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Comment by alecdbrooks | Hacker News Reader

>And what exactly is wrong with the "I have black friends" defense? Are you trying to say that pg is friends with someone in spite of his supposed hateful nature? That he's somehow looked past the person's "shortcomings"?

The critics I've read aren't saying pg has a hateful nature. They're saying that he hasn't fully accounted for his unconscious biases.

Given that everyone's friends have actual shortcomings, it doesn't seem a stretch to say that people are friends with people they imagine to have shortcomings because of an unconscious bias.

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>The critics I've read aren't saying pg has a hateful nature. They're saying that he hasn't fully accounted for his unconscious biases.

I've seen a lot of Twitter rage that is rather like this one: https://twitter.com/monteiro/status/416728196503973888

Nobody can ever account for all unconscious bias. It's the original sin doctrine of the social justice warrior community.

"Nobody can ever account for all bugs. It's the original sin doctrine of the programming community."

I'm not saying Graham should drop everything until every last bias is gone. I'm saying he shouldn't act as though sexism is a solved problem at YCombinator just because the percentage of female founders is up and it has women as partners.

How is he supposed to "fix" sexism at YC when no one is capable of identifying instances of it? Gender distributions isn't proof of sexism _at YC_. As PG has stated, YC is too far removed from the problem to be useful in combating sexism as shown by imbalanced gender distributions. So what do you expect YC to do in this case?

> "So what do you expect YC to do in this case?"

I believe the standard request is:

> "If there was just the pro-activity line of attack, if it was like, "OK, yes, women aren't set up to be startup founders at the level we want." What would be lost if Y Combinator was more proactive about it? About lowering standards or something like that? Or recruiting women or something, like any of those options?"

How is he acting as though sexism is a "solved problem"?

The reasons I wrote "he's acting as though sexism is a solved problem at YCombinator" are because none of his suggested solutions are about sexism at YC and this line: "More thoughtful people were willing to concede YC wasn't biased against women."

Edit: He is willing to do more about the problem generally, and I give him credit for that.

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