[caddemon]

IMO it isn't inherently immoral to select based on some correlate if it's also correlated with success, but I think it depends a lot on the details. How important is the opportunity, what is the typical acceptance rate, are there analogous opportunities that are selected for using different metrics, etc. I think YC is okay on this front - kind of like access to Harvard instead of access to higher education in general.

That's just my opinion, and it is a tough, subjective question. However I think where things often go wrong in practice is that the metrics aren't actually correlated with success, or are very weakly so! I am not familiar with the YC process, but my experience with selective applications in general is that institutions are slow to update their methods, and often don't really back up their decisions with data.

Of course it is an extremely hard problem to predict start up success in the first place, that's pretty much the whole YC business model. So they should have a lot more incentive to determine the metrics that hold some real signal than a university or even a FAANG does. Which makes me think there are legitimate reasons they ask these questions, but I do hope they've considered the tradeoff in how much signal is obtained versus how much bias may be introduced.

As a bit of an aside, this is why I like the idea of pushing for more diversity between institutions instead of just within. If different places were more meaningfully different we should see more diversity in metrics used and hopefully this would result in a fairer landscape across the population without needing to enforce overbearing rules on individual institutions. Of course that makes the assumption that a particular set of metrics won't end up naturally dominating, but I'm fairly confident in that. Different people thrive in different environments, and honestly the measurements we currently have are full of uncertainty anyway.