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I appreciate the thoughtful response. I understand the argument you're making about economic signaling, and indeed YC(b)'s milquetoast declaration of encouraging women and minority applicants would be a cheap sop to political correctness. But I think you elide an important point, which is that YC(a)'s signaling, though expensive, is also motivated by political correctness. In other words, you've tweaked two variables, when in fact only one has changed; a more accurate rendering is YC(a) is serious about being politically correct, while YC(b) merely cares about appearing to be politically correct. Political correctness is common to the two cases for the simple reason that YC(a) would inevitably help wealthy, well-connected female and black/Latino founders to the exclusion of, say, poor, less-privileged Asian founders. It's hard to explain this behavior in humanitarian terms, but it's easy to explain in political terms. Nobody gets in trouble these days for expressing the sentiment that we need more women, blacks, and Latinos in tech, no matter how rich and well-connected they may be. The only other possibility I can think of is that YC(a) genuinely wants to help especially deserving founders, and such founders are so overrepresented among women and blacks/Latinos that specifically targeting those groups achieves the goal well enough for YC's purposes. In other words, the cost of reaching such founders may be so much lower when targeting specific self-identified groups that it's worth the minor cost of helping the occasional privileged member of one of those groups. Still, it's hard to avoid the observation that this policy is generally aligned with political correctness, which would appear to justify some skepticism. (My guess is that YC's policy isn't Machiavellian in the least, but it works adaptively because of a political environment in which explicitly helping women and blacks/Latinos is strongly favored both by custom and by law.) |
I think that's true in California, but politically correct favoritism that ignores class helps fuel right-wing extremism.
Perhaps I see that more clearly because I don't live in the SV bubble.