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What I Didn't Say

paulgraham.com · 1,452 words · saved by 1 readers

December 2013 A quote from an "interview" with me (I'll explain the scare quotes in a minute) went viral on the Internet recently: We can't make women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years. When I saw this myself I wasn't sure what I was even supposed to be saying. That women aren't hackers? That they can't be taught to be hackers? Either one seems ridiculous. The mystery was cleared up when I got a copy of the raw transcript. Big chunks of the original conversation have been edited out, including a word from within that sentence that completely changes its meaning. What I actually said was: We can't make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years. I.e. I'm not making a statement about women in general. I'm talking about a specific subset of them. So which women am I saying haven't been hacking for the past 10 years? This

What I Didn't Say --> December 2013 A quote from an "interview" with me (I'll explain the scare quotes in a minute) went viral on the Internet recently: We can't make women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years. When I saw this myself I wasn't sure what I was even supposed to be saying. That women aren't hackers? That they can't be taught to be hackers? Either one seems ridiculous. The mystery was cleared up when I got a copy of the raw transcript. Big chunks of the original conversation have been edited out, including

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