I think the possibility that YC is discriminating against women is worthy of discussing. If they are, it would be beneficial for both YC and the world at large if they did something to address it. If they are not, it's still interesting and possibly valuable to attempt to figure out why the list looks like it does.
Sure, it's worth discussing. But it's just a bullet point on a very, very long list of arbitrary things accelerators discriminate for. Just look at those faces. Where are the New York mechanic or soccer mom types, or people with visible tattoos? What in God's name have they done with the elderly, tuned them into Soylent green?
You can see from a glance that is NOT a representative sample of the population, and that's based on looks alone. Let's not even mention things like the way you talk and present yourself, educational and employment background. God forbid you are one of those neurodivergent people - Google even has a cute word for those poor undesirables: lacking googliness.
Bottom line, entrepreneurship is just anohter political occupation that relates to power over other people. It cannot function otherwise than as an extension of power relations in society, because those relationships permeate the market and affect the businesses` ability to make money. Startup survivorship is so low and the pool of qualified applicants so inexhaustible, that an accelerator cannot but work to enforce those stereotypes and power structures: why waste capital on a militant atheist founder in a devout society if there is even the slightest chance some parts of the public will boycott their products?
And having a 80% of a full chance on account of gender is in this context a minor problem compared with a 0% chance of anybody that does not talk the talk investors expect for purely cultural reasons.
I wonder to what extent that is due to women being discriminated against after they apply, or women being less likely to apply. If there is a significant difference in the acceptance rate, they should consider concealing characteristics like gender as much as possible in the process and maybe inviting people with more diverse perspectives to assess candidates. If there is no significant difference, they should consider advertising YC places where they may reach a different audience and publish statistics that reassure applicants that they will be treated equally.
I agree, both male privilege and female privilege are real and very serious problems. The existence of one doesn't negate the other. They are often interlinked, such as the male privilege of not getting lower pay and fewer career opportunities just because you have a child and the female privilege of being allowed to take more time away from work to raise that child and not being treated as a secondary parent. You can't solve one without solving the other.
The things you mention are not necessarily in that category, but seem to be because people are taught not to care about men as much. The flip-side could be our society's infantilization of women, but the harms of that are more subtle than the result of our society's indifference towards men, such as men receiving higher sentences for the same crimes and being refused help in situations where help is offered to women. Perhaps having fewer people encouraging women to take risks and fewer people being willing to invest in women is one of those harms.
I think the point is less about whether each type of privilege is real, but that this logic is incredible shaky. (i.e. deciding there is a bias against a group solely based on representation in outcomes)
Put another way (and I think the OP tried) if we look at prison sentences by gender and apply the same logic, then we have a huge bias against men in the justice system, yet no one seems to be making that case nor would it gain popularity.
Of course there is a huge bias against men in the justice system. That should be obvious to anyone, and is also confirmed by many studies. For example, from the US federal system:
> It finds large gender gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution (averaging over 60%), conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Female arrestees are also significantly likelier to avoid charges and convictions entirely, and twice as likely to avoid incarceration if convicted.
> We find significantly harsher sentences imposed on male offenders even after controlling for most case characteristics, including mitigating factors such as ‘caring responsibilities’. Specifically, the odds ratios of receiving a custodial sentence for offences of assault, burglary and drugs committed by a man as opposed to a woman are 2.84, 1.89 and 2.72
People are subject to criminal penalties (and other kinds of violence) for political reasons, and for refusing to participate in politics. Voting can be seen as a ritual similar to other religious rituals, and not participating is a crime in some countries.
In some un-free countries such as North Korea the purpose of voting is co-opted to mean something completely different: the ritualized political humiliation of the population. By forcing you to vote in an "election" that everyone knows to be a fraud, you're forced to humiliate yourself and by extension delegitimize all voting processes everywhere.
What makes you think talking more about race works any better or should be considered to be "social progress" rather than the opposite? Would that study have better results if done today? I'm not American, but I don't see why you are so sure today's America is not closer to the Jim Crow Era than 2005 was.
I'm a black person who grew up in Sweden in the 00s and early 10s, and I'm very glad race was never relevant or talked about outside of social science class. Almost everyone at my school was white, and I never felt like I was different because of my skin color. The first person who ever told me that my race or skin color was relevant to anything was an American. The worst thing about American culture (and what keeps me from moving to the US even though I could make much more money there) is that so many Americans are insisting on considering race (and other arbitrary categorizations like ethnicity, sex and gender) to be such a large part of what makes a person, overshadowing that person's unique attributes and identity.
You should read about the experiences of African Americans. Many cultural facets and political tensions held over from slavery are alive and well.
Financially, income inequality in Sweden is vastly lower than in the United States as it is, and in the United States much of the inequality falls on racial boundaries. A recent Federal Reserve Bank of Boston study found that local white household’s median net worth was $247,000 while for African American households it was $8. Yes, eight single dollars. The Black population in Boston has been well established for well over a century, and much of its white population came in waves of western European immigration in the early to mid 20th century.
Not talking about this problem hasn't solved it so far because systemic self-perpetuating inequality doesn't just go away if you ignore it.
I'm not objecting to talking about racism. I'm objecting to seeing race as a significant part of what makes a person. It's possible to do one without the other.
I don't see how it's useful to note that something didn't work when there is no evidence to suggest that the alternative works any better. I don't understand how talking more about race as a characteristic could possibly help to reduce racism or racial inequality. It seems to me much more likely to do the opposite.
That the social construct of race shouldn't contribute significantly to a person's identity is irrelevant. Vast troves of empirical evidence show how dramatically being born on one side or another of a racial boundary in the United States changes your life experience. See the study I cited in another comment "Are Greg and Emily more employable than Jamal and Lakisha." researchers sent 5000 job applications to jobs pairing a handful of fake, equally weighted resumes with stereotypically white or black sounding names. White sounding names got FIFTY PERCENT more callbacks... This is the United States where no job among already disadvantaged prime likely means no home, no food, no health care, no nothing. This isn't an affect people adopt as part of some fanciful cultural identity. Disrupting it isn't about pride or hurt feelings. It is a bin that our society forces people into and it will not go away by pretending it doesn't exist. Talking about it or not taking about it is the wrong dichotomy. It's directly addressing it VS not addressing it.
I think it's easy to imagine how something like a meteor or nuclear war could end our civilization without killing all humans on earth. A new civilization would almost certainly arise, and it could be better or worse, but it would probably be very alien to us. At least as alien as Ancient Rome. A settlement on Mars could conceivably preserve our cultures and current civilization in the face of such an event.
> A settlement on Mars could conceivably preserve our cultures and current civilization in the face of such an event.
huh. most honest answer I've seen so far. "We're going to mars so we can later to go war with Earth, ideally when they are weak"
BTW Do you guys think building big chemical rockets just automatically advances your matsci/chem/bio timeline? It doesn't. That's the effect of massive government cheese.
Fun fact about the age of discovery: shit was already discovered. Domesticated food, fresh water, and abundant friends were already there.
The universe is bored of generating new challenges for your particular kind of aggressive. It has lots of fun new problems for people who are willing to work together though. Sorry.
I'm not suggesting Mars should go to war with or colonize Earth after such an event, just that there may be value in our cultures and civilization continuing to exist somewhere. I could imagine how Mars may choose to do that, but I would consider that to be a bad thing.
Perhaps it would be better if our civilization ends in the event it destroys itself on Earth, but why should we assume what comes next will be better? How would being born out of an apocalypse affect a civilization?
Why would a nuclear war or a similar cataclysm produce an "alien civilization"? Even if it wiped out 90% of humanity, that leaves 800 million people, all of whom carry their respective cultures.
I don't think that's true. What is the alleged treaty called? The Antarctic Treaty binds the contracting states to prohibit individuals from doing various things in Antarctica, the Outer Space Treaty doesn't really do that, and arguably does the opposite by prohibiting territorial claims. Regardless, I don't think any treaty should be taken very seriously. They will both be violated whenever it's expedient to violate them.
That's true, but it's defined (and kept up to date) in practice by COSPAR, who have a pretty elaborate set of definitions in place for Mars in particular.
COSPAR is (officially speaking) a private body, and as such their Planetary Protection Policy is not legally binding. They propose their policy as an interpretation of Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty, but as a private body they lack the legal authority to make binding interpretations of an international treaty. The standard approach in international law would be to look at the intentions and understanding of the States Parties at the time the Treaty was originally concluded in order to interpret it - which would likely support a far weaker understanding of “harmful contamination” than what COSPAR proposes.
The rules for Mars aren't based in the treaty but instead on "planetary protection" an abstract policy coming from no law other than forms of regressive environmentalism that tries to limit contamination so that it's easier to find potential microbes. It's already actively harming site selection for Mars exploration by preventing sending of rovers that might discover life to actual areas that might have life.
To save the possibility of finding life we are preventing ourselves from finding life.
With Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash (and Ethereum and Ethereum Classic), it's no different from a demerger from the perspective of a company shareholder. You own a greater number of shares because the company has split in two, but they are not the same shares. They are shares in different companies that have the same origin but will go in different directions. Same with those currencies. The current version of Ethereum works a bit differently, as explained elsewhere in this comment section.
There may be other solutions or defence mechanisms, but one solution would be to fork again and remove the Ether those validators have staked from your chain as part of your fork.
A chain is defined by a set of rules that everyone on the chain agrees to abide by. Braking the rules damages the economic utility of the chain, so the Ether on the chain where the validators colluded to break the rules would be worth less, as a result of their actions. The validators are locked on that chain (as they can't prevent a fork from excluding them), so they have a strong incentive against harming the chain. Ethereum is not majoritarian. I don't have to abide by the will of the majority. I only need to come to a consensus about the rules and state of the chain with the people with whom I want to share the chain.
PoS makes it much easier to escape a malicious majority compared to PoW where the hashing power majority can follow the minority anywhere unless the minority is willing to switch to a different hashing algorithm. Even then, the majority could sell their mining equipment and buy new equipment that will work on the new chain on the same terms as that chain's honest minority can. With PoS, the malicious majority would need to buy new Ether from the honest minority who can then just fork again after having made a profit on the attack, and can continue to do that until the malicious majority runs out of resources or realizes that they cannot censor a fork in Ethereum's PoS system.
> Braking the rules damages the economic utility of the chain, so the Ether on the chain where the validators colluded to break the rules would be worth less, as a result of their actions.
So you’re going to create a new fork, remove the money from the majority of the wealthy stakeholders who are governing the system, and expect this one to be be seen as legitimate? The one that is explicitly giving the finger to the wealthy?
I don't think legitimacy is a meaningful concept in this context. I would use the chain with the greatest utility, which is determined by whether I like the rules, whether the rules are consistently and predictably enforced, and whether other people I want to interact with are using that chain. Whether the people who use the chain have more Ether or more computer power compared to the people who use a competing chain doesn't affect utility.
While I don't think it's meaningful to say that one chain is more legitimate than another, if I was forced to make such a deamination in this case, I would consider the chain where the rules are consistently and predictably enforced in a way that leads to predictable outcomes more legitimate than a chain where validators have colluded to arbitrarily subvert the enforcement of the rules.
