People who have good social radar are often imprecise and hand-wavey in their explanations of it. I have had to learn to explain it in much more precise terms. And I have had some relatively unusual opportunities to firm up my mental models and make it more data-driven, because the audience I had (my very aspie older son) needed that in order to understand it at all.

So, most people with good social radar are not going to be able to readily give the precise, data-driven explanations that the HN crowd values so highly. But the reason I suspect Jessica is being dismissed based in part on her gender, rather than the hand-wavey nature of her assertions, is because of the framing of the criticism she is getting. As I said earlier, a lot of the comments here do not boil down to "please, show your work and prove you are right." They boil down "Oh, you are full of shit and no one can know that and, god, my respect for YC just plummeted" as if she had confessed that her method for deciding who to accept involved casting their horoscope or consulting a psychic.

When I first joined HN, the top three people here all had about 50k karma and there was a much more collegial environment than currently exists. I was never given access to that collegial environment. I never got a mix of some acknowledgement that I might have a point and some criticism that not everyone agreed with me and the opportunity to state why I thought x, y or z. Instead, men on the leaderboard closed ranks. For a long time, if I said anything, you could bet dollars to donuts that two different people (not the same ones every time) from the leaderboard would chime in to announce how wrong I was.

It took me literally years to figure out that this was going on in part because, for a woman, I had a high amount of karma and I was, thus, rocking the boat. Initially, I had no idea because, at the time, my karma was so far off from qualifying for a bottom rung on the leaderboard that I figured I was a Nobody and no one should be noticing me at all. However, I was able to infer (based on that social indicators in the way people reacted to me, in spite of the lack of hard data – in other words, “social radar”) that I was apparently prominent for a woman, in spite of my pathetically low amount of karma. Eventually, I was able to dig up real data proving that fairly firmly (in spite of the limits on the data available to me). Once I understood the position I was in, I was able to quit attracting so much damning attention.

So what I am telling you is that a) Hacker News has deteriorated in some ways generally, which has hurt the experience of most members and I would like to see the bar raised such that the collegial environment returns generally and b) I would like women included in that respectful debate of ideas in a way I do not believe they have been previously included. And one way you can help achieve that, if you so desire, is to change the manner in which you criticize women and their "hand-wavey" attempts to express themselves.

One thing that would really, really help a whole lot is make damn sure you understand that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." In other words, just because women are generally going to not be good at defending their positions on terms that the men here will readily accept does not, by itself, prove they are wrong. Just because the explanation is hand-wavey does not mean she is full of shit. Ask better questions. Encourage women to get the data that backs up their position. If they can't immediately do so, genuinely "agree to disagree" instead of pissing on them like they aren't worthy of any respect. Give women an opportunity to grow into the ability to communicate in more precise terms and learn to effectively back up their statements. Because shooting them down and pissing on them is not something that will ever help women up their game and learn to go toe-to-toe with the big boys. It merely excludes them.

And thank you for reading my blog post and engaging me in good faith.