I do not doubt that there may be correlation between people who have performed poorly in YC and "very strong accents", it does not mean causation.
pg is an investor. From the point of view of angel investing, causation is not important. Correlation is enough. If some trait historically shows the company will be half as likely to succeed, why should an investor put money in that company, causation be damned?
e.g Thee cliche white male that attended an Ivy League school was successful. therefore, to be safe I go that way all the time. This then goes ahead and pollutes your data-set because it would be built on that bias.
Now, I am not saying that those that patten match are bad, but they should at the very least try not to make their 'findings' influence other people who might have the chance to to start a new data set without bias.
If being male, being white, and attending Harvard are all positively correlated with being successful in a startup, then there's actually nothing wrong with selectively looking for those qualifiers.
Does it make it more difficult to get a foot in the door if you're female, Ecuadorian and went to a community college, despite being a phenomenal programmer with a great idea? Yes, it does make it more difficult, but that's not their problem. They are choosing where to invest their money, and using math to do so should be encouraged.
If they don't have a spreadsheet in front of them, then at the very least they should understand that prestige is prestige for a reason.
Does that make it impossible to succeed without those qualifiers? No, but it's not unfair that it's more difficult to do so without them. You can't play a fair game all the way through. Sooner or later something's going to happen that's not in your favor.
Discrimination is not irrational. As a society we have determined that we value an individual's desire to get a job more than a business's desire for an efficient filtering mechanism.
"Discrimination is rational" and "discrimination is bad" are not mutually exclusive.
The fact that discrimination seems natural means that we need to fight against it consciously, not rationalize it as acceptable.
If you value diversity, equality, etc, then you have to actively monitor your own discriminatory tendencies and lead with respect, compassion, love instead of rationality and pattern matching.
cglee, I'm curious, what would you do if you were making investments and you knew that a certain cultural background was correlated with a tenfold increase in risk on your investment?
sliverstorm I'm curious what would you do if you were from one of those cultural backgrounds that are seen as bad for investors and were denied the opportunity to do something solely on the ground of your origin, an origin which you had no choice but to accept because you were born into?
And it does not matter that you are the next Jobs, because the moment the investors hear you greeting them with a foreign or exotic accent they are not paying any attention about what you have to say, at all.
What would you do? would you still support pg? even if that keeps you from ever being able to raise any funding?
I think you just disregarded my entire argument using a cultural taboo. Nice work.
See? I can play at that game too. The problem is, doing that doesn't get anywhere, because I'm still convinced of my point, and you're still convinced of yours, and there's no dialectic to compromise our ideas.
I apologize for the snarky tone; I just have no tolerance for people who try to justify discrimination, etc. To me, diversity, equality are ends in themselves. They're not means to a higher profit margin; they're not justifiable when more code is written, etc.
Treat everyone equally. Understand that humans are wired to recognize patterns, and are naturally discriminatory. Fight that urge.
Okay, so given two candidates that are equally skilled, what's the middle ground between discriminating solely on the basis of markers correlating with success, and hiring people strictly according to the demographics of the world?
The ridiculous logic that statement employs aside, he has no obligation to treat it fairly. But if that's the case then whatever he says will just be disregarded. I won't treat his unfair dismissal as fair either. Okay, so we're where we started, with my point still standing.
Again, being snarky like this leads nowhere. If you're going to give a solid rebuttal, good! If you're not, then you're not achieving anything.
My guess is that if you're using words like dialectic then secretly you aren't an extremist. (By extremist, I mean someone who adopts a polarized position, which you freely admit.)
pg is an investor. From the point of view of angel investing, causation is not important. Correlation is enough. If some trait historically shows the company will be half as likely to succeed, why should an investor put money in that company, causation be damned?