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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

by 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.
soulskill 13y ago
It's egregious to edit a quote. This is a bit of a naive sentiment. Quotes, unfortunately, aren't always provided in easily-digestible form. This is particularly the case in informal, spoken-word interviews -- which seems to be the situation here. Most people, when faced with questions they don't know in advance, speak in very ungrammatical, broken sentences. They interrupt themselves, they use the wrong words because they don't have the time to pick better ones, and (as pg said) they sometimes stop talking when the interviewer understands what they're trying to say. If you're listening to these interviews, they make sense because it's slower, and you can usually intuit their mood, watch their body language, and figure out the point they're driving at. Transcribed without edits, it'll probably need a few re-reads, and you'll question their ability to communicate. I'd bet a lot of spoken interviews would fail the Turing test. For an example of this, listen to a few random interviews with people who aren't in the business of public speaking on a news network, or tune in to a game and listen to the sportscasters. Imagine you were reading it exactly as spoken, and imagine how difficult it would be to make sense of it. Thus: editing. It's entirely reasonable for a journalist to make small transcription edits for clarity. Readers get confused or irritated or bored if they need to struggle to make sense of the interview. It's entirely ethical if the edits don't change the meaning of the quote. That's what happened here -- but do we know it was necessary unethical? (As opposed to being negligent?) Well, as with the quote itself, we need to look to the context. It's uncertain to what degree the nature of the interview was made clear to pg. He says it was clearly communicated as one thing, and Jessica Lessin says it was clearly communicated as another. We can't really know without seeing the actual communication between them. If we assume that Lessin's account is accurate, and the discussion was intended to be used as an interview, then it's reasonable to assume those pieces would be polished up and pushed out at some point. It's also reasonable to assume the removal of "these" was an honest mistake, for the reason The Information gave; it referred to a group that pg didn't explicitly mention. It's also reasonable to think that the person making the edits thought it would be obvious pg was referring to female startup founders, since the question to which he was responding does explicitly mention it. With this assumption, and since it was a different publication that raised the controversy, I can very easily see it as an honest mistake -- in other words, negligence. Lessin and The Information owe pg an apology for that. Now, it's within the realm of possibility that the quote was altered intentionally, which would be highly unethical. But again, if they wanted to do that, they probably would have pointed it out themselves, rather than waiting for ValleyWag to do it.
wonderzombie 13y ago
C'mon. Have you ever read a published interview? Do you think even a non-trivial percentage of people speak in complete sentences, with mostly-correct grammar? Seriously? For what it's worth, I call myself a feminist and at this point I really super don't give a shit about this controversy. PG isn't my favorite, and hanging this whole thing on a single word in a single sentence seems fraught. If that's his fig leaf, he's entitled to it. Call it a misunderstanding, miscommunication, whatever. It's a distraction from the actual issue under discussion, the dearth of women in tech and what we as an industry can do to fix it.
abalone 13y ago
What pg said is that 1) the "pool of potential startup founders" is programmers, 2) it's non-discriminatory and self-selecting, and 3) women are underrepresented in this pool because it's hard to get 13 year old girls interested in programming, and 4) rather than encouraging women to become startup founders it would be better to fix that 13 year old girl problem This debate about whether he was referring to "just programmers" is a complete red herring. Programmers == startup founders, to him. The really damning quote is this: 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. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now. Repeat: pg literally said it would be better to discourage women from starting startups now. Not "these" women. Not "non programmer" women. All women. ...... The problem is not that pg is some huge sexist. It's that he's defensive. He's passing the buck 10 years up the chain, saying that's where the problem lies. In CS curriculum or something. But in actuality, parents and educators could just as well say that 13 year old girls don't have enough 23 year old female hacker role models to look up to. So perhaps YC, PyCon and the industry as a whole could be more proactive. For example by spotlighting and giving extra support to the best examples of female hacker role models, and connecting them with girls. Not by discouraging women from starting startups now.
- dullcrisp 13y ago
  Full quote: > If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now. It’s already too late. What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that. I don't think he meant to say that women should be specifically discouraged from starting startups. And that interpretation does not fit with the rest of what he said in the interview.
  - abalone 13y ago
    Splitting hairs over "not encourage" vs. "discourage" is sort of in the same vein as "these women" vs. "women". It's missing the point. He said it's "too late" for women at this stage, if they haven't been hacking since 13. What part of "too late" suggests that pg thinks there's more proactive stuff we can do? pg's point is clearly that we're fine and the problem lies 10 years up the line because middle school isn't doing enough to get 13 year old girls interested in hacking, because god knows how the heck you do that. It's passing the buck.
GrinningFool 13y ago
Editing a quote is fine. Editing improperly is very bad form indeed - particularly, editing without telling the reader that you've done so, in the form of "..." for omitted text, and "[ ]" for inserted text .

by Arjuna 13y ago

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.

soulskill 13y ago

It's egregious to edit a quote. This is a bit of a naive sentiment. Quotes, unfortunately, aren't always provided in easily-digestible form. This is particularly the case in informal, spoken-word interviews -- which seems to be the situation here. Most people, when faced with questions they don't know in advance, speak in very ungrammatical, broken sentences. They interrupt themselves, they use the wrong words because they don't have the time to pick better ones, and (as pg said) they sometimes stop talking when the interviewer understands what they're trying to say. If you're listening to these interviews, they make sense because it's slower, and you can usually intuit their mood, watch their body language, and figure out the point they're driving at. Transcribed without edits, it'll probably need a few re-reads, and you'll question their ability to communicate. I'd bet a lot of spoken interviews would fail the Turing test. For an example of this, listen to a few random interviews with people who aren't in the business of public speaking on a news network, or tune in to a game and listen to the sportscasters. Imagine you were reading it exactly as spoken, and imagine how difficult it would be to make sense of it. Thus: editing. It's entirely reasonable for a journalist to make small transcription edits for clarity. Readers get confused or irritated or bored if they need to struggle to make sense of the interview. It's entirely ethical if the edits don't change the meaning of the quote. That's what happened here -- but do we know it was necessary unethical? (As opposed to being negligent?) Well, as with the quote itself, we need to look to the context. It's uncertain to what degree the nature of the interview was made clear to pg. He says it was clearly communicated as one thing, and Jessica Lessin says it was clearly communicated as another. We can't really know without seeing the actual communication between them. If we assume that Lessin's account is accurate, and the discussion was intended to be used as an interview, then it's reasonable to assume those pieces would be polished up and pushed out at some point. It's also reasonable to assume the removal of "these" was an honest mistake, for the reason The Information gave; it referred to a group that pg didn't explicitly mention. It's also reasonable to think that the person making the edits thought it would be obvious pg was referring to female startup founders, since the question to which he was responding does explicitly mention it. With this assumption, and since it was a different publication that raised the controversy, I can very easily see it as an honest mistake -- in other words, negligence. Lessin and The Information owe pg an apology for that. Now, it's within the realm of possibility that the quote was altered intentionally, which would be highly unethical. But again, if they wanted to do that, they probably would have pointed it out themselves, rather than waiting for ValleyWag to do it.

wonderzombie 13y ago

C'mon. Have you ever read a published interview? Do you think even a non-trivial percentage of people speak in complete sentences, with mostly-correct grammar? Seriously? For what it's worth, I call myself a feminist and at this point I really super don't give a shit about this controversy. PG isn't my favorite, and hanging this whole thing on a single word in a single sentence seems fraught. If that's his fig leaf, he's entitled to it. Call it a misunderstanding, miscommunication, whatever. It's a distraction from the actual issue under discussion, the dearth of women in tech and what we as an industry can do to fix it.

abalone 13y ago

What pg said is that 1) the "pool of potential startup founders" is programmers, 2) it's non-discriminatory and self-selecting, and 3) women are underrepresented in this pool because it's hard to get 13 year old girls interested in programming, and 4) rather than encouraging women to become startup founders it would be better to fix that 13 year old girl problem This debate about whether he was referring to "just programmers" is a complete red herring. Programmers == startup founders, to him. The really damning quote is this: 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. What that means is the problem is 10 years upstream of us. If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now. Repeat: pg literally said it would be better to discourage women from starting startups now. Not "these" women. Not "non programmer" women. All women. ...... The problem is not that pg is some huge sexist. It's that he's defensive. He's passing the buck 10 years up the chain, saying that's where the problem lies. In CS curriculum or something. But in actuality, parents and educators could just as well say that 13 year old girls don't have enough 23 year old female hacker role models to look up to. So perhaps YC, PyCon and the industry as a whole could be more proactive. For example by spotlighting and giving extra support to the best examples of female hacker role models, and connecting them with girls. Not by discouraging women from starting startups now.

dullcrisp 13y ago
Full quote: > If we really wanted to fix this problem, what we would have to do is not encourage women to start startups now. It’s already too late. What we should be doing is somehow changing the middle school computer science curriculum or something like that. I don't think he meant to say that women should be specifically discouraged from starting startups. And that interpretation does not fit with the rest of what he said in the interview.
- abalone 13y ago
  Splitting hairs over "not encourage" vs. "discourage" is sort of in the same vein as "these women" vs. "women". It's missing the point. He said it's "too late" for women at this stage, if they haven't been hacking since 13. What part of "too late" suggests that pg thinks there's more proactive stuff we can do? pg's point is clearly that we're fine and the problem lies 10 years up the line because middle school isn't doing enough to get 13 year old girls interested in hacking, because god knows how the heck you do that. It's passing the buck.

GrinningFool 13y ago

Editing a quote is fine. Editing improperly is very bad form indeed - particularly, editing without telling the reader that you've done so, in the form of "..." for omitted text, and "[ ]" for inserted text .