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I think this piece acts as a reductio ad absurdum of some of its premises. When your chain of reasoning leads you to the conclusion that "women are likely to br

I think this piece acts as a reductio ad absurdum of some of its premises. When your chain of reasoning leads you to the conclusion that "women are likely to bring diversity to a male founding team, and that’s not what founding teams need" it should be obvious that something has gone wrong, just as you would conclude after a mathematical chain of reasoning yields the conclusion "X is both even and odd." In other words, this is an example of the pernicious spread of a purely financial-utility-maximizing perspective on decision making within the startup culture which deliberately ignores the necessity of making sure that all of our actions stay within desirable moral parameters. The observation that a smaller percentage of women than men in the current cultural context feel motivated to create and work in startups should not be a justification for ignoring the issue; it is a justification for interrogating our sociocultural organization, and a motivation for directing energy and resources towards making startups a positive force for changing prevailing cultural patterns. Entrepreneurship is about creating value and the reductionist idea that only financial value matters must always be fought vigorously.

cousin_it 15y ago
> I think this piece acts as a reductio ad absurdum of some of its premises. When your chain of reasoning leads you to the conclusion that "women are likely to bring diversity to a male founding team, and that’s not what founding teams need" it should be obvious that something has gone wrong Nooo! Reductio ad absurdum means "obtaining two statements that contradict each other", not "obtaining a statement that sounds immoral to me". If the latter were valid reasoning, previous generations could have used it to prove the existence of god, because disbelieving in god was immoral to them. I guess we could call such arguments "reduction to enemy" instead.
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yummyfajitas 15y ago
Based on Trunk's reasoning, diversity would be just as harmful to creating value for the customer as it would be to creating financial value. Also, you are misusing the term "reducto ad absurdum". Trunk's reasoning merely shows that there is a tradeoff to be made between value creation and diversity (i.e., more diversity -> less value). This is a positive (factual) claim. The fact that your moral values lead you to believe that startups should choose less value and more diversity does not negate this claim.

cousin_it 15y ago

> I think this piece acts as a reductio ad absurdum of some of its premises. When your chain of reasoning leads you to the conclusion that "women are likely to bring diversity to a male founding team, and that’s not what founding teams need" it should be obvious that something has gone wrong Nooo! Reductio ad absurdum means "obtaining two statements that contradict each other", not "obtaining a statement that sounds immoral to me". If the latter were valid reasoning, previous generations could have used it to prove the existence of god, because disbelieving in god was immoral to them. I guess we could call such arguments "reduction to enemy" instead.

deleted 15y ago
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yummyfajitas 15y ago

Based on Trunk's reasoning, diversity would be just as harmful to creating value for the customer as it would be to creating financial value. Also, you are misusing the term "reducto ad absurdum". Trunk's reasoning merely shows that there is a tradeoff to be made between value creation and diversity (i.e., more diversity -> less value). This is a positive (factual) claim. The fact that your moral values lead you to believe that startups should choose less value and more diversity does not negate this claim.