[Jun8]

So, by throwing big words around and pretending to be an expert I gained a few karma points, fantastic. Please don't get so worked up about sloppy posts and "attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" :-)

The 0.5 prior thing was an irrelevant use of the principle of indifference. What I really had in mind was a situation with the null hypothesis that having early women on board has no effect on the success rate of a startup whereas H_1 would be that they do have an effect. However, from my description I think what came out was a prior of the kind P(success | women).

Without using any terminology, intuitively the point I was trying to make (ineptly, as you point out) was this: the likelihood that I assign to the statement that "having women early in a startup increases its succeed rate" is very low, I need to see many cases, form startups working on diverse areas for me to update my likelihood value for this. Why? Because I don't think that a subset of population selected with no clear connection to success will affect the success of a startup. Clearly, if the selection has some obvious connection, e.g. coming from a highly educated family, being good in programming, etc. then it will affect success. It's just not clear to me how being a female or black or gay or Indian, etc. has such a connection. I may, of course, be wrong.

And what about the irony of me calling the kettle black: I don't hold my HN posts to the same standard as research reports from a major company.

[btilly]

First of all, you were the one who started off on a high horse. Don't be surprised if people come back in kind.

Now what you're now admitting is that your real prior isn't 50/50 or anything close. You're starting from the assumption that it is incredibly unlikely that women can make much of a difference, and therefore you really do require extraordinary evidence before you'll even consider the possibility that hiring women could help. In short your mind is so made up that your actual prior can fairly be described as fact resistant.

But is that a reasonable theory to have? Independent estimates are that women make an estimated 85% of all consumer purchases. If having women at the top of your company helps you figure out how to talk to that group, there is a clear potential connection between success and having women involved.

You don't like where this is leading? Well try something a little less biased on for size. If the vast majority of startups do not have women at a high level, but ability is equally divided between women and men, does that mean that startups with women involved early likely have an advantage getting better people?

I'm seeing lots of reasons to see that it could be plausible that having women involved early is beneficial for your startup. (Not necessarily true, only reasonably plausible.) My advice to you is therefore to not be so fast in setting preconceptions that let you reject data out of hand, sight unseen.