Re:Changes at YC
by ak_111 on Monday March 13, 2023 @06:04PM
(#35143626)
This comment comes across as a silly nitpick given the sober content of the post, but I think it is completely fair given Paul Graham's many writings and tweets on the virtues of writing clearly and his hatred of what I call corporatese.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Not sure how involved pg was with this post as its stated author Garry Tan
You would imagine he read it at some point. You would also imagine his CEO would have internalised Paul Graham's most important piece of advice about communication (writing clearly).
I have no inside information on this one, but YC has been around for 18 years, and pg left the president role 9 years ago. It's been about half of YC's life that he's been out of the day-to-day stuff. It's absolutely not obvious that he'd be reading each announcement that goes out (I'd be surprised at such).
Re:Changes at YC
by eyelidlessness on Monday March 13, 2023 @07:09PM
(#35144509)
I don’t think it comes across as a silly nitpick, and I’ve read very little PG has written. It’s useful to identify how phrasing and framing of communication can be used to manipulate how that communication is received, regardless of who is communicating. And I think the same observation would have been made if this were a post about any other organization.
It is laudable that this observation was very close to the top when I clicked to see the comments. I’d be surprised if this critique gets buried by HN moderation, and cautiously hopeful it won’t get buried by folks biased to defend YC &co.
But the exact same language from any other source would be examined exactly the same way, and for very good reason.