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A comment on Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth. Parent comment

Re:Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth by abalone on Monday August 26, 2013 @10:37PM (#6281143)
"That correlates more with any other success factor that I've seen in the world's greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at Bezos, or Andreessen, David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who've dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life. So when I see that pattern coming in -- which was true of Google -- it was very easy to decide to invest." -- John Doerr

Anytime race is involved you've got to be careful before playing the "strong correlation" card.

Granted this is about accents, which an be trained. But it's a little unsettling to me how nakedly pg relies on correlation of a racial/cultural signal, without so much as a comment on how obviously racist and sexist Doerr's perspective is.

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Re:Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth by anovikov on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @04:35AM (#6282203)
pg is not a politician who must appeal to all to be successful, so why do you wonder? he just thinks of the things that work. I run an outsourcing shop, and if i clearly knew that black gays are 2x productive for the same rate i'd quickly turn worst racist/sexist guy you seen.
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Re:Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth by abalone on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @05:02AM (#6282313)
Only politicians should be concerned with racial equality? Wow.
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Re:Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth by webdevsometimes on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @09:14AM (#6283177)
Only politicians have to pretend that everyone is 100% equal in every way, because they can't afford to offend anyone. pg, on the other hand, doesn't need to worry about that as much because what matters is whether the startup is successful or not. If there is a pattern indicating that a certain group of people are particularly bad at running a business, why should he take the higher risk associated with investing in them?
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Re:Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth by abalone on Tuesday August 27, 2013 @03:04PM (#6285435)
Because correlation != causation, and applying "pattern recognition" to race and gender is racist and sexist.
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