16 ms·

On The Information and How We Operate

119 points by IBM 13y ago

waterlesscloud 13y ago
Well, the problem here is that "these" very clearly did refer to something, and anyone who doesn't think so might not be someone you want editing. Apparently they still don't think it referred to anything, which is completely mind-boggling. The correct response here would have been to admit the mistake and apologize for it. As it is, it's hard to take them as any sort of serious journalists now.
- hamburglar 13y ago
  Yeah, the notion that "these" didn't refer to "women who apply to YC and aren't already hackers" is just silly when you read the actual transcript. She may as well have said "the 'these women' referred to something we edited out, making it confusing, so we decided the quote was better if it appeared to mean 'all women'".
  - samstave 13y ago
    The editing made the whole context much more sensationalist and generalized. This simply removes all credibility for this woman in my eyes. "Hey, just by removing the word "these" we can make this quote look as though it refers to half the population!" Yeah - how about this: Original: Just by this manipulation of a quote, a journalist has ruined trust in her journalistic integrity Vs: Just by this manipulation of a quote, a journalist has ruined trust in journalistic integrity
sillysaurus2 13y ago
We edited a bit around some of Mr. Graham’s quotes on female founders. Specifically, we edited a “these” from the quote. The reason was simple. The “these” didn’t refer to anything. What pg actually said was, "We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years." Lessin is saying removing "these" doesn't change the meaning. I think that's absurd, to put it mildly.
- 001sky 13y ago
  Exactly. Its not going to refer to "anything" when <it was taken out of context>. Had it been there, the lack of context would have been implied... Of course, then it is no longer a sound-bite. Which kills the PR value of the whole enterprise.
- sneak 13y ago
  Yeah, fuck these people. That's just insulting to our intelligence.
- gbog 13y ago
  It is not absurd, it is plain dishonest.
- ceol 13y ago
  Could you explain how the meaning of his statement changed so drastically from the inclusion of the word "these"? The question asked about women who are not founders, not women who are not programmers. It seems fitting to remove it, since it would feel out of place when quoted, but it seems the point of his statement is there.
  - thatthatis 13y ago
    Q: What about lowering the bar now? A1: There's nothing we can do to help women become hacker-founders. A2: To help women become hacker-founders, we have to start with the group we'd be admitting in 10 years. the "these" changes it from: "women can't be helped" to "you can't fix the problem for this generation, you can only fix the problem for the next generation" One says "it's a problem of gender" the other says "it's a problem of sequencing"
    - ceol 13y ago
      Doesn't the second one still say it's a problem of gender? I'm not seeing how the introduction of the word "these" adds all of that additional stuff you're saying. All it does is take the statement from "all women" to "all women who we could recruit to be founders." But in the context of the discussion, he meant the same thing: He feels women do not want to be founders.
eCa 13y ago
> We edited some of Mr. Graham’s quotes on female founders. If you quote someone you quote them, you don't remove certain words because they don't "refer to anything". If you leave something out you put in "[...]". What does "a bit around" mean anyway?
- Crito 13y ago
  The Reuters Handbook of Journalism on quoting: "Quotes are sacrosanct. They must never be altered other than to delete a redundant word or clause, and then only if the deletion does not alter the sense of the quote in any way. Selective use of quotes can be unbalanced. Be sure that quotes you use are representative of what the speaker is saying and that you describe body language (a smile or a wink) that may affect the sense of what is being reported. When quoting an individual always give the context or circumstances of the quote. It is not our job to make people look good by cleaning up inelegant turns of phrase, nor is it our job to expose them to ridicule by running such quotes. In most cases, this dilemma can be resolved by paraphrase and reported speech. Where it cannot, reporters should consult a more senior journalist to discuss whether the quote can be run verbatim. Correcting a grammatical error in a quote may be valid, but rewording an entire phrase is not. When translating quotes from one language into another, we should do so in an idiomatic way rather than with pedantic literalness. Care must be taken to ensure that the tone of the translation is equivalent to the tone of the original. Beware of translating quotes in newspaper pickups back into the original language of the source. If a French politician gives an interview to an American newspaper, it is almost certain that the translation back into French will be wrong and in some cases the quote could be very different. In such cases, the fewer quotes and the more reported speech, the better." http://handbook.reuters.com/?title=Accuracy#Quotes http://handbook.reuters.com/?title=Accuracy#Quotes Basically minimal editing is acceptable, so long as you remain very faithful to the original quote. If the original quote is too broken to be published, then don't quote it; instead paraphrase it in your own words.
- coffeeaddicted 13y ago
  Editing sentences in interviews is not unusual. Most people don't talk like they write, so cleaning up what they said can be the fair thing to do. But it doesn't cover changing the meaning of a sentence like in this case.
jhonovich 13y ago
Is this claim true? "Mr. Graham didn’t object to anything in the story, or the fact we published it in the first place, until Valleywag wrote about the story days later."
hugi 13y ago
"We edited a bit around some quotes"… This passes for journalism?
- schainks 13y ago
  My sentiment exactly. If journalists want to help people through their craft with integrity, these kinds of modifications should be transparently pointed out to the reader. Oh, wait! There's MLA formatting for that: "We can't make . . . women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years."
- GrinningFool 13y ago
  This is OK in journalism - but there is very specific protocol around it that makes it OK. If you remove text, you indicate that you've done so, like so: "No, the problem is these women are not by the time get to 23" should have become "No, the problem is ... women are not by the time get to 23" Thus indicating to the readers that some information had been removed. It's still a bit of an ugly trick, but it's acceptable because it tells the reader that this isn't the full, in-context quote. As I've said in previous comments, this is what can happen when people without journalistic training present themselves as journalists. They publish unaware of these rules. Particularly the subtle, nuanced rules - like inserting an ellipsis when removing text from a quote, or using brackets to indicate inserting text for clarity that the source didn't provide. And so "the problem is women are not by the time they get to 23" blows up into a big firestorm -- first because the public trusted and assumed that these rules were followed, then later when we discovered that they were not. It's unclear to me why they didn't just say "Oops, we did selectively quote and it appears we didn't handle it well. Our bad." It does appear to be an honest mistake made in ignorance.
anaphor 13y ago
I don't think "these" was supposed to be referring to anything in the sentence or around the sentence there. It was being used as sort of a quantifier, as in "there are some women who haven't been hacking and we cannot make them see things as a hacker". Of course "these women" refers to something different than "women". i.e. "for all women who have not been hacking for at least 10 years, it is not possible to make them see things as a hacker" vs. "for all women, it is not possible to make them see things as a hacker". You can clearly see they mean two very different things because in the first one you are quantifying over a proper subset of women.
maillure 13y ago
This seems like a non-apology. In my opinion, it seems like you ("The Information") made a colossal mistake by editing out a key word in a sentence, profoundly changing its meaning, and worse, doing this on a hot-button topic in a way that attempts to raise stink. If this is true, shame on you.
groups 13y ago
It's fine to edit for length and clarity if you recognize that by removing context you're creating a new context. It's up to the editor to be careful. The editor can't say "I am the editor and I have perfectly preserved pg's comments" knowing that valleywag will call him a sexist, when the editor knows him not to be one. If the editor thinks pg is, they should talk. I'm convinced by pg's rebuttal.
milkshakes 13y ago
> In our interview, which was explicitly introduced as an edited transcript, we made edits for clarity and length. How, exactly, is the edited version more clear?
karterk 13y ago
I'm sorry, but you just can't "edit" quotes - that's just bad journalism. They wanted a sensational story that will rake in pageviews, and have conveniently slanted the quotes towards that. Pathetic to say the least.
- crassus 13y ago
  I disagree with this. I've seen blogs use completely unedited interviews with ideological enemies, leaving in "ums" and "you knows?" and it looks terrible. Probably every decent interview you've ever seen was lightly edited.
  - thatswrong0 13y ago
    It makes sense to get rid of most "ums" and "you knows?". For the most part they don't require judgment; most cases are just useless artifacts of speech. Removing "these" from the a middle of a sentence is not nearly so easy. "These" generally refers to something and it can't be removed so easily just because an editor thinks that it can be. In this case, removing "these" changed the sentence to be a general statement about women from a statement amount a subset of women. This obviously should not be removed, regardless of the lack of a specific reference from "these". Leave the judgment to the reader.
deleted 13y ago
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georgemcbay 13y ago
Why can't people just be wrong anymore (and admit to it)? I'm sure there's some amount of rose-tinted glasses going on here but as a 40 year old I seem to remember a now long-lost past when people could more readily issue a mea culpa, promise to try harder and everyone could move along without every discussion turning into a battle where the person who fucked up expends massive amounts of energy trying to prove they didn't fuck up by selectively choosing to cling on to ways they could possibly weasel out of the issue without actually saying they made an error in judgement (or allowed one to be made on their watch). To be fully fair, the sincere mea culpa does still occur sometimes and we've even seen it here on HN with some startups/founders who fucked up, but it happens so rarely now that when I see those exceptions that prove the rule they are surprising, which is sad. Ignoring the human element, this sort of non-apology response isn't even a good strategy if you look at things in a purely Machiavellian way. "Yeah, sorry, I fucked up, I'll fix this" gains you a bunch of goodwill, repairs reputation and trust (so long as you aren't fucking up constantly). OTOH, the typical "Nah, I wasn't wrong, here's why you're wrong to think that" or "I'm sorry you were offended by the thing I did" response does nothing but make you look like an immature ass, so why pursue this strategy? Even in borderline cases where you still think you were kind of right, just fucking apologize and move on! It is clearly the +EV move. As a non-subscriber to The Information I previously had a fairly neutral view of them as I just sadly sort of accept selective misquoting as the way things work now, but reading this "How We Operate" thing skewed my view harshly negative.
- joshdotsmith 13y ago
  Totally agree with this sentiment. One of the best things enlisting ever taught me is not to quibble. Own up and drive on.
  - reeses 13y ago
    As another old person, I blame the shift from "mea culpa" to "my bad." One is used when genuinely accepting responsibility and the other is used like a wave after cutting someone off in traffic. The answer is to reintroduce the classics into the educational system. Cursive, too.
- 13y ago
njones 13y ago
"We edited Mr. Graham’s quotes on female founders." (edited for clarity)
aroberge 13y ago
Instead of saying "In our interview, which was explicitly introduced as an edited transcript, we made edits for clarity and length....." and then talked about consulting with PG's PR person, a proper apology should have been along the lines of "For the sake of clarity, we sometimes edit for length but, in this case, it is clear that a word that was removed changed the meaning intended. Even though our process involved consultation with PG's PR person, in the end the responsibility for accuracy is ours and we failed. For this, we apologize."
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forrestthewoods 13y ago
In an attempt to edit for clarity the intended meaning was completely changed. There's only one possible response that is appropriate. Admit that a mistake was made, apologize without reservation, and make sure it never happens again. Anything short of that is simply unethical.
ojbyrne 13y ago
"No, the problem is these women are not by the time get to 23… Like Mark Zuckerberg starts programming, starts messing about with computers when he’s like 10 or whatever" Let's concentrate on the slight against twenty-something women, because of course there's no such thing as hackers in their 30s, 40s or 50s, of either sex.
- brianmcdonough 13y ago
  There is an age bias, but it's a natural result of young founders having more disposable time and energy. They can also keep trying to be successful for more years as they have more years to work with. If you look at the most successful startup companies' founders, many of them are kids who were already wealthy via their parents and had more resources to begin with. Not all, but many. Who goes to Harvard and Stanford after all?
  - ojbyrne 13y ago
    Except that shows a bias for typical family values, by assuming that older people may have wife (or husband), kids, mortgages, etc, when they may not. If you're going to screen for "disposable time" then screen for "disposable time." And "energy" is just straight up bias.
    - brianmcdonough 13y ago
      From Yale News: "the neural networks in the brains of the middle-aged and elderly have weaker connections and fire less robustly than in youthful ones." http://news.yale.edu/2011/07/27/yale-researchers-show-how-memory-lost-and-found-0 http://news.yale.edu/2011/07/27/yale-researchers-show-how-me... It's hard to argue with science...
      - ojbyrne 13y ago
        http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174 In fact, science is all about argument.
baldajan 13y ago
Having read this post and pg's essay (and comments), I think the pitch forks have been raised and we should calm down. Yes, removing "these" was a bad judgement call, and I believe the true intentions were hidden in the post. It was an editorial mistake that caught pg off guard and went viral, making it a "disaster". In hindsight, things could have been better communicated and better organized; but everything is better with hindsight. In the end, the mistake was corrected and we hopefully all learned something from this debacle.
- redwood 13y ago
  You bring up a good point: Whether or not the quote was damagingly modified (which it was) we have a greater problem in our society than a journalist mis-quoting, and that's an obsession with link-bait BS.
- thatswrong0 13y ago
  > It was an editorial mistake Yet this post doesn't acknowledge it as such: > We edited a bit around some of Mr. Graham’s quotes on female founders. Specifically, we edited a “these” from the quote. The reason was simple. The “these” didn’t refer to anything. > ... > Mr. Graham has since said the “these” referred to women who aren’t programmers. In our opinion, he didn’t say that to us. We’re happy for him to have clarified to the public. No acknowledgement that they made a mistake. That's the sound of heels digging in.
- gbog 13y ago
  > It was an editorial mistake that caught pg off guard I can't understand this. "Guarding oneself" should mean to be carefully watching one's own word in order to avoid saying bad things, right? Then this would imply that these "bad things" are there, in the mind, but shouldn't be said, right? And being "caught off guard" would mean that the person (here pg) would have lifted his own self-checker for a second, letting his "real thoughts" leak outside, is that right? Then I plainly, furiously disagree with all the process: - I disagree that pg has "bad (hear sexist) thoughts" - I disagree that saying something about female founder is sexist - I disagree that social issues should be solved by guarding oneself from saying misinterpretable things - I freaking disagree with all this new trend, I believe it is an extremely dangerous experiment on human minds. My theory is that the essays pg wrote against PC are the reason of the attacks he is experiencing right now. I nearly moved to the USA 3 years ago. I am happy I did not and stayed in China because all in all I prefer China's censorship, which is plain and solid, right here, and doesn't hide.
thelibrarian 13y ago
"Weaseling out of things is important to learn. Its what separates us from the animal. Except the weasel." - Homer J. Simpson
brianmcdonough 13y ago
PG has a lot of integrity, something that warrants protecting, but this is not that big of a deal. Nobody will remember it in a few weeks and The Information probably snagged as many new subs as they lost because of the publicity. I highly doubt they were attempting to make PG look bad on purpose and it was the other pub that drew attention to it or really, nobody would know about the edit. The whole thing is pretty silly, but I understand why PG is responding. It must be hard for some people to understand why there aren't more female founders, but that's not something he can change unless he decides to change his business, which is wildly successful... so why would he... ? People forget he runs a business and they think he just snaps his fingers and startups turn to gold regardless of the founders. He's always maintained it's all about the team. That will never change, male, female or robot.
aresant 13y ago
All controversy aside, it's interesting how much of this negativity to both PG and The Information was driven by ValleyWag's link-baitery of the original story. While I believe The Information made a mistake, and should have probably apologized a bit more succinctly, I don't think anybody - including PGs press agent who had the transcript - could have imagined that quote, in particular lighting this firestorm.
logn 13y ago
> Mr. Graham has since said the “these” referred to women who aren’t programmers. In our opinion, he didn’t say that to us. We’re happy for him to have clarified to the public. He says it right here, in his second use of "these": We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years. And for more context prior: Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. Even without context, "these" modifies women; it's a subset. Anyone who thinks "these women" is equivalent to "women" isn't qualified to be a journalist.
Arjuna 13y ago
It's egregious to edit a quote. After all, the very raison d'être of a quote is to convey that, "this is exactly and precisely what was said." However, here we have a case that, due to the editing of a quote (despite the intentions of the person that modified the quote), we didn't previously know what was actually said, and that's extremely disingenuous and misleading to a reader. The writer goes on to say: "The reason was simple. The "these" didn't refer to anything. The paragraph that preceded it referred to Mark Zuckerberg being a hacker and it immediately followed a question about what would be lost if YC encouraged more women to be startup founders." [...] "In many cases "these" is an important word. But in this case, we decided it wasn't because it didn't refer to a specific group of women and was in response to a question about women in general." Removing "these" and the context completely changed the meaning. It leads the reader to believe that the narrative is about females in general. But, with "these" included, and the correct context, it is clear that this is about females who are not programmers. In the final analysis, editing quotes is bad form.
- thatthatis 13y ago
  "We edited a bit around some of Mr. Graham’s quotes on female founders. Specifically, we edited a “these” from the quote. The reason was simple. The “these” didn’t refer to anything. The paragraph that preceded it referred to Mark Zuckerberg being a hacker and it immediately followed a question about what would be lost if YC encouraged more women to be startup founders." The statement that the preceding paragraph referenced Zuckerberg and thus the "these" had no contextual meaning is unbelievable to me. Q: What about lowering the bar for women? A: Take a hacker like Zuckerberg, he started when he was 10. There's nothing we can do to help these women. What seems more reasonable? pg responded to a question about women by referencing Zuckerberg then in an entirely separate and new thread started being misogynistic? -or- Pg responded to a question about women by describing what a hackers path looks like then came back to more directly answer the question. Jessica Lessin is too smart a person to be confused here. I'm calling bs.
  - cynicalkane 13y ago
    Don't underestimate the ability of allegedly smart people to fool themselves in the service of a pet cause. Humans are designed to think tribally. Not fooling yourself for your cause makes you an outlier.
diminoten 13y ago
Technically speaking, the word 'these' as used by PG doesn't refer to anyone, as the group he's referring to (non-programming women) isn't specifically mentioned by him or the interviewer previously. So it is indeed ambiguous, and it would make sense to clean up, in a vacuum. Valleywag was clearly out for blood, and it sucks they don't care what PG meant, and PG very clearly didn't say women aren't hackers, even without the 'these'. The tone is absurdly clear. The Information wasn't wrong to remove it from a grammatical standpoint, but hopefully their editors will walk away with a better understanding of how precise language can be. Frankly, I doubt PG or The Information saw this coming. Why this has been a newsworthy event baffles me, but here we are.
- jeswin 13y ago
  Not true. PG used 'these' with context. The interviewer was specifically asking about admitting women by 'lowering standards' or recruiting. And PG is saying that those ideas won't work, because the applicants won't have the experience. Eric: "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?" Paul: "No, the problem is these women are not by the time get to 23…"
- trothoun 13y ago
  > So it is indeed ambiguous, and it would make sense to clean up, in a vacuum. hmm... that seems analogous to saying that it's proper behavior for a compiler to silently delete references to uninitialized variables.
dpcheng2003 13y ago
Running in the minority here but I honestly don't have a HUGE problem with the omission of "these", even though, yes it does change the meaning and intent of PG's quote. I am more interested that in all the backlash, I haven't seen anyone trash Valleywag, which originally sensationalized the article in the first place. If Valleywag didn't add their hyperbolic rhetoric around the quotes, would we be having discussion? Regardless whether you think PG meant these women to be those who apply to YC/choose CS as a major before hacking at 13, I think the greater point he's making (and one that is being lost here) is that STEM bias against women is systemic and starts much earlier than the YC interview process, board room or admissions desk. Girls who are discouraged from STEM interests at 6 and 7 are less likely to pick up "hacking" at 13. This causes a ripple effect over time as fewer girls/women convert into STEM practitioners at each stage of growth, partly from additional gender bias and partly because we're starting at a lower number. This is a real issue and I'm glad we're having a discussion about this. I just hope we don't lose sight of what matters.
- Crito 13y ago
  > I am more interested that in all the backlash, I haven't seen anyone trash Valleywag I see most people taking Valleywag/Gawker being trash as a forgone conclusion. Take tptacek's top comment in this discussion two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6977412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6977412 Anyway, I don't think this issue is as simple as women being pushed away from STEM fields at a young age. The gender discrepancies seen in different undergraduate STEM programs don't quite support that idea; women have a much stronger showing in the natural sciences than engineering or computer science. There may be influences at a young age in play here (I strongly suspect that there are) but it seems to me that it is not as general as STEM.
daemonk 13y ago
"Mr. Graham has since said the “these” referred to women who aren’t programmers. In our opinion, he didn’t say that to us. We’re happy for him to have clarified to the public." The word in question, "these", refers to this sentence of the interview: "We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years." I think it's pretty obvious that he is referring to women that haven't been hacking for the past 10 years when he used "these". How else can you take that sentence to mean?
primitivesuave 13y ago
There is absolutely no defense for editing a quote.
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n72 13y ago
Wait, Ms. Lessin is one of Rapgenius crew?
n72 13y ago
Dear Jessica, let me introduce a tool that you can add your journalistic toolkit: square brackets. As user Kosmonaut says in an "English Language and Usage" post: "[Square brackets] are used to indicate that a direct quote has been edited — to fit the surrounding information, or to add context that does not show up within the scope of the quote." See, originally, the word "these" appeared where "[Square brackets]" appears in the above quote. However, since you don't have context for the quote, you wouldn't have known that "these" referred to "square brackets". So, I put "Square brackets" in square brackets to add clarity to the quote. I hope I have shown you how useful square brackets are and I suspect that since you seem to be involved in journalism, which often involves quotes, you will find opportunities to use them! http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2271/what-is-the-proper-use-of-square-brackets-in-quotes http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2271/what-is-the-...
- gcb1 13y ago
  to properly use [] on a recorded interview is overkill. just glance on the transcript... there is barely a proper english phrase there. the whole thing would be 80% brackets just to make it grammatically correct.
gcb1 13y ago
the fact that this is "news" at all is embarrassing to all women that managed to become developers, ceos, etc. period. this shouldn't be here, in two or three front page items. and this shouldn't have even been asked on that interview.
- detcader 13y ago
  really? "all women"? should all Muslims be embarrassed for 9/11?
  - Crito 13y ago
    should: 1. Used to express obligation or duty I see no such suggestion in the post that you are responding to. You seem to have misread it.
    - detcader 13y ago
      So, you're saying gcb1 is a woman who speaks for all women?
uptown 13y ago
What's up with all the "smart people" references? Seems like a self-aggrandizing attempt to elevate the stature of "THE information" by claiming it's the chosen publication only for those with big brains.
bethly 13y ago
His quote was ungrammatical, but it sounds significantly worse when he seems to be talking about the women applying to YCombinator. His use of venues that have been traditionally hostile to women, conferences and open source, to try to make his group look better is pretty disingenuous too.
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abalone 13y ago
This whole thing is a fascinating demonstration of the power of contextualization to color one's perception of the facts. When you read the whole transcript, it's pretty clear pg is NOT just talking about a subset of women. He means women as a whole are underrepresented in the founder population because it's really hard to get 13 year old girls interested in coding. When the valleywag expose was first published, I thought the comments were pretty damning. pg's reponse really focused my attention on the omission of "these" and persuaded me that he was only talking about women "who aren't programmers." This convinced me that The Information are egregious hacks. After all, they omitted a word without an ellipsis and that's clearly wrong. But now, perhaps motivated by my fascination, I took the time to actually read the full transcript. And it's clear pg is talking about all female applicants to YC. Here's a fuller excerpt that traces the complete context of exactly what group of people pg is referring to. -------- Eric: I want to circle back to women in YC. How much do you think YC needs to be proactive, has any moral obligation to be proactive about this, or anything like that? pg (excerpts): There’s a couple of reasons why there are not as many female founders... If the reason we accept few female founders is that we’re biased against them, we would be able to tell this... I’m almost certain that we don’t discriminate against female founders... The problem with that is... the people who are really good technology founders have a genuine deep interest in technology... If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it own their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13... God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers... You can tell what the pool of potential startup founders looks like... You can go on Google and search for audience photos of PyCon... That’s a self selected group of people. Anybody who wants to apply can go to that thing. They’re not discriminating for or against anyone. [at this point Eric asks his question about how Y Combinator could be more proactive] Paul: We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years. -------- Conclusion: The entire time pg is referring "female founders" and the "pool of potential startup founders". His only reference to "programmers" is merely in describing the pool of potential startup founders. And women aren't in it because they weren't "hacking on computers at age 13". So yes, absolutely pg made a gaffe in saying girls aren't hackers. That is in fact what he said, and is now pretending he didn't, and that it would be "absurd" for him to say it. But he did.
rdtsc 13y ago
Quite simply, either incompetent or malicious. Can't figure out which. Incompetent: if really can't see how "these" changes the meaning, because it does. As a journalist, not realizing how a word can change the meaning and the idea of message, they might want to reconsider professions. I really don't know how much better to put it. It is like saying "as a programmer I don't understand why I need to put semicolons at the end of C++ statements, whitespace should just be enough!". Malicious: they knew what they did and they wanted to create controversy. Well they sure did create controversy. Will they end up benefiting from it? Not sure yet. I suspect there is probably an agenda behind it all and "oh look, misogyny!". Not to say misogyny in tech should be downplayed or not payed attention to BUT this is moving the topic backwards and hurts it more than it advances it. Every Andrea Richards, every Ben Noordhuis case hurts the cause more than it helps. I've said it before (and probably copied it from someplace I don't remember) sometimes a cause's biggest detractors are its most ardent fans. Really the ones who are a little too ardent for the cause's good. In summary, yeah, still can't decide which is which but I can see it some between those two -- incompetence and maliciousness.
ChristianMarks 13y ago
It's hopeless to attempt to extract a correction from a journalist on a matter of interpretation and context. It isn't forthcoming, even though in this case the omission of the qualifier 'these', which selects some subset of a set, cannot be omitted without changing the meaning.
bjornsing 13y ago
I'm not a linguist but in my mind there's very little wrong with the original sentence as pg said it. Compare e.g. with this one: "These apples are bad because they have been laying in the sun for two days." There is no reference to anything outside the sentence; "these" and "they" are sort of referring to each other, tying the sentence together. So to me this is the most shocking revelation: > Mr. Graham has since said the “these” referred to women who aren’t programmers. In our opinion, he didn’t say that to us. That's the equivalent of editing down the above sentence to say, "Apples are bad because they have been laying in the sun for two days.", and then start claiming that the interviewee is a schizophrenic because he's making general claims about all apples. :/

119 points by IBM 13y ago

Well, the problem here is that "these" very clearly did refer to something, and anyone who doesn't think so might not be someone you want editing. Apparently they still don't think it referred to anything, which is completely mind-boggling. The correct response here would have been to admit the mistake and apologize for it. As it is, it's hard to take them as any sort of serious journalists now.

hamburglar 13y ago
Yeah, the notion that "these" didn't refer to "women who apply to YC and aren't already hackers" is just silly when you read the actual transcript. She may as well have said "the 'these women' referred to something we edited out, making it confusing, so we decided the quote was better if it appeared to mean 'all women'".
- samstave 13y ago
  The editing made the whole context much more sensationalist and generalized. This simply removes all credibility for this woman in my eyes. "Hey, just by removing the word "these" we can make this quote look as though it refers to half the population!" Yeah - how about this: Original: Just by this manipulation of a quote, a journalist has ruined trust in her journalistic integrity Vs: Just by this manipulation of a quote, a journalist has ruined trust in journalistic integrity

sillysaurus2 13y ago

We edited a bit around some of Mr. Graham’s quotes on female founders. Specifically, we edited a “these” from the quote. The reason was simple. The “these” didn’t refer to anything. What pg actually said was, "We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years." Lessin is saying removing "these" doesn't change the meaning. I think that's absurd, to put it mildly.

001sky 13y ago
Exactly. Its not going to refer to "anything" when <it was taken out of context>. Had it been there, the lack of context would have been implied... Of course, then it is no longer a sound-bite. Which kills the PR value of the whole enterprise.
sneak 13y ago
Yeah, fuck these people. That's just insulting to our intelligence.
gbog 13y ago
It is not absurd, it is plain dishonest.
ceol 13y ago
Could you explain how the meaning of his statement changed so drastically from the inclusion of the word "these"? The question asked about women who are not founders, not women who are not programmers. It seems fitting to remove it, since it would feel out of place when quoted, but it seems the point of his statement is there.
- thatthatis 13y ago
  Q: What about lowering the bar now? A1: There's nothing we can do to help women become hacker-founders. A2: To help women become hacker-founders, we have to start with the group we'd be admitting in 10 years. the "these" changes it from: "women can't be helped" to "you can't fix the problem for this generation, you can only fix the problem for the next generation" One says "it's a problem of gender" the other says "it's a problem of sequencing"
  - ceol 13y ago
    Doesn't the second one still say it's a problem of gender? I'm not seeing how the introduction of the word "these" adds all of that additional stuff you're saying. All it does is take the statement from "all women" to "all women who we could recruit to be founders." But in the context of the discussion, he meant the same thing: He feels women do not want to be founders.

eCa 13y ago

> We edited some of Mr. Graham’s quotes on female founders. If you quote someone you quote them, you don't remove certain words because they don't "refer to anything". If you leave something out you put in "[...]". What does "a bit around" mean anyway?

Crito 13y ago
The Reuters Handbook of Journalism on quoting: "Quotes are sacrosanct. They must never be altered other than to delete a redundant word or clause, and then only if the deletion does not alter the sense of the quote in any way. Selective use of quotes can be unbalanced. Be sure that quotes you use are representative of what the speaker is saying and that you describe body language (a smile or a wink) that may affect the sense of what is being reported. When quoting an individual always give the context or circumstances of the quote. It is not our job to make people look good by cleaning up inelegant turns of phrase, nor is it our job to expose them to ridicule by running such quotes. In most cases, this dilemma can be resolved by paraphrase and reported speech. Where it cannot, reporters should consult a more senior journalist to discuss whether the quote can be run verbatim. Correcting a grammatical error in a quote may be valid, but rewording an entire phrase is not. When translating quotes from one language into another, we should do so in an idiomatic way rather than with pedantic literalness. Care must be taken to ensure that the tone of the translation is equivalent to the tone of the original. Beware of translating quotes in newspaper pickups back into the original language of the source. If a French politician gives an interview to an American newspaper, it is almost certain that the translation back into French will be wrong and in some cases the quote could be very different. In such cases, the fewer quotes and the more reported speech, the better." http://handbook.reuters.com/?title=Accuracy#Quotes http://handbook.reuters.com/?title=Accuracy#Quotes Basically minimal editing is acceptable, so long as you remain very faithful to the original quote. If the original quote is too broken to be published, then don't quote it; instead paraphrase it in your own words.
coffeeaddicted 13y ago
Editing sentences in interviews is not unusual. Most people don't talk like they write, so cleaning up what they said can be the fair thing to do. But it doesn't cover changing the meaning of a sentence like in this case.

jhonovich 13y ago

Is this claim true? "Mr. Graham didn’t object to anything in the story, or the fact we published it in the first place, until Valleywag wrote about the story days later."

hugi 13y ago

"We edited a bit around some quotes"… This passes for journalism?

schainks 13y ago
My sentiment exactly. If journalists want to help people through their craft with integrity, these kinds of modifications should be transparently pointed out to the reader. Oh, wait! There's MLA formatting for that: "We can't make . . . women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years."
GrinningFool 13y ago
This is OK in journalism - but there is very specific protocol around it that makes it OK. If you remove text, you indicate that you've done so, like so: "No, the problem is these women are not by the time get to 23" should have become "No, the problem is ... women are not by the time get to 23" Thus indicating to the readers that some information had been removed. It's still a bit of an ugly trick, but it's acceptable because it tells the reader that this isn't the full, in-context quote. As I've said in previous comments, this is what can happen when people without journalistic training present themselves as journalists. They publish unaware of these rules. Particularly the subtle, nuanced rules - like inserting an ellipsis when removing text from a quote, or using brackets to indicate inserting text for clarity that the source didn't provide. And so "the problem is women are not by the time they get to 23" blows up into a big firestorm -- first because the public trusted and assumed that these rules were followed, then later when we discovered that they were not. It's unclear to me why they didn't just say "Oops, we did selectively quote and it appears we didn't handle it well. Our bad." It does appear to be an honest mistake made in ignorance.

anaphor 13y ago

I don't think "these" was supposed to be referring to anything in the sentence or around the sentence there. It was being used as sort of a quantifier, as in "there are some women who haven't been hacking and we cannot make them see things as a hacker". Of course "these women" refers to something different than "women". i.e. "for all women who have not been hacking for at least 10 years, it is not possible to make them see things as a hacker" vs. "for all women, it is not possible to make them see things as a hacker". You can clearly see they mean two very different things because in the first one you are quantifying over a proper subset of women.

maillure 13y ago

This seems like a non-apology. In my opinion, it seems like you ("The Information") made a colossal mistake by editing out a key word in a sentence, profoundly changing its meaning, and worse, doing this on a hot-button topic in a way that attempts to raise stink. If this is true, shame on you.

groups 13y ago

It's fine to edit for length and clarity if you recognize that by removing context you're creating a new context. It's up to the editor to be careful. The editor can't say "I am the editor and I have perfectly preserved pg's comments" knowing that valleywag will call him a sexist, when the editor knows him not to be one. If the editor thinks pg is, they should talk. I'm convinced by pg's rebuttal.

milkshakes 13y ago

> In our interview, which was explicitly introduced as an edited transcript, we made edits for clarity and length. How, exactly, is the edited version more clear?

karterk 13y ago

I'm sorry, but you just can't "edit" quotes - that's just bad journalism. They wanted a sensational story that will rake in pageviews, and have conveniently slanted the quotes towards that. Pathetic to say the least.

crassus 13y ago
I disagree with this. I've seen blogs use completely unedited interviews with ideological enemies, leaving in "ums" and "you knows?" and it looks terrible. Probably every decent interview you've ever seen was lightly edited.
- thatswrong0 13y ago
  It makes sense to get rid of most "ums" and "you knows?". For the most part they don't require judgment; most cases are just useless artifacts of speech. Removing "these" from the a middle of a sentence is not nearly so easy. "These" generally refers to something and it can't be removed so easily just because an editor thinks that it can be. In this case, removing "these" changed the sentence to be a general statement about women from a statement amount a subset of women. This obviously should not be removed, regardless of the lack of a specific reference from "these". Leave the judgment to the reader.

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georgemcbay 13y ago

Why can't people just be wrong anymore (and admit to it)? I'm sure there's some amount of rose-tinted glasses going on here but as a 40 year old I seem to remember a now long-lost past when people could more readily issue a mea culpa, promise to try harder and everyone could move along without every discussion turning into a battle where the person who fucked up expends massive amounts of energy trying to prove they didn't fuck up by selectively choosing to cling on to ways they could possibly weasel out of the issue without actually saying they made an error in judgement (or allowed one to be made on their watch). To be fully fair, the sincere mea culpa does still occur sometimes and we've even seen it here on HN with some startups/founders who fucked up, but it happens so rarely now that when I see those exceptions that prove the rule they are surprising, which is sad. Ignoring the human element, this sort of non-apology response isn't even a good strategy if you look at things in a purely Machiavellian way. "Yeah, sorry, I fucked up, I'll fix this" gains you a bunch of goodwill, repairs reputation and trust (so long as you aren't fucking up constantly). OTOH, the typical "Nah, I wasn't wrong, here's why you're wrong to think that" or "I'm sorry you were offended by the thing I did" response does nothing but make you look like an immature ass, so why pursue this strategy? Even in borderline cases where you still think you were kind of right, just fucking apologize and move on! It is clearly the +EV move. As a non-subscriber to The Information I previously had a fairly neutral view of them as I just sadly sort of accept selective misquoting as the way things work now, but reading this "How We Operate" thing skewed my view harshly negative.

joshdotsmith 13y ago
Totally agree with this sentiment. One of the best things enlisting ever taught me is not to quibble. Own up and drive on.
- reeses 13y ago
  As another old person, I blame the shift from "mea culpa" to "my bad." One is used when genuinely accepting responsibility and the other is used like a wave after cutting someone off in traffic. The answer is to reintroduce the classics into the educational system. Cursive, too.
13y ago

njones 13y ago

"We edited Mr. Graham’s quotes on female founders." (edited for clarity)

aroberge 13y ago

Instead of saying "In our interview, which was explicitly introduced as an edited transcript, we made edits for clarity and length....." and then talked about consulting with PG's PR person, a proper apology should have been along the lines of "For the sake of clarity, we sometimes edit for length but, in this case, it is clear that a word that was removed changed the meaning intended. Even though our process involved consultation with PG's PR person, in the end the responsibility for accuracy is ours and we failed. For this, we apologize."

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forrestthewoods 13y ago

In an attempt to edit for clarity the intended meaning was completely changed. There's only one possible response that is appropriate. Admit that a mistake was made, apologize without reservation, and make sure it never happens again. Anything short of that is simply unethical.

ojbyrne 13y ago

"No, the problem is these women are not by the time get to 23… Like Mark Zuckerberg starts programming, starts messing about with computers when he’s like 10 or whatever" Let's concentrate on the slight against twenty-something women, because of course there's no such thing as hackers in their 30s, 40s or 50s, of either sex.

brianmcdonough 13y ago
There is an age bias, but it's a natural result of young founders having more disposable time and energy. They can also keep trying to be successful for more years as they have more years to work with. If you look at the most successful startup companies' founders, many of them are kids who were already wealthy via their parents and had more resources to begin with. Not all, but many. Who goes to Harvard and Stanford after all?
- ojbyrne 13y ago
  Except that shows a bias for typical family values, by assuming that older people may have wife (or husband), kids, mortgages, etc, when they may not. If you're going to screen for "disposable time" then screen for "disposable time." And "energy" is just straight up bias.
  - brianmcdonough 13y ago
    From Yale News: "the neural networks in the brains of the middle-aged and elderly have weaker connections and fire less robustly than in youthful ones." http://news.yale.edu/2011/07/27/yale-researchers-show-how-memory-lost-and-found-0 http://news.yale.edu/2011/07/27/yale-researchers-show-how-me... It's hard to argue with science...
    - ojbyrne 13y ago
      http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174 http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174 In fact, science is all about argument.

baldajan 13y ago

Having read this post and pg's essay (and comments), I think the pitch forks have been raised and we should calm down. Yes, removing "these" was a bad judgement call, and I believe the true intentions were hidden in the post. It was an editorial mistake that caught pg off guard and went viral, making it a "disaster". In hindsight, things could have been better communicated and better organized; but everything is better with hindsight. In the end, the mistake was corrected and we hopefully all learned something from this debacle.

redwood 13y ago
You bring up a good point: Whether or not the quote was damagingly modified (which it was) we have a greater problem in our society than a journalist mis-quoting, and that's an obsession with link-bait BS.
thatswrong0 13y ago
> It was an editorial mistake Yet this post doesn't acknowledge it as such: > We edited a bit around some of Mr. Graham’s quotes on female founders. Specifically, we edited a “these” from the quote. The reason was simple. The “these” didn’t refer to anything. > ... > Mr. Graham has since said the “these” referred to women who aren’t programmers. In our opinion, he didn’t say that to us. We’re happy for him to have clarified to the public. No acknowledgement that they made a mistake. That's the sound of heels digging in.
gbog 13y ago
> It was an editorial mistake that caught pg off guard I can't understand this. "Guarding oneself" should mean to be carefully watching one's own word in order to avoid saying bad things, right? Then this would imply that these "bad things" are there, in the mind, but shouldn't be said, right? And being "caught off guard" would mean that the person (here pg) would have lifted his own self-checker for a second, letting his "real thoughts" leak outside, is that right? Then I plainly, furiously disagree with all the process: - I disagree that pg has "bad (hear sexist) thoughts" - I disagree that saying something about female founder is sexist - I disagree that social issues should be solved by guarding oneself from saying misinterpretable things - I freaking disagree with all this new trend, I believe it is an extremely dangerous experiment on human minds. My theory is that the essays pg wrote against PC are the reason of the attacks he is experiencing right now. I nearly moved to the USA 3 years ago. I am happy I did not and stayed in China because all in all I prefer China's censorship, which is plain and solid, right here, and doesn't hide.

thelibrarian 13y ago

"Weaseling out of things is important to learn. Its what separates us from the animal. Except the weasel." - Homer J. Simpson

brianmcdonough 13y ago

PG has a lot of integrity, something that warrants protecting, but this is not that big of a deal. Nobody will remember it in a few weeks and The Information probably snagged as many new subs as they lost because of the publicity. I highly doubt they were attempting to make PG look bad on purpose and it was the other pub that drew attention to it or really, nobody would know about the edit. The whole thing is pretty silly, but I understand why PG is responding. It must be hard for some people to understand why there aren't more female founders, but that's not something he can change unless he decides to change his business, which is wildly successful... so why would he... ? People forget he runs a business and they think he just snaps his fingers and startups turn to gold regardless of the founders. He's always maintained it's all about the team. That will never change, male, female or robot.

aresant 13y ago

All controversy aside, it's interesting how much of this negativity to both PG and The Information was driven by ValleyWag's link-baitery of the original story. While I believe The Information made a mistake, and should have probably apologized a bit more succinctly, I don't think anybody - including PGs press agent who had the transcript - could have imagined that quote, in particular lighting this firestorm.

logn 13y ago

> Mr. Graham has since said the “these” referred to women who aren’t programmers. In our opinion, he didn’t say that to us. We’re happy for him to have clarified to the public. He says it right here, in his second use of "these": We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years. And for more context prior: Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. Even without context, "these" modifies women; it's a subset. Anyone who thinks "these women" is equivalent to "women" isn't qualified to be a journalist.

Arjuna 13y ago

It's egregious to edit a quote. After all, the very raison d'être of a quote is to convey that, "this is exactly and precisely what was said." However, here we have a case that, due to the editing of a quote (despite the intentions of the person that modified the quote), we didn't previously know what was actually said, and that's extremely disingenuous and misleading to a reader. The writer goes on to say: "The reason was simple. The "these" didn't refer to anything. The paragraph that preceded it referred to Mark Zuckerberg being a hacker and it immediately followed a question about what would be lost if YC encouraged more women to be startup founders." [...] "In many cases "these" is an important word. But in this case, we decided it wasn't because it didn't refer to a specific group of women and was in response to a question about women in general." Removing "these" and the context completely changed the meaning. It leads the reader to believe that the narrative is about females in general. But, with "these" included, and the correct context, it is clear that this is about females who are not programmers. In the final analysis, editing quotes is bad form.

thatthatis 13y ago
"We edited a bit around some of Mr. Graham’s quotes on female founders. Specifically, we edited a “these” from the quote. The reason was simple. The “these” didn’t refer to anything. The paragraph that preceded it referred to Mark Zuckerberg being a hacker and it immediately followed a question about what would be lost if YC encouraged more women to be startup founders." The statement that the preceding paragraph referenced Zuckerberg and thus the "these" had no contextual meaning is unbelievable to me. Q: What about lowering the bar for women? A: Take a hacker like Zuckerberg, he started when he was 10. There's nothing we can do to help these women. What seems more reasonable? pg responded to a question about women by referencing Zuckerberg then in an entirely separate and new thread started being misogynistic? -or- Pg responded to a question about women by describing what a hackers path looks like then came back to more directly answer the question. Jessica Lessin is too smart a person to be confused here. I'm calling bs.
- cynicalkane 13y ago
  Don't underestimate the ability of allegedly smart people to fool themselves in the service of a pet cause. Humans are designed to think tribally. Not fooling yourself for your cause makes you an outlier.

diminoten 13y ago

Technically speaking, the word 'these' as used by PG doesn't refer to anyone, as the group he's referring to (non-programming women) isn't specifically mentioned by him or the interviewer previously. So it is indeed ambiguous, and it would make sense to clean up, in a vacuum. Valleywag was clearly out for blood, and it sucks they don't care what PG meant, and PG very clearly didn't say women aren't hackers, even without the 'these'. The tone is absurdly clear. The Information wasn't wrong to remove it from a grammatical standpoint, but hopefully their editors will walk away with a better understanding of how precise language can be. Frankly, I doubt PG or The Information saw this coming. Why this has been a newsworthy event baffles me, but here we are.

jeswin 13y ago
Not true. PG used 'these' with context. The interviewer was specifically asking about admitting women by 'lowering standards' or recruiting. And PG is saying that those ideas won't work, because the applicants won't have the experience. Eric: "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?" Paul: "No, the problem is these women are not by the time get to 23…"
trothoun 13y ago
> So it is indeed ambiguous, and it would make sense to clean up, in a vacuum. hmm... that seems analogous to saying that it's proper behavior for a compiler to silently delete references to uninitialized variables.

dpcheng2003 13y ago

Running in the minority here but I honestly don't have a HUGE problem with the omission of "these", even though, yes it does change the meaning and intent of PG's quote. I am more interested that in all the backlash, I haven't seen anyone trash Valleywag, which originally sensationalized the article in the first place. If Valleywag didn't add their hyperbolic rhetoric around the quotes, would we be having discussion? Regardless whether you think PG meant these women to be those who apply to YC/choose CS as a major before hacking at 13, I think the greater point he's making (and one that is being lost here) is that STEM bias against women is systemic and starts much earlier than the YC interview process, board room or admissions desk. Girls who are discouraged from STEM interests at 6 and 7 are less likely to pick up "hacking" at 13. This causes a ripple effect over time as fewer girls/women convert into STEM practitioners at each stage of growth, partly from additional gender bias and partly because we're starting at a lower number. This is a real issue and I'm glad we're having a discussion about this. I just hope we don't lose sight of what matters.

Crito 13y ago
> I am more interested that in all the backlash, I haven't seen anyone trash Valleywag I see most people taking Valleywag/Gawker being trash as a forgone conclusion. Take tptacek's top comment in this discussion two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6977412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6977412 Anyway, I don't think this issue is as simple as women being pushed away from STEM fields at a young age. The gender discrepancies seen in different undergraduate STEM programs don't quite support that idea; women have a much stronger showing in the natural sciences than engineering or computer science. There may be influences at a young age in play here (I strongly suspect that there are) but it seems to me that it is not as general as STEM.

daemonk 13y ago

"Mr. Graham has since said the “these” referred to women who aren’t programmers. In our opinion, he didn’t say that to us. We’re happy for him to have clarified to the public." The word in question, "these", refers to this sentence of the interview: "We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years." I think it's pretty obvious that he is referring to women that haven't been hacking for the past 10 years when he used "these". How else can you take that sentence to mean?

primitivesuave 13y ago

There is absolutely no defense for editing a quote.

deleted 13y ago

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n72 13y ago

Wait, Ms. Lessin is one of Rapgenius crew?

n72 13y ago

Dear Jessica, let me introduce a tool that you can add your journalistic toolkit: square brackets. As user Kosmonaut says in an "English Language and Usage" post: "[Square brackets] are used to indicate that a direct quote has been edited — to fit the surrounding information, or to add context that does not show up within the scope of the quote." See, originally, the word "these" appeared where "[Square brackets]" appears in the above quote. However, since you don't have context for the quote, you wouldn't have known that "these" referred to "square brackets". So, I put "Square brackets" in square brackets to add clarity to the quote. I hope I have shown you how useful square brackets are and I suspect that since you seem to be involved in journalism, which often involves quotes, you will find opportunities to use them! http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2271/what-is-the-proper-use-of-square-brackets-in-quotes http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/2271/what-is-the-...

gcb1 13y ago
to properly use [] on a recorded interview is overkill. just glance on the transcript... there is barely a proper english phrase there. the whole thing would be 80% brackets just to make it grammatically correct.

gcb1 13y ago

the fact that this is "news" at all is embarrassing to all women that managed to become developers, ceos, etc. period. this shouldn't be here, in two or three front page items. and this shouldn't have even been asked on that interview.

detcader 13y ago
really? "all women"? should all Muslims be embarrassed for 9/11?
- Crito 13y ago
  should: 1. Used to express obligation or duty I see no such suggestion in the post that you are responding to. You seem to have misread it.
  - detcader 13y ago
    So, you're saying gcb1 is a woman who speaks for all women?

uptown 13y ago

What's up with all the "smart people" references? Seems like a self-aggrandizing attempt to elevate the stature of "THE information" by claiming it's the chosen publication only for those with big brains.

bethly 13y ago

His quote was ungrammatical, but it sounds significantly worse when he seems to be talking about the women applying to YCombinator. His use of venues that have been traditionally hostile to women, conferences and open source, to try to make his group look better is pretty disingenuous too.

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abalone 13y ago

This whole thing is a fascinating demonstration of the power of contextualization to color one's perception of the facts. When you read the whole transcript, it's pretty clear pg is NOT just talking about a subset of women. He means women as a whole are underrepresented in the founder population because it's really hard to get 13 year old girls interested in coding. When the valleywag expose was first published, I thought the comments were pretty damning. pg's reponse really focused my attention on the omission of "these" and persuaded me that he was only talking about women "who aren't programmers." This convinced me that The Information are egregious hacks. After all, they omitted a word without an ellipsis and that's clearly wrong. But now, perhaps motivated by my fascination, I took the time to actually read the full transcript. And it's clear pg is talking about all female applicants to YC. Here's a fuller excerpt that traces the complete context of exactly what group of people pg is referring to. -------- Eric: I want to circle back to women in YC. How much do you think YC needs to be proactive, has any moral obligation to be proactive about this, or anything like that? pg (excerpts): There’s a couple of reasons why there are not as many female founders... If the reason we accept few female founders is that we’re biased against them, we would be able to tell this... I’m almost certain that we don’t discriminate against female founders... The problem with that is... the people who are really good technology founders have a genuine deep interest in technology... If someone was going to be really good at programming they would have found it own their own. Then if you go look at the bios of successful founders this is invariably the case, they were all hacking on computers at age 13... God knows what you would do to get 13 year old girls interested in computers... You can tell what the pool of potential startup founders looks like... You can go on Google and search for audience photos of PyCon... That’s a self selected group of people. Anybody who wants to apply can go to that thing. They’re not discriminating for or against anyone. [at this point Eric asks his question about how Y Combinator could be more proactive] Paul: We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years. -------- Conclusion: The entire time pg is referring "female founders" and the "pool of potential startup founders". His only reference to "programmers" is merely in describing the pool of potential startup founders. And women aren't in it because they weren't "hacking on computers at age 13". So yes, absolutely pg made a gaffe in saying girls aren't hackers. That is in fact what he said, and is now pretending he didn't, and that it would be "absurd" for him to say it. But he did.

rdtsc 13y ago

Quite simply, either incompetent or malicious. Can't figure out which. Incompetent: if really can't see how "these" changes the meaning, because it does. As a journalist, not realizing how a word can change the meaning and the idea of message, they might want to reconsider professions. I really don't know how much better to put it. It is like saying "as a programmer I don't understand why I need to put semicolons at the end of C++ statements, whitespace should just be enough!". Malicious: they knew what they did and they wanted to create controversy. Well they sure did create controversy. Will they end up benefiting from it? Not sure yet. I suspect there is probably an agenda behind it all and "oh look, misogyny!". Not to say misogyny in tech should be downplayed or not payed attention to BUT this is moving the topic backwards and hurts it more than it advances it. Every Andrea Richards, every Ben Noordhuis case hurts the cause more than it helps. I've said it before (and probably copied it from someplace I don't remember) sometimes a cause's biggest detractors are its most ardent fans. Really the ones who are a little too ardent for the cause's good. In summary, yeah, still can't decide which is which but I can see it some between those two -- incompetence and maliciousness.

ChristianMarks 13y ago

It's hopeless to attempt to extract a correction from a journalist on a matter of interpretation and context. It isn't forthcoming, even though in this case the omission of the qualifier 'these', which selects some subset of a set, cannot be omitted without changing the meaning.

bjornsing 13y ago

I'm not a linguist but in my mind there's very little wrong with the original sentence as pg said it. Compare e.g. with this one: "These apples are bad because they have been laying in the sun for two days." There is no reference to anything outside the sentence; "these" and "they" are sort of referring to each other, tying the sentence together. So to me this is the most shocking revelation: > Mr. Graham has since said the “these” referred to women who aren’t programmers. In our opinion, he didn’t say that to us. That's the equivalent of editing down the above sentence to say, "Apples are bad because they have been laying in the sun for two days.", and then start claiming that the interviewee is a schizophrenic because he's making general claims about all apples. :/