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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
Up until the last paragraph I thought you were going to say that your opinion of Paul Graham had become much more negative.
To be fair most of the people directly involved in this ruckus don't come out of it looking all that well; but The Information did say the interview was on the record and did tell Graham that it was getting published and didn't get pushback. The fact that Valleywag was able to stir up a controversy and garner a massive amount of traffic off the back of PG's somewhat inept handling of a sensitive question ( that he knew was sensitive ) does no credit to Valleywag, even if it is their business model.
Those people who slotted this into their preexisting models of reality and tried to use it as a teaching opportunity may feel rather threatening to some. which may mean they need to rethink their tactics; but may just mean that some people feel threatened whenever the topic of gender equity is brought up.
Now I get that what PG was saying was not nearly as inflammatory as it was made out to be by Valleywag. However, it did bring to light some unconscious bias on his part; and I get that that is very hard to acknowledge and correct, especially when you have to do so in the full glare of hostile publicity. I do hope the PG can take some time to reflect and to reach out to some of the people who have substantive criticisms of his thinking on this topic.
note: I'm not saying that he needs to turn ycombinator into a feminist reeducation camp, just that he needs to _listen_ to what some of his critics are trying to point out to him.
note the second: I've been participating in HN for 6 years or so; and I have to say that the level of reflexive sexism I've seen in the comments this past week is making me think I should abandon my account.
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.
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'".
> 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 "[...]".
"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."
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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…"
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
"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?
[+] [-] Arjuna|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] abalone|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] soulskill|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] GrinningFool|12 years ago|reply
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 .
[+] [-] sillysaurus2|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sneak|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ceol|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 001sky|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gbog|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] georgemcbay|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] olefoo|12 years ago|reply
To be fair most of the people directly involved in this ruckus don't come out of it looking all that well; but The Information did say the interview was on the record and did tell Graham that it was getting published and didn't get pushback. The fact that Valleywag was able to stir up a controversy and garner a massive amount of traffic off the back of PG's somewhat inept handling of a sensitive question ( that he knew was sensitive ) does no credit to Valleywag, even if it is their business model.
Those people who slotted this into their preexisting models of reality and tried to use it as a teaching opportunity may feel rather threatening to some. which may mean they need to rethink their tactics; but may just mean that some people feel threatened whenever the topic of gender equity is brought up.
Now I get that what PG was saying was not nearly as inflammatory as it was made out to be by Valleywag. However, it did bring to light some unconscious bias on his part; and I get that that is very hard to acknowledge and correct, especially when you have to do so in the full glare of hostile publicity. I do hope the PG can take some time to reflect and to reach out to some of the people who have substantive criticisms of his thinking on this topic.
note: I'm not saying that he needs to turn ycombinator into a feminist reeducation camp, just that he needs to _listen_ to what some of his critics are trying to point out to him.
note the second: I've been participating in HN for 6 years or so; and I have to say that the level of reflexive sexism I've seen in the comments this past week is making me think I should abandon my account.
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|12 years ago|reply
The interesting thing in this case is that it makes them look incompetent.
[+] [-] joshdotsmith|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] waterlesscloud|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eCa|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
"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
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|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dpcheng2003|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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
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.
[+] [-] diminoten|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
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|12 years ago|reply
hmm... that seems analogous to saying that it's proper behavior for a compiler to silently delete references to uninitialized variables.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] logn|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] anaphor|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aresant|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jhonovich|12 years ago|reply
"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."
[+] [-] n72|12 years ago|reply
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-...
[+] [-] gcb1|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maillure|12 years ago|reply
If this is true, shame on you.
[+] [-] rdtsc|12 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] karterk|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crassus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njones|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] milkshakes|12 years ago|reply
How, exactly, is the edited version more clear?
[+] [-] aroberge|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daemonk|12 years ago|reply
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?