumental task, but the startup community seems to be embracing the current culture and back-rationalizing its attributes. You see this when you see people describe how getting started at age 13 is somehow important to building CRUD websites.
If something is a positive for everybody who believes the "right" way and negative for everybody else, I tend to believe that's a net negative because it makes us dumber in the aggregate.
However, I agree to an extent with everything after that.
Both the Koch brothers and PG have enabled a few people to become rather rich. Has PG/YC done any of the things that we dislike the Koch brothers for? Have they done things like lobby against climate change legislation?