There is a very large and prominent movement that is trying to separate biological sex (male vs. female) from cultural gender ("man" vs. "woman"). Assuming someone sympathizes with that movement, what noun should they use to refer to someone of the female biological sex, and anyway what's wrong with "female"?
In that case you'd typically use "biological female" to emphasize the distinction and get around from sounding like a ferengi or andrew tate-like figure.
I understand feeling this way, generically. Let's imagine a public speech. In a small room. Dead quiet except for speaker. There's a suddenly loud happy baby, competing with the adult speaker for volume. They take 2 minutes to wheel the baby to the back of the room, that's only 30 feet away, so nothing really changes in terms of noise elvel. And another woman politely approaches them with their line asking if they'd like to take it outside.
The thing is at that point, I have jumped to a # of conclusions: small room, disruptive over long period of time, dead quiet, and acceded to this odd cultural view I never saw anywhere other than moneyed SV and extreme money that talking obliquely means you're being polite.
The article doesn't give us enough data to help, but it does give us enough data to know this was a near-platonic caricature of a situation where the unprofessional bit isn't the baby making noise. It was during a talk about the practical challenges of being a founder with an infant, at an event targeted towards being more inclusive to female founders.
> Really bad look for YC, being a mother is literally the highest calling a woman can have.
This is a weird take. Women can be more than just baby factories. They can have a far more reaching impact on the world beyond just adding to its population.
in my opinion creating life is miraculous. beyond inventing some piece of tech or rocket or business. you are breathing new beings into our reality. what can be higher than that?
Your framing leads to questions like: are infertile women inferior?
I think it's wonderful to find purpose in creating and nurturing a life, but framing it as the best makes people who cannot or choose not to do the thing seem inadequate.
> creating life is miraculous. beyond inventing some piece of tech or rocket or business. you are breathing new beings into our reality. what can be higher than that?
We can create life de novo in a laboratory [1]. We’re approaching the point where we can replicate a womb artificially, and do a better job at that than natural ones. (Interstitial attachment in humans is evolutionarily recent and inefficient [2]. The size of the human brain, too, is evolutionarily recent, which makes human childbirth evolutionarily recent and uniquely deadly among primates [3]. These aren’t difficult to improve on, which is why IVF, C sections, NICUs and lactation inducement are a thing.)
Parenting is rewarding, necessary and noteworthy. Calling it miraculous in literal (versus figurative) terms puts it on a glass pedestal. That’s dangerous if you believe parenting should be respected.
There is no universe where (all things equal -- dont get pedantic here) a lab grown child will have a better long term outlook than a natural one. We havent even figured out how to make formula that will leave children as healthy as a breastfed child.
There is constant feedback between mother and child, and any mother will tell you how they got cravings where their body/baby told them exactly what it needed. The baby, still in the womb, gets to hear the parents and experience their life. This all carries into the child's life and is inherently unable to be replicated in a lab.
> no universe where a lab grown child will have a better long term outlook than a natural one
What are you basing this on? Children conceived through IVF already have nearly identical long-term outcomes to naturally conceived babies. (You have to adjust for income and intent. Otherwise, the IVF babies do better on some measures.)
I tend to agree that we won’t be able to create an arrival womb that outperforms a natural one under ideal circumstances in our lifetimes. But most circumstances aren’t ideal, even when the parents and their doctors have the best intentions.
> haven’t even figured out how to make formula that will leave children as healthy as a breastfed child
Formula isn’t trying to replicate breast milk, it’s trying to be cheap and convenient. Lab-grown breast milk is still decades away, but it’s in the same vein of biochemistry. (The joining factor being our increasing ability to control immune factor production.)
Again, I don’t think it will be better than the best natural breastmilk. (It won’t be fresh, for one.) But OP didn’t say a perfect mother is doing her highest calling. They created a paragon for all women.
Yes when women are forced to treat having and raising children as a disease (no children allowed in "professional" settings, dont take time off for family, etc) instead of a normal part of life to be celebrated and encouraged.
Doctors don't have the children's best interests in mind. They need to avoid liability at all costs, which largely means 'avoid death and disfigurement even if the kid isn't as well off long term'. As a bonus, doing unnecessary things gets them paid more.
> What are you basing this on?
> we won’t be able to create an arrival womb that outperforms a natural one under ideal circumstances for some time.
Ever. Because factory made, lab grown, and mass produced products have never and inherently can never have the biodiversity of the real thing despite what the marketers might tell you. Even our 'natural' food mass produced in monoculture fields is devoid of nutrients compared to small farms.
> Formula isn’t trying to replicate breast milk, it’s trying to be cheap and convenient
IVF replicates a critical part of making a baby, conception, and artifically steers another, implantation. From a miraculousness perspective, conception is high up there. Certainly one that a hundred years ago someone would have similarly scoffed at being able to be done in a lab not only at all, but almost as well as in nature.
> Even our 'natural' food mass produced in monoculture fields is devoid of nutrients compared to small farms
> Except for the dozens of fetuses that are not brought to term and flushed because they would not survive to birth
One, zygote or blastocyst; it's not technically even an embryo until the amniotic sac develops [1]. Definitely not a fetus.
Two, "at least 40% of [natural] human pregnancies are lost before implantation" [2]. With assisted reproduction, that's 75% [3].
But "total loss from fertilisation to birth is 40-60%" in natural births [4]. About 65% to 80% of IVF implanted embryos result in a live birth [5], or about a total loss of 80%. (And improving.)
When ART results in a lower total loss from fertilisation to birth than natural conception, would you argue for banning the latter?
It can be both miraculous and ordinary. Miraculous in that we have no idea (really) how life/consciousness comes into being and ordinary enough that billions of people do it.
There are billions of us on this planet already. Why is it difficult for you to imagine that someone could have a larger net positive impact on all those existing billions than they would by just adding a few additional people to the planet? Not that they're mutually exclusive to begin with.
Parenthood is a wonderful thing for people that want it. Not everyone does and ascribing absolute value to it for a whole sex is weird.
I call this b.s as it sounds like religion in the first place and forgets that being a parent it’s not only about creating life. That’s the “easy” part and you don’t have very much of an input(I.e compared with other mammals anyway).
That statement implies that your mother was a bad mother. I'm sorry. Being a mother is so much more than just creating another being. It also involves programming values and experiences into someone so that they can navigate the world. Raising my brother and I was by far the top achievement of my mother, and it was very fulfilling to her. Other mothers I know of are similar.
> Being a mother is so much more than just creating another being. It also involves programming values and experiences into someone
OP describes a “blessing and privilege only afforded to women.” That describes the biological process of having a baby. Not parenting and child rearing broadly, whether that be by the father, adoptive parents or extended family and community that help nurture a child.
That's a weirder take. Women who do a good job caring for the next generation are more valuable than most of the other impacts you're likely to make in a business career. Most people overestimate the impact of their work and underestimate the impact of their family and personal relationships. It's one of the most common deathbed regrets.
"Spending more time with friends and family" is not the same thing as "having kids"
I know I will regret not spending as much time with close friends as I could have - I already do. Some of them I no longer have the chance to do so. I regret not traveling more when I was younger - and I traveled A LOT! Still do. But there are some things I'll never get to experience. I'm sure I'll regret some aspects of focusing on my career.
Career and work are almost certainly not the most important aspect of your life. But that doesn't mean that you have to have kids, either, or that you'd regret not having them. I find it weird to suggest that the most meaningful form of interpersonal relationship has to be that of parent and child instead of whatever an individual finds to be the most meaningful.
There's certainly exceptions, but I would say for the majority of people, their relationships with their parents are amongst the closest and most important in their lives. It's one of the few relationships that survives the different phases of life. I don't have children so I can't recommend that for you, but I still think having children is a beautiful thing that should be encouraged.
"I received a private apology email from the woman who confronted me".
People can make mistakes, especially dealing with things on the edge that they haven't yet had a lot of experience with. The fact that an apology was made tells me that the person was trying to understand and reflect. That is a good look for any organization.
YES - but I'd say this should be a top-level comment. And note that the woman was a YC Partner. Expecting a more-public or higher-level response from YC seems somewhat unrealistic.
I define my terms on my blog and github. You can define your terms on your blog and github. Those definitions will sometimes be similar, sometimes be different. We all benefit from the variety. It's a beautiful world.
And I'll assume good faith on your part and shoot this right back. If someone says "being a physician is the highest calling yada yada", would it be fair and thoughtful rebuttal to say, well, some people aren't capable of becoming medical doctors, it is exclusionary? It's an over-worn stereotype–too many people love doctors, it's passé? It's an unequal discrimination which elevates some career professions over different ones, which is inequitable?
Is it problematic to express adoration for the profession of doctors?
These types of expressions can be interpreted without being literally construed and deconstructed to atoms. It's *okay* for people to express positive sentiments about things—it's not necessary to put those sentiments under an electron microscope and describe their internal atomic-level contradictions. Because, we live in pleasenter world if people can freely express positive sentiments about things all the time, without too much worrying about "but what about..."
You can express adoration for motherhood or doctors without stating that anyone not doing those things isn't achieving their highest calling.
It's quite simple to avoid this - just recognize that the highest calling of anyone is a personal and subjective matter and trying to ascribe absolute value to it is silly. Talk about your own highest calling, not others.
> Really bad look for YC, being a mother is literally the highest calling a woman can have. A blessing and privilege only afforded to women, and they tossed this founder out for no reason.
This is some sexist godddam bullshit.
Yes, motherhood is important - for all of us, and people raising families are something we need to do better to accommodate society wide, but implying the most important thing a woman could ever do is be a baby factory is stupid regressive thinking.
Which makes a more meaningful impact to society and the world, raising one child or saving every human on the planet two hours of labor a week?
Ideally, no one should have to chose, you ought to be able to do both of those things at once, and not having to pick.
> Yes, motherhood is important - for all of us, and people raising families are something we need to do better to accommodate society wide, but implying the most important thing a woman could ever do is be a baby factory is stupid regressive thinking.
Without that occurring, society and civilization would soon cease to exist. It's a little difficult to overstate its importance. I would even go so far as to say that the most important thing a man can do is become a father.
If people were trying to disabuse the rest of us of the notion that a woman can't succeed in a career and also be a mother, the actions of the conference organizer undermined that.
> Which makes a more meaningful impact to society and the world, raising one child
Raising 2.1 children, but I'll forgive getting the number wrong. Pretending that this doesn't have a more meaningful impact than having a c-level job title in some company trying to launch a phone app that will sell us pet food more efficiently is asinine.
It is important that people in general become parents in some number so that the human race can continue to exist, yes. No one is denying that.
Not everyone needs to be a parent. We're not in a situation where humanity is in danger of extinction because of a reduction in childbirth. There are more pressing existential threats related to having more people than there are pressing existential threats related to having fewer, even if you don't believe in climate change, etc. We have wars over land and resources today, including powers with the ability to end modern human civilization in a nuclear holocaust.
None of which is to say people should stop having children if they want to, but the idea that the greatest contribution people can make to the world is having kids is absurd. You're being reductive in relegating it to making a phone app to sell pet food, so I'll do the same in the other direction - If an individual were to find a cheap and easily producible cure-all for cancer but remain childless, have they contributed less to humanity than an individual that does raise 2.1 children?
While true in the strict sense, this is false in a more general sense. Yes, everyone does need to become a parent. You're not the 1-in-100 exception that gets to duck this responsibility, and you're definitely not all that exception, people reading the comment.
The more of you who skip out on this, the greater the burden on those that don't. When you don't have you're 2.1 children, someone else has to have those children on top of the 2.1 they need for themselves.
> We're not in a situation where humanity is in danger of extinction because
We are actually in danger of extinction, the math is simple, and only a bizarre form of willful blindness prevents you from seeing it. You can check anywhere you like, find some source that you trust. It will tell you that we have sub-replacement fertility. In the United States, in North America, in the western hemisphere. In east Asia. The latest numbers are highly suggestive that India just recently (within the last 3 years or so) has sunk below the replacement level. There are few countries not suffering this trend, there are none untouched by it. It generally takes about 20 minutes to walk through all the various fallacies, at the end of which the denier then says "but when things shrink down a little fertility can go back up, and things will be fine!"
Except fertility doesn't go back up. No little girl who grows up in a world where all her role models have few or no children will wake up one morning and say to herself "I want 2.1 children when I'm a grownup!" but that's what would have to happen for all little girls. Just for the population to stabilize. If only some of them say that, then we're still on the road to extinction, because the average has to be 2.1. The same ideas that caused people to remain childless will still be floating around. There will still be people telling those little girls...
> Not everyone needs to be a parent.
One of them might even be you, depending on how long you live.
> If an individual were to find a cheap and easily producible cure-all for cancer but
Saving the lives of geriatric people, who will die someday anyway, having made no more children than before they got cancer? Willfully blind.
This seems to all be presupposed on the idea that the population growing is a positive thing is a universally accepted truth. I don't think that is a de facto true statement. I wrote a lot arguing this point, got towards the end of your comment, and realized that most of it is nothing that will change your mind, so instead I'll focus on why I deleted it all:
> Saving the lives of geriatric people, who will die someday anyway, having made no more children than before they got cancer? Willfully blind.
I originally wrote about how cancer impacts more than just geriatric people, and how even from your perspective, around 1800 children die from cancer every year - people who will, in theory, even at sub-replacement levels, produce more kids than an individual making their 2.1 children.
But I realized that this one line shows that we fundamentally have different viewpoints about the purpose of life. If life isn't good, what is the point of having kids? Back when I still wanted children, I had decided not to have them because of concerns about climate change. I believe that it is at the very least human-accelerated, and most likely primarily caused by us as well, but even if not, we have clear trends and data showing that there is a very real risk that huge portions of humanity will have their lives significantly disrupted by it in my lifetime, much less that of my children. I don't want to force someone to have to live through that.
But if the prevailing opinion of people in the world was "Let's not cure cancer because it's just saving geriatric people who won't have more kids anyway," then that's not a world that doesn't match my value system and not one I want to subject my children to living in. I think the existence of humanity is an amoral thing - there's not fundamentally any specific reason we need to exist beyond us wanting to, and if as a collective whole we decide that existence has not been a thing wonderful enough to bring new people into it and we no longer desire to exist, then, well, that's fine.
If we want humanity to continue, let's make the world a place where people want to bring children into it, and incentivize them doing so.
to me the main point of the parent comment was not that population growth is good, but that the current trend points to a sharp population decline coming in a century or two, and once we have a sharp decline it will be very hard to stop that decline and get to zero growth at replacement rate which is really what the goal in the end must be.
If we want humanity to continue, let's make the world a place where people want to bring children into it, and incentivize them doing so.
i agree, but at this point we are really very far away from that.
> This seems to all be presupposed on the idea that the population growing is a positive thing is a universally accepted truth
I used the number 2.1. It does not result in population growth. It gives you a nearly perfect population stability. It neither grows, nor shrinks. And if that's not good enough for you, if it happened right this moment, the population once stabilized would be a bit smaller than it is now.
> But I realized that this one line shows that we fundamentally have different viewpoints about the purpose of life.
"Purpose of life" sounds religious, or ignorant. Instead, let's talk about whether you like humans and think humans are positive. If you do, you would dislike any trend or event which would make them extinct. If the extinction is proceeding, and you're whining about how it's unfair that women are treated like babymaking machines (which all humans are, male and female), then it seems that quite without knowing it, you think humans are a negative thing. Not so negative maybe that they require being wiped out immediately, but negative enough you will do nothing to halt the slow-motion extinction that is coming.
While there are the occasional individuals I dislike, I like humans in total, and I would be sad if I were forced to believe that they will be extinct 1000 years from now. But there is a growing sentiment that they are bad, and maybe this dull, unintelligent rock would be better off if humans were gone. A sort of death cult.
> I don't want to force someone to have to live through that.
My ancestors survived famines and disasters that would shock all of us into disbelief. Horrors and terrors. Predated upon, eaten alive. Suffering with diseases unknown to modern man. Much of the time without even understanding what was going on, it's no surprise they imagined and invented gods doing that to them, evil gods. For them to have gone through all that, and to give up on what we've all been doing because my children might have to figure out some engineering... naive or blasphemous, I don't know what to call it. My children could solve any problem, will solve them.
> then that's not a world that doesn't match my value system and not one I want to subject my children to living in.
So be it. The world always belonged to my children, and their children. I guess I should thank you for realizing yours were not fit to inherit it.
> If we want humanity to continue,
You've already made your choice. I see no reason to consult you further.
Yeah. The guy who explicitly stated people who are too old to have children aren't worth saving is the person who values human life more than me.
I find it bizarre that I'm being accused of cultlike thinking by someone who has distilled humanity down to just reproducing. We're not single-celled organisms, man. We can aspire to things greater than just having kids.
> So be it. The world always belonged to my children, and their children. I guess I should thank you for realizing yours were not fit to inherit it.
Making a value judgment about theoretical children based on a few online interactions is such a deeply weird thing to do. This whole interaction is one of the strangest I've had on the internet in several decades of using it.
> Yeah. The guy who explicitly stated people who are too old to have children aren't worth saving is the person who values human life more than me.
It's difficult to explain counter-intuitiveness to the unclever. But yes. Overvaluing the geriatric to the exclusion of children and pro-procreation is equivalent to not valuing human life. It seems like some people should be able to get that, given how the old are so close to death, that it's about valuing death.
> I find it bizarre that I'm being accused of cultlike thinking by
Many cult members report similar sentiments if/when they are deprogrammed. From the inside, they're pretty sure they're the normal ones, and everyone else is weird.
> We're not single-celled organisms,
So some claim. They're sure, somehow, that they've transcended their biology. That, descending from an unending lineage nearly 4 billion years long, that they are the specific individual that all of that happened for, and things need not continue beyond them.
But you're just an animal.
> We can aspire to things greater than just having kids.
You absolutely cannot. When you do this, you die having achieved little and having left no one to replace you on planet Earth to continue whatever work you thought so important that you skipped making children. All your works will, within two centuries or less, be for naught.
> This whole interaction is one of the strangest I've had on the internet in several decades of using it.
That tends to happen when you chance upon someone not promoting the status quo.
> being a mother is literally the highest calling a woman can have. A blessing and privilege only afforded to women, and they tossed this founder out for no reason.
oh god no. What? "Highest calling" is a personal and subjective thing. Is my highest calling donating sperm for said activity?
Having children is a choice. It's not right or wrong. Someone could even have children and still feel like something else is a greater purpose in their life, and that's fine too, as long as they provide love and care for their children.
Let's not ascribe a biological function as being the primary point of being anything or anyone.
I agree that pregnancy is significantly more difficult for women than it is for men. No question. There's a reason I said being a sperm donor and not being a father.
But this entire argument seems to be about the idea that human reproduction is the highest calling for any individual, and that, with current technology, requires both sperm and eggs.
My stance is that "highest calling" is a personal belief and one that others cannot make a value judgment on. I've discussed doctors and medical researchers in other comments because they have a more direct impact on "amount of people alive" by being in those professions than they would by having children, but I wouldn't argue that those are the "highest calling" for individuals either, or that such a thing exists as an objective truth to begin with.
I do not think anyone should be reduced to their reproductive functions, regardless of how "wondrously complex" those things are.
"Trust that I would step out if my child were actually disturbing anyone."
Key word here is trust, which I think many have lost the ability to provide to others since the pandemic. We live in a jaded society and sometimes people will project their opinions from positions of power that aren't quite justified.
Good on the author for being capable of doing so much and taking conflict in stride!
The problem is it leaves the entire interpretation of what is or is not a distraction up to the mother. The founder obviously thought the baby was being distracting enough to (politely) ask her to step outside.
I've been at professional events with infants; as long as the infant was quiet there's no issue. But I think the it's also reasonable to defer to the attendees who also deserve a professional environment free of distractions. It's hard to know without all the details, but the author must have felt there was some distraction, or I doubt she would have moved to the back to begin with.
> When he started babbling and cooing, I moved to the back of the room. That's when someone approached me and said, "Would you like to stroll your baby outside? I want people to get the full experience out of this conference."
It sounds like the child was indeed disturbing people. The author may have not be in alignment with the rest of the audience as far as what behavior is disturbing.
The world is far too cruel to children, and sees them primarily as nuisance. Part of this is because of increased childlessness, leaving people without the experience of dealing with young children previous generations had. Parents deserve to be able to go to all kinds of events.
I disagree with your reason, but agree with your conclusion. We've been pretty unforgiving and cruel to both mothers and children for a long, long time.
I think the callousness towards parents is earned. I have seen children destroy gardens and when parents are told they show no remorse or attempts to reprimand the child. You are told to calm down they are just being kids. Of course this leads to people seeing children as a nuisance.
I agree. I'm a parent with two (now adult) daughters. I'm not intolerant of other peoples' children because I am personally child-free or was an only child (though I was). I'm intolerant of other peoples' children when those children draw attention to themselves.
If your kid is quiet and keeps to themselves, then I haven't even noticed them in the first place in order to take issue. The reason I take issue is because your kid is being loud or obnoxious and ruining my experience in (grocery store | restaurant | movie theatre | public transportation | anywhere that I'm politely minding my own business but your kid is forcing me to know that it exists).
As people like to say when discussing rights and freedoms: your rights end where my nose begins.
My wife and I recently travelled to Walt Disney World for a vacation. While in a hotel lobby we walked past a child around 8 or 9 years-old (if I had to guess) accompanied by a man that I assumed was his father. As we walked past, the kid punched my wife in the arm. It wasn't a mistake. He telegraphed the hell out of it. When I confronted the father he just smiled and shrugged it off.
If people didn't constantly have to deal with situations like the above, then we could talk about being more tolerant towards other peoples' children.
But if it's not a child invading physical boundaries, it's auditory. God help those of us with misophonia that have to listen to children make the most hideous noises (and not always due to a temper tantrum, sometimes it's just loud screeching or yelling as part of play or whatever).
Why should anyone have to tolerate this? And no, I don't blame the children, I blame the parents. But who is at fault is irrelevant. No one should be obligated to put up with assholes whether those assholes are 40 years-old or 4 years-old.
> Part of this is because of increased childlessness
Another way of phrasing this is more people are choosing not to have children - one motivation probably being that they can actually be quite a nuisance, a sentiment I've heard from literally every parent I've ever talked to.
Parents do deserve to go to all kinds of events - and generally are allowed to. Parents do not have the right to disturb events for people who choose not to have kids.
That is true but not really what I was getting at. Because there are fewer children today, the average person has no casual interaction with children in their day to day, something that was rare in days past. This has led to the idea that children do not belong anywhere that is not explicitly a "family area" which disqualifies them (parents) from going places they need to be, such as events focused on the importance of being a mother and business owner!
I've been to several (scientific) conferences including babies. They sometimes make a small disturbance, but I don't think anyone has ever taken offence at this.
> I'm not naming this woman because I think the problem is bigger than me or her.
Probably A Better Person than I, but I'm in the privileged position of not being a man and not trying start a career. A YCombinator representative suggesting that a mother with a baby leaves in a talk specifically in a talk on "Mothering experience while starting a business" seems to send a very strong signal about what Y Combinator thinks of this situation.
I would be kinda mad if someone came with a (noisy) baby during a presentation of a conference paper I spend months working on, plus facing the stress of selection. They are professionals to keep care of them when needed, there is no valid reason besides saving a few bucks bringing a baby there.
I saw the baby's application and it was terrible. Hadn't even launched anything (other than vomit) yet. The good news is he can keep applying. In fact, the average person in YC applied 2.4 times before being accepted.
> Darwin was in a stroller, and I was rocking him back and forth to sleep. When he started babbling and cooing, I moved to the back of the room. That's when someone approached me and said, "Would you like to stroll your baby outside? I want people to get the full experience out of this conference."
I am a dad who brings kids everywhere. This is an entirely polite and reasonable response. If my kids are being distracting, I appreciate being told and have zero problem taking a baby out to calm down. They never said she had to leave because she had a baby.
It's great when others are chill around your kids, but I would never just force random people to have to put up with children.
Contextualize the event, though. Womanhood and motherhood are often quite strongly connected. An event celebrating and developing women should anticipate a higher percentage of the audience will be mothers with infants.
Be prepared for that, communicate with your audience in advance, have clear expectations with staff, perhaps be more permissive with infants, etc.
If you look at a random sample of humans, vs a random sample of 20-50 year old women, the sample that is women will include more mothers than the sample across humanity, generally.
Typically, a random sample across all people will include approximately 50% men, who are statistically very unlikely to be birthing parents.
> Doesn't that reinforce stereotypes?
No, because you are accommodating both parents and non parents. Admitting that parents exist and that they can also be founders or professionals is a negation of the idea that women must be exclusively caretakers.
> Why not expect people to be responsible parents?
I don't see anyone in the article who was an irresponsible parent.
>who are statistically very unlikely to be birthing parents.
This is an odd framing unless you are expecting people to be birthing at a conference. To the OP’s point, there’s no reason someone who birthed a child should shoulder a disproportionate amount of the child rearing.
So is yours an age-based argument rather than a gender one?
Ideal reality vs. actual reality are separate things. In fact, recognizing actual reality is a prerequisite to going "well damn this actually really sucks we should fix that."
In an ideal world, men would be just as likely to be taking on the responsibilities of childcare in equal measures with women. In the real world, even in "progressive" areas, women disproportionately are shouldered with those responsibilities. It is something that I would expect an event focusing on female founders and the challenges they face would take into account.
there’s no reason someone who birthed a child should shoulder a disproportionate amount of the child rearing
there is: breastfeeding. and no, pumping breastmilk and having dad feed the baby with a bottle is not the same thing.
the necessary reality is that the body contact that mother and baby experience while breastfeeding has no equivalence in the other gender, and if you value that experience then by necessity a breastfeeding mother must be doing a disproportionate amount of the child rearing.
That is one part of child rearing. Granting that may the the bulk and most important part early in life, it hardly encapsulates all of child rearing. Just because one aspect is disproportionate doesn’t mean raising a child as a whole needs to be.
agreed. and i suppose that one could balance things out by having fathers do more in other, later parts of childrearing, but given that breastfeeding can only be done by mothers, and there is nothing that can only be done by fathers the odds favor a mothers involvement over the fathers. the fathers involvement is optional, the mothers is required.
one problem being that full time jobs force a choice on who stays at home to take care of the children. because of breastfeeding, in the majority of cases the choice will be the mother. female founders are going to remain an exception until we restructure our work such that the majority of people work no more than 20 hours a week and thereby no longer forcing a choice on who stays at home because both parents would be able to contribute to childrearing without having to stop working. (i was a stay-at-home dad btw, so i have experienced the alternative)
>restructure our work such that the majority of people work no more than 20 hours a week
I think this is highly unlikely in the US, given how much we as a society prize economic productivity.
Another alternative is to make parents a protected class to legally prevent discrimination, although that may cause all kinds of pushback just like we're seeing with DEI in the current environment.
It shouldn't. I have two young kids. My youngest has started making loud noises/talking during events like this and I immediately headed for the door with her. It's completely inconsiderate to the other people in the room.
>They never said she had to leave because she had a baby.
"To me, that's ridiculous. [for one of the partners of Y Combinator to] ask me to leave [("do you want to take your baby outside")] with a quietly cooing baby during a talk that was explicitly about the challenges of being a mother and founder was shocking. I realized then that the monster of systemic barriers to entrepreneurs who are also moms is bigger than I ever realized." - FTA
Imagine a medical conference about new treatments for allergies. Now imagine if one of the attendees had a never ending sneezing/coughing fit. Would it not be reasonable to ask that person to step outside to avoid distraction? I don't think the topic of the talk means related distractions should be ignored.
"Imagine a hypothetical and quite silly scenario, which I've constructed to be obviously absurd" isn't a great rhetorical device.
There's no need for analogizing here, we have a clear scenario we can discuss directly - a woman was asked to leave an event discussing motherhood because her baby was deemed a distraction.
We are plenty capable of just discussing that without made up scenarios.
Analogies are often useful to remove the emotional charge of a discussion (like those related to parenting) to try and pin down more rational principles.
This reads as a shallow dismissal. If your goal is to arrive at first principles, I disagree. As others have said, it's difficult for many to have a discussion about parenting because it's so central to many people's identity that it becomes emotionally charged. It's much more difficult to ascertain core principles amid emotional reactions. Which part do you disagree with: that people are sensitive to judgements related to parenting or that it's harder to get a principled argument from an emotional reaction? Or put differently, what is unique about this case where you don't think those rules apply?
It is a shallow dismissal, you've read it correctly. Your analogy was silly, parenting is emotional (and being emotional isn't negative), and the situation was quite straightforward and needed no simplification.
>It is a shallow dismissal, you've read it correctly. Your analogy was silly,
You may want to familiarize yourself with the HN guidelines:
>Please don't post shallow dismissals
>When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
A better response could have either answered which of those points you actually disagree with and why, or if you don’t disagree with the points but just the analogy, offer up a better analogy.
>the situation was quite straightforward and needed no simplification.
To reiterate, the point of the analogy is not to simplify as you've suggested, but to cast it in a less emotional light given the impediments strong emotion can put up to rational discourse.
To clarify further, I never said emotions are are inherently negative. I did say they can inhibit a discussion that is trying to get to rational underlying principles. We have lots of societal arrangements that acknowledge and try to mitigate this fact. Considering your reaction and apparent unwillingness/inability to answer very direct questions related to parenting seems to prove that point, as do the other commenters who have acknowledged any comments on parenting can become a third-rail in discussion due to this fact.
Not a big fan of kids (as in having them around), not a dad, counterpoint: If there's one societal function that's fundamental it's having kids. I think forcing random people to put up with your children is probably the most defensible thing you can force upon other people.
Not to say that it's not great if you can be considerate to others while you have kids. But considering how inconsiderate kids are and how much everyone around you depends on you having kids, some amount of putting up with those kids, collectively, seems very okay.
I think society, in general, is fairly considerate of parents. But it also means, in certain contexts, parents need to be considerate of the rest of society. If your kid is being inconsiderate at a professional event, or church, or a movie theater etc., I think the reasonable thing to do is step outside until your child is able to come back to being considerate.
Do parents not expect other parents to act with consideration to other members of society? I believe the fundamental principle remains the same in either instance.
Whether or not I have a disability does not change my mind about whether people in a wheelchair should board a plane first.
My kids get to be the absolute center of my world, but I’m careful not to expect them to be the center of anyone else’s.
being a parent changes your perception about the challenges other parents face. it is one thing for me as a parent to realize that my kid is disruptive and step outside unprompted, but quite another for someone to ask me to leave. the latter would make me very uncomfortable, and needs to be handled with extreme tact and consideration.
Genuine question, but why would this make you feel uncomfortable?
>needs to be handled with extreme tact and consideration.
Did you think they acted without tact? By the authors own account, they seemed very polite and even sent a follow-up email. The founders account of the interaction made it seem even more polite (asking her if she needed help, offering to hold the baby, offering other areas where she could still hear the talk but not be as much of a distraction etc.)
being asked to leave implies that i am either oblivious towards the disruption my kids cause, or that i simply misjudge the situation and thought my kids are not as disruptive as the person asking me felt about it. both imply a judgement of my behavior, and that alone will make me uncomfortable. i do admit that i am biased by my experience in china where something like that would never happen as i explain here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41438834
not having experienced the situation i can't judge, but the fact that it prompted the person to write an article about it to me suggests that on some level it did make her feel uncomfortable. if it hadn't it wouldn't have been worth mentioning.
Sure. After reading both accounts, it came across to me that the founder with the baby was being overly sensitive and chose to steer into the least favorable interpretation. We should strive to be polite but we shouldn't avoid confrontation just because someone may take it the wrong way, especially when doing so comes at the detriment of other people's experiences.
I don’t think anyone is advocating intolerance towards children, but rather trying to define what is reasonable. A loud child in a restaurant might be ok, but a child screaming and throwing food less so. After reading both accounts, I get the feeling the founder with a baby has an expectation that is miscalibrated to what most people consider would be reasonable.
after moving to china any preconceptions i had about western people being considerate of children (and parents) went out the window. chinese not only tolerate children, but they allow them to get away with anything, almost to a fault even. i have never once seen anyone complain about children. they bring them to work and they care when someone needs help in levels that a western parent would consider intrusive. and any disruption they simply ignore. after experiencing that, asking a parent to step outside to me now feels rather rude and inconsiderate.
Do you think this is how it's always been in China or do you think this is a response to how their attitudes towards children have changed?
The US tends to have a very individualistic outlook compared to many other societies, so I think differences should be expected to differ from culture to culture. In the US, it would make me very uncomfortable to have keep my child in a movie theater making noises if I felt like it was inhibiting on someone else's enjoyment of a movie, for instance.
i believe it has been like that all the time, because in the times without insurance and pensions children where the ones who cared for you when you get old and so people depended on their kids and it logically makes sense that they would show extreme care for them growing up. (this also reflects in the attitude of future grandparents who to this day push their children to get married and have kids. sometimes in extreme ways)
>the times without insurance and pensions children where the ones who cared for you when you get old and so people depended on their kids and it logically makes sense that they would show extreme care for them growing up
This has been the case for most agrarian economies, including the US in the past so I’m not sure that’s a good discriminator.
that's a fair point. i haven't read anything about how children were treated in china in the past. i am more familiar with stories about treatment of children in historical europe. in short, in europe children were seen as a necessary nuisance (someone mentioned cattle)
but from that i want to draw a few observations: i think attitude towards children in europe either has improved or it hasn't changed. if it hasn't changed, then why should it have changed in china? but even if it has improved, on one hand it is still way behind china by comparison, but on the other hand we stopped depending on direct children a few decades earlier than china, so if there was a parallel development then china would have to be a few decades behind europe with their changing attitude towards children. that being not the case suggests that there was no change in attitude at all, or at least not one prompted by a modern pension system and therefore the chinese attitude towards children could not be a new thing.
Even if they have changed, I seriously doubt you can distill something complex like societal interactions and norms down to a simple one-variable model like the introduction of pensions.
Society norms definitely shift. My point is that that change is generally the result of a highly dynamic and complicated process, rather than pointing to a single cause.
This has not matched my experience in seeing children being raised in other countries in Asia, though I have not spent significant time in China itself, particularly around parents and their children, so I can't comment there. I will say that does not match the behavior I have seen of first generation or even second generation Chinese immigrants in America, however.
My anecdotal experience, primarily driven by my time in Japan as well as living in a place that has a very large Asian immigrant population is that they are as strict when it becomes to the behavior of their children as any Westerner, and often moreso. When I go to the local H-mart, I am far more likely to see a parent corralling their child and getting them to behave than when I see similar behavior out of kids from western parents at the Safeway
Perhaps this holds true in China itself, but I don't believe the distinction is purely East vs. West.
When I go to the local H-mart, I am far more likely to see a parent corralling their child and getting them to behave
i don't want to claim that my experience is the norm, but this sentence in particular reminded me that my distinct first impression in china was like "boy they do let their kids here get away with anything"
add to that the reputation of the single child policy creating "little emperors" because of how parents raise their child.
but again, this is just my experience. it may well possible that this is a small minority, and that i just never saw parents corralling their children because they possibly were already effective at raising them to be well behaved.
it is also worth noting that i observed a much higher tolerance at people behaving out of the norm. (but then it is also a much rarer occurrence and it is also not considered polite to confront people)
> But considering how inconsiderate kids are and how much everyone around you depends on you having kids, some amount of putting up with those kids, collectively, seems very okay.
Which is why letting you bring your kids, but then also politely letting you know when your kids are being a distraction should be a totally acceptable compromise.
The problem is only when a parent takes any amount of confrontation to be a form of societal oppression and writes an expose on it on Business Insider (for example).
Assume they know their kids are a distraction (the implication that they might not makes me cringe a little) and they still want to participate. How much is that a burden we share vs a right parents have to fight for and can be denied?
I am a father of three and I strongly disagree with you. I respect the right for others to enjoy their day without having to deal with someone else's loud or misbehaving children. I myself don't enjoy strangers' kids being loud and fully empathise with people who don't have kids.
I have no problem removing myself and my children from a place is we're being a nuisance.
I'm generally quite strongly on the side of being considerate of other people for a continental European, but in the particular case of children I kind of disagree. Children are an annoying but absolutely necessary part of society. They will work for our pensions and care for us when we are old. They should be everyone's problem and responsibility, not just the parents.
> They will work for our pensions and care for us when we are old.
That sentence sent chills down my spine.
Life is an end in itself. It is a not a means to the ends of others. Your children are no more my responsibility than they are my tool to serve me in old age. My pension and care in old age is not their responsibility any more than their behaviour is my obligation to put up with.
If this sounds strange and overly "individualistic" then let me frame the issue in a slightly different way.
If we accept that children are an "absolutely necessary part of society" because "they will work for our pensions and care for us when we are old" then what happens if people choose not to have children? Are childless (by choice) people parasites in such a society? If more and more people decide to not have children is there a point where this becomes a social crises to the point where we start forcing people to have children?
And what about children who decide to emigrate as adults? Is there a point where you prevent people from travelling in order to guarantee that you have enough people around to pay pensions and take care of old people?
Not that it should matter, but I write this a middle-aged parent of two adult daughters who I do not hold to any sort of moral obligation to take care of me when I'm old. If they choose to then cool, I guess, but it's their life to live as they choose. The mere fact that they exist does not automatically obligate them to anyone else for any purpose.
>My pension and care in old age is not their responsibility any more than their behaviour is my obligation to put up with.
You may think this ought not be true, but as a matter of reality it is. Each generation carries the weight of the previous one through retirement. Is it just? I think so - but regardless of that, it is the agreement every child is born into.
>Are childless (by choice) people parasites in such a society?
> You may think this ought not be true, but as a matter of reality it is. Each generation carries the weight of the previous one through retirement.
To the extent that this is true, it is by choice.
> Is it just? I think so - but regardless of that, it is the agreement every child is born into.
"Agreement" presupposes the consent of each party. You cannot be entered into an "agreement" without your own participation in the act of agreeing.
Children cannot consent, therefore this is no "agreement" by definition.
What you have called an "agreement" is more appropriately referred to as a "duty." There is a very critical distinction between the two concepts which I will elaborate on in a moment.
> Somewhat, but it is rude to point that out.
What do manners have to do with anything?
What you're describing is the concept of duty. You're saying that by virtue of just being born, a child is obligated to care for his or her elders through retirement and that their personal choices are irrelevant.
In this case there is a very important question: "What are you going to do about it when the child says 'no'?"
You can either do nothing, which is a valid option, but it means that the entire concept and discussion was moot. You can invent "duties" all you want, but people ultimately get to decide how to live their own lives and there's nothing you can do about it.
Or, you can pass laws and use force in order to compel people to do certain things "for the good of society."
Which brings me to why I asked the question: "Are people who choose to be child-free parasites?"
That's a very important question because if a "society" depends on children in order to pay peoples' pensions and to take care of them when they are older, and that dependence is so fundamental that we consider people who choose not have children "parasites", and we obligate children to a duty to take care of elders ... then you've weakened the recognition of individual rights (at least reproductive rights and the right to travel / emigrate) to such an extent that you've opened the door to banning contraception, abortion and freedom of travel.
>To the extent that this is true, it is by choice.
For anyone in a western country it is not by choice. Your wages get taxed and put towards social security, elderly housing, and Medicare (or equivalent). The work you do to get those wages keeps companies in business, meaning the stock portfolios of those that built them for retirement have value and can be liquidated. Unless you fully disconnect from society, you are responsible for the retirement of those who came before you.
>You're saying that by virtue of just being born, a child is obligated to care for his or her elders through retirement and that their personal choices are irrelevant.
This is putting words into my mouth. I have never prescribed anything, just described things as I see them. It seems plainly obvious to me that simply by working and living, you are putting fuel into the machine that powers your elders' retirement.
>Or, you can pass laws and use force in order to compel people to do certain things "for the good of society."
We already do this, try your luck with the IRS after not paying your social security tax. I do not understand how you envision the world.
I think the question comes down to what is reasonable accommodation. As others have said, allowing you to bring your child to the conference seems reasonable. As does asking you to step outside when your child becomes a distraction.
In the US workforce, there are laws about what constitutes a reasonable accommodation for a disability. If you have a mobility restriction, it’s reasonable to ask for a first floor office, but not that the owner install an elevator.
"Would you like to stroll your baby outside? I want people to get the full experience out of this conference."
According to response from the organizer, the offer here was to help the mom get the full experience by offering her accommodations so that she doesn't have to miss any part of the presentation despite having her child with her.
Congratulations on fully understanding the situation. There are a lot of such failed provocations unfortunately. Like the short movie in Poland with the lady on the bus who showed a piece of footage in which the bus driver asks her out of the vehicle, and it was an article along the lines of ‘he asked me out of the bus because I was with my child’, while the entire surveillance footage of the bus reveals that the driver asked the mother to fasten her pram with a seatbelt in a suitable place. She refused and the driver asked her out because she did not comply with his instructions and rules related to transport. People who have children completely fail to understand or do not want to understand people who have made a conscious decision not to have them.
Thanks for this comment, your commentary is uplifting.
Should have used the baby as a prop or call to action in a booth, or unveiled a way for VCs to monetize it, and I'm sure ears would have perked up then.
When I did YC I often had office hours with PG and JL while their son crawled around on the floor. It was very family friendly. I loved that, and it taught me good lessons that have been helpful now that I have kids of my own.
I'm worried YC has "jumped the shark". The blocking of constructive criticism from people who have helped build this place is very sad.
Keep in mind, there are many people who can be more susceptible than others to noises. I know a few autistic folks who would have a very difficult time.
Do you have children? Don't you think those of us who do know exactly what the maximum amount of noise a baby can make is? Might we have concluded that even if that maximum noise level was reached (I wasn't there but from accounts I bet it was 1% of that), that it should have been celebrated, and applauded, and spun in a positive way, rather than how it was handled?
Nope, and even if it was 1% (doubt it) it’s still okay to ask someone to stop.
Humans have evolved to find baby noises very disruptive, so even a low quiet noise can be distracting. A mother might be more used to baby noises and okay with a level the average person might not be.
And again, people have conditions where they can find quieter noises distracting.
Why does someone’s medical condition suddenly have to take a back seat to exiting a venue when your baby makes noise.
If I ever have children, I wouldn’t subject others around me to things like this. You have a responsibility to other people in society. Your child isn’t special and doesn’t deserve consideration above medical conditions.
After reading the few details in the article, it sounds like it could have just been a disagreement about when a baby's noises cross the line into "distraction."
Was the talk recorded so we can judge for ourselves? :)
You are assuming she's explaining the situation correctly, in an unbiased way. I think there was context and nuance to the situation she may have intentionally left out.
It is, I have to say, so inexplicable (especially given the topic of the talk) that they would do this as a result of a baby "cooing", that I wonder if this is an accurate description of events?
I would like to lean into having kids at work whenever practical and having them eventually become apprentices to possibly do similar work when they grow up. This has been the historical norm for farmers, shopkeepers, craftsman etc and in my opinion beats institutionalized childcare and staying in college until age of 30 to get a good job.
However I kind of wonder if the author would support that or suddenly switch to standard talking points about institutionalized childhood. Are moms and dads in the company she founded bringing kids to office daily instead of dropping them off at daycare?
Parent of 2. Babies are distracting by design:) they cannot talk and they can only get attention by crying/cooing, and we are wired to listen and prioritize the sound of babies crying/cooing over other activities to guarantee their survival:therefore if there's a baby crying/cooing at a conference the attendees will give priority to the baby over the speaker. I personally didn't think it was rude to ask to go strolling outside as this was from my perspective distracting for the participants.
It is almost always "child free" people that are massively disturbed by even the quietest child noises. I can only speculate as to the (obvious) reasons for this attitude which gives me some level of compassion and even sorrow for those people.
You're being gaslit by most of the comments here but you're not imagining things - there's been a huge shift from an attitude of "children, even other peoples' children, are our future so it's reasonable to tolerate some noise from them" to "children are a dirty loud nuisance that must be stopped".
Again, the reasons for this seem obvious to me but you're an asshole if you point them out explicity.
> there's been a huge shift from an attitude of "children, even other peoples' children, are our future so it's reasonable to tolerate some noise from them" to "children are a dirty loud nuisance that must be stopped"
Plenty of ancient civilisations treated children as glorified cattle. They weren’t expected to survive, so it wasn’t irrational. The notion of a babbling baby in the Roman Senate, a Victorian ball or Meiji Dai Shin’in is laughable.
We are more considerate of babies and parents than we’ve probably ever been as a society. That’s a good thing. But it’s also regularly abused, as anyone who has been on a plane with a child screaming for their iPad knows.
> The notion of a babbling baby in the Roman Senate, a Victorian ball or Meiji Dai Shin’in is laughable.
Yes because those institutions didn't have a lot of women or mothers in them, and the people participating in them had servants and slaves that took care of their progeny.
I know the reality of the modern world hasn't reached everyone yet but we don't exclude mothers from public life any more so maybe the idea of having children in public bodies isn't that "laughable" any more.
> because those institutions didn't have a lot of women or mothers in them, and the people participating in them had servants and slaves that took care of their progeny
Correct. I'm challenging the notion that we "tolerate[d] some noise from" children in the past. (Though even in matriarchal societies, e.g. the Haudenosaunee / Iroquois, I don't recall reading about children in the Long House where official business was conducted.)
> the modern world hasn't reached everyone yet but we don't exclude mothers from public life any more so maybe the idea of having children in public bodies isn't that "laughable" any more
Perhaps. But if we are to have that discussion, it has to be honest about that being novel.
> Humans are evolutionarily evolved to listen to babies. It makes even quiet noises annoying.
It's funny, once you have kiddos, you learn to be able to tell the type of crying they are doing. Some cries are really for attention that an adult needs to attend to right this second, some are just noise, and then there's everything in between. Once you're around infants enough, you kinda just tune out the less important crying, just like you would a fan or a car engine. But, it is a skill you learn, and can lose.
So, parents of young children, I think, really can't see what the big deal is. They're skilled at tuning out the cries that aren't important.
all driven by soulless, self-centered singles and childless couples who cannot abide anything but a world that exists only for their personal indulgence
just wait a generation until these vapid reptiles start to expire and their bloodlines disappear forever...memorialized only in a plaque on a bench in the office plaza where their VC used to be
I have seen good speakers with large audiences and screaming babies that can make a quip along the lines “baby, your skepticism is healthy, but let me convince you, I have done my homework” that is funny at least once, everyone relaxes, and it doesn’t kick anyone out. If the baby keeps yapping, parents will usually find another place anyway.
Also onsite daycare would be a honking great business idea for so many events, including but not limited to company holiday parties.
The headline's characterization seems designed to stoke outrage over something that appears to be fairly mundane. From my reading, she was politely asked to stroll her baby out of the room, whereas the headline makes it sound like she was kicked out of the conference because kids are not welcome.
In my experience, it's very common to simply exit the room with your kid in these kinds of situations and return after they've quieted down, just as a courtesy to those who are there to listen and to be heard.
I recognize the mother is suggesting her kid wasn't very noisy, but I also know that parents are often biased and protective of their kids and can't always see things the way everyone else does. I guess it all hinges on "was the kid sufficiently noisy", but it's probably not worth litigating the subjectivity in this type of extremely common occurrence.
186 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 247 ms ] thread"Show HN" is way more exciting when you don't yet have object permanence
Where'd the startup go?! :D Now you see it–now it's been acquired by Google
(typed from my phone while still rolling)
Chill out. One of these words alliterates with founders, the other does not.
It only sounds like you're a ferengi when you use female as a noun.
The thing is at that point, I have jumped to a # of conclusions: small room, disruptive over long period of time, dead quiet, and acceded to this odd cultural view I never saw anywhere other than moneyed SV and extreme money that talking obliquely means you're being polite.
The article doesn't give us enough data to help, but it does give us enough data to know this was a near-platonic caricature of a situation where the unprofessional bit isn't the baby making noise. It was during a talk about the practical challenges of being a founder with an infant, at an event targeted towards being more inclusive to female founders.
This is a weird take. Women can be more than just baby factories. They can have a far more reaching impact on the world beyond just adding to its population.
I think it's wonderful to find purpose in creating and nurturing a life, but framing it as the best makes people who cannot or choose not to do the thing seem inadequate.
We can create life de novo in a laboratory [1]. We’re approaching the point where we can replicate a womb artificially, and do a better job at that than natural ones. (Interstitial attachment in humans is evolutionarily recent and inefficient [2]. The size of the human brain, too, is evolutionarily recent, which makes human childbirth evolutionarily recent and uniquely deadly among primates [3]. These aren’t difficult to improve on, which is why IVF, C sections, NICUs and lactation inducement are a thing.)
Parenting is rewarding, necessary and noteworthy. Calling it miraculous in literal (versus figurative) terms puts it on a glass pedestal. That’s dangerous if you believe parenting should be respected.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_biology
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6053685/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4305162/
There is constant feedback between mother and child, and any mother will tell you how they got cravings where their body/baby told them exactly what it needed. The baby, still in the womb, gets to hear the parents and experience their life. This all carries into the child's life and is inherently unable to be replicated in a lab.
What are you basing this on? Children conceived through IVF already have nearly identical long-term outcomes to naturally conceived babies. (You have to adjust for income and intent. Otherwise, the IVF babies do better on some measures.)
I tend to agree that we won’t be able to create an arrival womb that outperforms a natural one under ideal circumstances in our lifetimes. But most circumstances aren’t ideal, even when the parents and their doctors have the best intentions.
> haven’t even figured out how to make formula that will leave children as healthy as a breastfed child
Formula isn’t trying to replicate breast milk, it’s trying to be cheap and convenient. Lab-grown breast milk is still decades away, but it’s in the same vein of biochemistry. (The joining factor being our increasing ability to control immune factor production.)
Again, I don’t think it will be better than the best natural breastmilk. (It won’t be fresh, for one.) But OP didn’t say a perfect mother is doing her highest calling. They created a paragon for all women.
> most circumstances aren’t ideal
Yes when women are forced to treat having and raising children as a disease (no children allowed in "professional" settings, dont take time off for family, etc) instead of a normal part of life to be celebrated and encouraged.
Doctors don't have the children's best interests in mind. They need to avoid liability at all costs, which largely means 'avoid death and disfigurement even if the kid isn't as well off long term'. As a bonus, doing unnecessary things gets them paid more.
> What are you basing this on? > we won’t be able to create an arrival womb that outperforms a natural one under ideal circumstances for some time.
Ever. Because factory made, lab grown, and mass produced products have never and inherently can never have the biodiversity of the real thing despite what the marketers might tell you. Even our 'natural' food mass produced in monoculture fields is devoid of nutrients compared to small farms.
> Formula isn’t trying to replicate breast milk, it’s trying to be cheap and convenient
Junk food for infants.
IVF replicates a critical part of making a baby, conception, and artifically steers another, implantation. From a miraculousness perspective, conception is high up there. Certainly one that a hundred years ago someone would have similarly scoffed at being able to be done in a lab not only at all, but almost as well as in nature.
> Even our 'natural' food mass produced in monoculture fields is devoid of nutrients compared to small farms
Sure. What do you think most mothers are eating?
Except for the dozens of fetuses that are not brought to term and flushed because they would not survive to birth.
One, zygote or blastocyst; it's not technically even an embryo until the amniotic sac develops [1]. Definitely not a fetus.
Two, "at least 40% of [natural] human pregnancies are lost before implantation" [2]. With assisted reproduction, that's 75% [3].
But "total loss from fertilisation to birth is 40-60%" in natural births [4]. About 65% to 80% of IVF implanted embryos result in a live birth [5], or about a total loss of 80%. (And improving.)
When ART results in a lower total loss from fertilisation to birth than natural conception, would you argue for banning the latter?
[1] https://www.medicinenet.com/embryo_vs_fetus_differences_week...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6053685/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7670474/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5306416/
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5306416/
[5] https://www.pfcla.com/blog/frozen-embryo-transfer-success-ra...
Parenthood is a wonderful thing for people that want it. Not everyone does and ascribing absolute value to it for a whole sex is weird.
Yes this is the entire point of TFA and the parent comment.
OP describes a “blessing and privilege only afforded to women.” That describes the biological process of having a baby. Not parenting and child rearing broadly, whether that be by the father, adoptive parents or extended family and community that help nurture a child.
(I’m hopeful this was mis-phrased by OP.)
That's a weirder take. Women who do a good job caring for the next generation are more valuable than most of the other impacts you're likely to make in a business career. Most people overestimate the impact of their work and underestimate the impact of their family and personal relationships. It's one of the most common deathbed regrets.
I know I will regret not spending as much time with close friends as I could have - I already do. Some of them I no longer have the chance to do so. I regret not traveling more when I was younger - and I traveled A LOT! Still do. But there are some things I'll never get to experience. I'm sure I'll regret some aspects of focusing on my career.
Career and work are almost certainly not the most important aspect of your life. But that doesn't mean that you have to have kids, either, or that you'd regret not having them. I find it weird to suggest that the most meaningful form of interpersonal relationship has to be that of parent and child instead of whatever an individual finds to be the most meaningful.
"I received a private apology email from the woman who confronted me".
People can make mistakes, especially dealing with things on the edge that they haven't yet had a lot of experience with. The fact that an apology was made tells me that the person was trying to understand and reflect. That is a good look for any organization.
I'm assuming good faith, but this is a very problematic perspective.
* It's reductive, as not all women want to have children.
* It's exclusionary, as not all women can have children.
* It reinforces gender stereotypes.
* It's extremely commonly used to justify systemic discrimination.
Agreed!
I define my terms on my blog and github. You can define your terms on your blog and github. Those definitions will sometimes be similar, sometimes be different. We all benefit from the variety. It's a beautiful world.
What do you mean by dismissive?
Is it problematic to express adoration for the profession of doctors?
These types of expressions can be interpreted without being literally construed and deconstructed to atoms. It's *okay* for people to express positive sentiments about things—it's not necessary to put those sentiments under an electron microscope and describe their internal atomic-level contradictions. Because, we live in pleasenter world if people can freely express positive sentiments about things all the time, without too much worrying about "but what about..."
It's quite simple to avoid this - just recognize that the highest calling of anyone is a personal and subjective matter and trying to ascribe absolute value to it is silly. Talk about your own highest calling, not others.
This is some sexist godddam bullshit.
Yes, motherhood is important - for all of us, and people raising families are something we need to do better to accommodate society wide, but implying the most important thing a woman could ever do is be a baby factory is stupid regressive thinking.
Which makes a more meaningful impact to society and the world, raising one child or saving every human on the planet two hours of labor a week?
Ideally, no one should have to chose, you ought to be able to do both of those things at once, and not having to pick.
Without that occurring, society and civilization would soon cease to exist. It's a little difficult to overstate its importance. I would even go so far as to say that the most important thing a man can do is become a father.
If people were trying to disabuse the rest of us of the notion that a woman can't succeed in a career and also be a mother, the actions of the conference organizer undermined that.
> Which makes a more meaningful impact to society and the world, raising one child
Raising 2.1 children, but I'll forgive getting the number wrong. Pretending that this doesn't have a more meaningful impact than having a c-level job title in some company trying to launch a phone app that will sell us pet food more efficiently is asinine.
Not everyone needs to be a parent. We're not in a situation where humanity is in danger of extinction because of a reduction in childbirth. There are more pressing existential threats related to having more people than there are pressing existential threats related to having fewer, even if you don't believe in climate change, etc. We have wars over land and resources today, including powers with the ability to end modern human civilization in a nuclear holocaust.
None of which is to say people should stop having children if they want to, but the idea that the greatest contribution people can make to the world is having kids is absurd. You're being reductive in relegating it to making a phone app to sell pet food, so I'll do the same in the other direction - If an individual were to find a cheap and easily producible cure-all for cancer but remain childless, have they contributed less to humanity than an individual that does raise 2.1 children?
While true in the strict sense, this is false in a more general sense. Yes, everyone does need to become a parent. You're not the 1-in-100 exception that gets to duck this responsibility, and you're definitely not all that exception, people reading the comment.
The more of you who skip out on this, the greater the burden on those that don't. When you don't have you're 2.1 children, someone else has to have those children on top of the 2.1 they need for themselves.
> We're not in a situation where humanity is in danger of extinction because
We are actually in danger of extinction, the math is simple, and only a bizarre form of willful blindness prevents you from seeing it. You can check anywhere you like, find some source that you trust. It will tell you that we have sub-replacement fertility. In the United States, in North America, in the western hemisphere. In east Asia. The latest numbers are highly suggestive that India just recently (within the last 3 years or so) has sunk below the replacement level. There are few countries not suffering this trend, there are none untouched by it. It generally takes about 20 minutes to walk through all the various fallacies, at the end of which the denier then says "but when things shrink down a little fertility can go back up, and things will be fine!"
Except fertility doesn't go back up. No little girl who grows up in a world where all her role models have few or no children will wake up one morning and say to herself "I want 2.1 children when I'm a grownup!" but that's what would have to happen for all little girls. Just for the population to stabilize. If only some of them say that, then we're still on the road to extinction, because the average has to be 2.1. The same ideas that caused people to remain childless will still be floating around. There will still be people telling those little girls...
> Not everyone needs to be a parent.
One of them might even be you, depending on how long you live.
> If an individual were to find a cheap and easily producible cure-all for cancer but
Saving the lives of geriatric people, who will die someday anyway, having made no more children than before they got cancer? Willfully blind.
> Saving the lives of geriatric people, who will die someday anyway, having made no more children than before they got cancer? Willfully blind.
I originally wrote about how cancer impacts more than just geriatric people, and how even from your perspective, around 1800 children die from cancer every year - people who will, in theory, even at sub-replacement levels, produce more kids than an individual making their 2.1 children.
But I realized that this one line shows that we fundamentally have different viewpoints about the purpose of life. If life isn't good, what is the point of having kids? Back when I still wanted children, I had decided not to have them because of concerns about climate change. I believe that it is at the very least human-accelerated, and most likely primarily caused by us as well, but even if not, we have clear trends and data showing that there is a very real risk that huge portions of humanity will have their lives significantly disrupted by it in my lifetime, much less that of my children. I don't want to force someone to have to live through that.
But if the prevailing opinion of people in the world was "Let's not cure cancer because it's just saving geriatric people who won't have more kids anyway," then that's not a world that doesn't match my value system and not one I want to subject my children to living in. I think the existence of humanity is an amoral thing - there's not fundamentally any specific reason we need to exist beyond us wanting to, and if as a collective whole we decide that existence has not been a thing wonderful enough to bring new people into it and we no longer desire to exist, then, well, that's fine.
If we want humanity to continue, let's make the world a place where people want to bring children into it, and incentivize them doing so.
If we want humanity to continue, let's make the world a place where people want to bring children into it, and incentivize them doing so.
i agree, but at this point we are really very far away from that.
I used the number 2.1. It does not result in population growth. It gives you a nearly perfect population stability. It neither grows, nor shrinks. And if that's not good enough for you, if it happened right this moment, the population once stabilized would be a bit smaller than it is now.
> But I realized that this one line shows that we fundamentally have different viewpoints about the purpose of life.
"Purpose of life" sounds religious, or ignorant. Instead, let's talk about whether you like humans and think humans are positive. If you do, you would dislike any trend or event which would make them extinct. If the extinction is proceeding, and you're whining about how it's unfair that women are treated like babymaking machines (which all humans are, male and female), then it seems that quite without knowing it, you think humans are a negative thing. Not so negative maybe that they require being wiped out immediately, but negative enough you will do nothing to halt the slow-motion extinction that is coming.
While there are the occasional individuals I dislike, I like humans in total, and I would be sad if I were forced to believe that they will be extinct 1000 years from now. But there is a growing sentiment that they are bad, and maybe this dull, unintelligent rock would be better off if humans were gone. A sort of death cult.
> I don't want to force someone to have to live through that.
My ancestors survived famines and disasters that would shock all of us into disbelief. Horrors and terrors. Predated upon, eaten alive. Suffering with diseases unknown to modern man. Much of the time without even understanding what was going on, it's no surprise they imagined and invented gods doing that to them, evil gods. For them to have gone through all that, and to give up on what we've all been doing because my children might have to figure out some engineering... naive or blasphemous, I don't know what to call it. My children could solve any problem, will solve them.
> then that's not a world that doesn't match my value system and not one I want to subject my children to living in.
So be it. The world always belonged to my children, and their children. I guess I should thank you for realizing yours were not fit to inherit it.
> If we want humanity to continue,
You've already made your choice. I see no reason to consult you further.
I find it bizarre that I'm being accused of cultlike thinking by someone who has distilled humanity down to just reproducing. We're not single-celled organisms, man. We can aspire to things greater than just having kids.
> So be it. The world always belonged to my children, and their children. I guess I should thank you for realizing yours were not fit to inherit it.
Making a value judgment about theoretical children based on a few online interactions is such a deeply weird thing to do. This whole interaction is one of the strangest I've had on the internet in several decades of using it.
It's difficult to explain counter-intuitiveness to the unclever. But yes. Overvaluing the geriatric to the exclusion of children and pro-procreation is equivalent to not valuing human life. It seems like some people should be able to get that, given how the old are so close to death, that it's about valuing death.
> I find it bizarre that I'm being accused of cultlike thinking by
Many cult members report similar sentiments if/when they are deprogrammed. From the inside, they're pretty sure they're the normal ones, and everyone else is weird.
> We're not single-celled organisms,
So some claim. They're sure, somehow, that they've transcended their biology. That, descending from an unending lineage nearly 4 billion years long, that they are the specific individual that all of that happened for, and things need not continue beyond them.
But you're just an animal.
> We can aspire to things greater than just having kids.
You absolutely cannot. When you do this, you die having achieved little and having left no one to replace you on planet Earth to continue whatever work you thought so important that you skipped making children. All your works will, within two centuries or less, be for naught.
> This whole interaction is one of the strangest I've had on the internet in several decades of using it.
That tends to happen when you chance upon someone not promoting the status quo.
Agreed
> being a mother is literally the highest calling a woman can have. A blessing and privilege only afforded to women, and they tossed this founder out for no reason.
oh god no. What? "Highest calling" is a personal and subjective thing. Is my highest calling donating sperm for said activity?
Having children is a choice. It's not right or wrong. Someone could even have children and still feel like something else is a greater purpose in their life, and that's fine too, as long as they provide love and care for their children.
Let's not ascribe a biological function as being the primary point of being anything or anyone.
But this entire argument seems to be about the idea that human reproduction is the highest calling for any individual, and that, with current technology, requires both sperm and eggs.
My stance is that "highest calling" is a personal belief and one that others cannot make a value judgment on. I've discussed doctors and medical researchers in other comments because they have a more direct impact on "amount of people alive" by being in those professions than they would by having children, but I wouldn't argue that those are the "highest calling" for individuals either, or that such a thing exists as an objective truth to begin with.
I do not think anyone should be reduced to their reproductive functions, regardless of how "wondrously complex" those things are.
Key word here is trust, which I think many have lost the ability to provide to others since the pandemic. We live in a jaded society and sometimes people will project their opinions from positions of power that aren't quite justified.
Good on the author for being capable of doing so much and taking conflict in stride!
I've been at professional events with infants; as long as the infant was quiet there's no issue. But I think the it's also reasonable to defer to the attendees who also deserve a professional environment free of distractions. It's hard to know without all the details, but the author must have felt there was some distraction, or I doubt she would have moved to the back to begin with.
It sounds like the child was indeed disturbing people. The author may have not be in alignment with the rest of the audience as far as what behavior is disturbing.
If your kid is quiet and keeps to themselves, then I haven't even noticed them in the first place in order to take issue. The reason I take issue is because your kid is being loud or obnoxious and ruining my experience in (grocery store | restaurant | movie theatre | public transportation | anywhere that I'm politely minding my own business but your kid is forcing me to know that it exists).
As people like to say when discussing rights and freedoms: your rights end where my nose begins.
My wife and I recently travelled to Walt Disney World for a vacation. While in a hotel lobby we walked past a child around 8 or 9 years-old (if I had to guess) accompanied by a man that I assumed was his father. As we walked past, the kid punched my wife in the arm. It wasn't a mistake. He telegraphed the hell out of it. When I confronted the father he just smiled and shrugged it off.
If people didn't constantly have to deal with situations like the above, then we could talk about being more tolerant towards other peoples' children.
But if it's not a child invading physical boundaries, it's auditory. God help those of us with misophonia that have to listen to children make the most hideous noises (and not always due to a temper tantrum, sometimes it's just loud screeching or yelling as part of play or whatever).
Why should anyone have to tolerate this? And no, I don't blame the children, I blame the parents. But who is at fault is irrelevant. No one should be obligated to put up with assholes whether those assholes are 40 years-old or 4 years-old.
Another way of phrasing this is more people are choosing not to have children - one motivation probably being that they can actually be quite a nuisance, a sentiment I've heard from literally every parent I've ever talked to.
Parents do deserve to go to all kinds of events - and generally are allowed to. Parents do not have the right to disturb events for people who choose not to have kids.
I've been to several (scientific) conferences including babies. They sometimes make a small disturbance, but I don't think anyone has ever taken offence at this.
> I'm not naming this woman because I think the problem is bigger than me or her.
Probably A Better Person than I, but I'm in the privileged position of not being a man and not trying start a career. A YCombinator representative suggesting that a mother with a baby leaves in a talk specifically in a talk on "Mothering experience while starting a business" seems to send a very strong signal about what Y Combinator thinks of this situation.
/s
I am a dad who brings kids everywhere. This is an entirely polite and reasonable response. If my kids are being distracting, I appreciate being told and have zero problem taking a baby out to calm down. They never said she had to leave because she had a baby.
It's great when others are chill around your kids, but I would never just force random people to have to put up with children.
Be prepared for that, communicate with your audience in advance, have clear expectations with staff, perhaps be more permissive with infants, etc.
The context matters here.
Was there on-site childcare?
If you look at a random sample of humans, vs a random sample of 20-50 year old women, the sample that is women will include more mothers than the sample across humanity, generally.
Typically, a random sample across all people will include approximately 50% men, who are statistically very unlikely to be birthing parents.
> Doesn't that reinforce stereotypes?
No, because you are accommodating both parents and non parents. Admitting that parents exist and that they can also be founders or professionals is a negation of the idea that women must be exclusively caretakers.
> Why not expect people to be responsible parents?
I don't see anyone in the article who was an irresponsible parent.
This is an odd framing unless you are expecting people to be birthing at a conference. To the OP’s point, there’s no reason someone who birthed a child should shoulder a disproportionate amount of the child rearing.
So is yours an age-based argument rather than a gender one?
In an ideal world, men would be just as likely to be taking on the responsibilities of childcare in equal measures with women. In the real world, even in "progressive" areas, women disproportionately are shouldered with those responsibilities. It is something that I would expect an event focusing on female founders and the challenges they face would take into account.
there is: breastfeeding. and no, pumping breastmilk and having dad feed the baby with a bottle is not the same thing.
the necessary reality is that the body contact that mother and baby experience while breastfeeding has no equivalence in the other gender, and if you value that experience then by necessity a breastfeeding mother must be doing a disproportionate amount of the child rearing.
one problem being that full time jobs force a choice on who stays at home to take care of the children. because of breastfeeding, in the majority of cases the choice will be the mother. female founders are going to remain an exception until we restructure our work such that the majority of people work no more than 20 hours a week and thereby no longer forcing a choice on who stays at home because both parents would be able to contribute to childrearing without having to stop working. (i was a stay-at-home dad btw, so i have experienced the alternative)
I think this is highly unlikely in the US, given how much we as a society prize economic productivity.
Another alternative is to make parents a protected class to legally prevent discrimination, although that may cause all kinds of pushback just like we're seeing with DEI in the current environment.
It shouldn't. I have two young kids. My youngest has started making loud noises/talking during events like this and I immediately headed for the door with her. It's completely inconsiderate to the other people in the room.
"To me, that's ridiculous. [for one of the partners of Y Combinator to] ask me to leave [("do you want to take your baby outside")] with a quietly cooing baby during a talk that was explicitly about the challenges of being a mother and founder was shocking. I realized then that the monster of systemic barriers to entrepreneurs who are also moms is bigger than I ever realized." - FTA
There's no need for analogizing here, we have a clear scenario we can discuss directly - a woman was asked to leave an event discussing motherhood because her baby was deemed a distraction.
We are plenty capable of just discussing that without made up scenarios.
You may want to familiarize yourself with the HN guidelines:
>Please don't post shallow dismissals
>When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A better response could have either answered which of those points you actually disagree with and why, or if you don’t disagree with the points but just the analogy, offer up a better analogy.
>the situation was quite straightforward and needed no simplification.
To reiterate, the point of the analogy is not to simplify as you've suggested, but to cast it in a less emotional light given the impediments strong emotion can put up to rational discourse.
To clarify further, I never said emotions are are inherently negative. I did say they can inhibit a discussion that is trying to get to rational underlying principles. We have lots of societal arrangements that acknowledge and try to mitigate this fact. Considering your reaction and apparent unwillingness/inability to answer very direct questions related to parenting seems to prove that point, as do the other commenters who have acknowledged any comments on parenting can become a third-rail in discussion due to this fact.
Not to say that it's not great if you can be considerate to others while you have kids. But considering how inconsiderate kids are and how much everyone around you depends on you having kids, some amount of putting up with those kids, collectively, seems very okay.
Whether or not I have a disability does not change my mind about whether people in a wheelchair should board a plane first.
My kids get to be the absolute center of my world, but I’m careful not to expect them to be the center of anyone else’s.
Genuine question, but why would this make you feel uncomfortable?
>needs to be handled with extreme tact and consideration.
Did you think they acted without tact? By the authors own account, they seemed very polite and even sent a follow-up email. The founders account of the interaction made it seem even more polite (asking her if she needed help, offering to hold the baby, offering other areas where she could still hear the talk but not be as much of a distraction etc.)
not having experienced the situation i can't judge, but the fact that it prompted the person to write an article about it to me suggests that on some level it did make her feel uncomfortable. if it hadn't it wouldn't have been worth mentioning.
The US tends to have a very individualistic outlook compared to many other societies, so I think differences should be expected to differ from culture to culture. In the US, it would make me very uncomfortable to have keep my child in a movie theater making noises if I felt like it was inhibiting on someone else's enjoyment of a movie, for instance.
This has been the case for most agrarian economies, including the US in the past so I’m not sure that’s a good discriminator.
but from that i want to draw a few observations: i think attitude towards children in europe either has improved or it hasn't changed. if it hasn't changed, then why should it have changed in china? but even if it has improved, on one hand it is still way behind china by comparison, but on the other hand we stopped depending on direct children a few decades earlier than china, so if there was a parallel development then china would have to be a few decades behind europe with their changing attitude towards children. that being not the case suggests that there was no change in attitude at all, or at least not one prompted by a modern pension system and therefore the chinese attitude towards children could not be a new thing.
My anecdotal experience, primarily driven by my time in Japan as well as living in a place that has a very large Asian immigrant population is that they are as strict when it becomes to the behavior of their children as any Westerner, and often moreso. When I go to the local H-mart, I am far more likely to see a parent corralling their child and getting them to behave than when I see similar behavior out of kids from western parents at the Safeway
Perhaps this holds true in China itself, but I don't believe the distinction is purely East vs. West.
i don't want to claim that my experience is the norm, but this sentence in particular reminded me that my distinct first impression in china was like "boy they do let their kids here get away with anything"
add to that the reputation of the single child policy creating "little emperors" because of how parents raise their child.
but again, this is just my experience. it may well possible that this is a small minority, and that i just never saw parents corralling their children because they possibly were already effective at raising them to be well behaved.
it is also worth noting that i observed a much higher tolerance at people behaving out of the norm. (but then it is also a much rarer occurrence and it is also not considered polite to confront people)
Which is why letting you bring your kids, but then also politely letting you know when your kids are being a distraction should be a totally acceptable compromise.
The problem is only when a parent takes any amount of confrontation to be a form of societal oppression and writes an expose on it on Business Insider (for example).
That sentence sent chills down my spine.
Life is an end in itself. It is a not a means to the ends of others. Your children are no more my responsibility than they are my tool to serve me in old age. My pension and care in old age is not their responsibility any more than their behaviour is my obligation to put up with.
If this sounds strange and overly "individualistic" then let me frame the issue in a slightly different way.
If we accept that children are an "absolutely necessary part of society" because "they will work for our pensions and care for us when we are old" then what happens if people choose not to have children? Are childless (by choice) people parasites in such a society? If more and more people decide to not have children is there a point where this becomes a social crises to the point where we start forcing people to have children?
And what about children who decide to emigrate as adults? Is there a point where you prevent people from travelling in order to guarantee that you have enough people around to pay pensions and take care of old people?
Not that it should matter, but I write this a middle-aged parent of two adult daughters who I do not hold to any sort of moral obligation to take care of me when I'm old. If they choose to then cool, I guess, but it's their life to live as they choose. The mere fact that they exist does not automatically obligate them to anyone else for any purpose.
You may think this ought not be true, but as a matter of reality it is. Each generation carries the weight of the previous one through retirement. Is it just? I think so - but regardless of that, it is the agreement every child is born into.
>Are childless (by choice) people parasites in such a society?
Somewhat, but it is rude to point that out.
To the extent that this is true, it is by choice.
> Is it just? I think so - but regardless of that, it is the agreement every child is born into.
"Agreement" presupposes the consent of each party. You cannot be entered into an "agreement" without your own participation in the act of agreeing.
Children cannot consent, therefore this is no "agreement" by definition.
What you have called an "agreement" is more appropriately referred to as a "duty." There is a very critical distinction between the two concepts which I will elaborate on in a moment.
> Somewhat, but it is rude to point that out.
What do manners have to do with anything?
What you're describing is the concept of duty. You're saying that by virtue of just being born, a child is obligated to care for his or her elders through retirement and that their personal choices are irrelevant.
In this case there is a very important question: "What are you going to do about it when the child says 'no'?"
You can either do nothing, which is a valid option, but it means that the entire concept and discussion was moot. You can invent "duties" all you want, but people ultimately get to decide how to live their own lives and there's nothing you can do about it.
Or, you can pass laws and use force in order to compel people to do certain things "for the good of society."
Which brings me to why I asked the question: "Are people who choose to be child-free parasites?"
That's a very important question because if a "society" depends on children in order to pay peoples' pensions and to take care of them when they are older, and that dependence is so fundamental that we consider people who choose not have children "parasites", and we obligate children to a duty to take care of elders ... then you've weakened the recognition of individual rights (at least reproductive rights and the right to travel / emigrate) to such an extent that you've opened the door to banning contraception, abortion and freedom of travel.
For anyone in a western country it is not by choice. Your wages get taxed and put towards social security, elderly housing, and Medicare (or equivalent). The work you do to get those wages keeps companies in business, meaning the stock portfolios of those that built them for retirement have value and can be liquidated. Unless you fully disconnect from society, you are responsible for the retirement of those who came before you.
>You're saying that by virtue of just being born, a child is obligated to care for his or her elders through retirement and that their personal choices are irrelevant.
This is putting words into my mouth. I have never prescribed anything, just described things as I see them. It seems plainly obvious to me that simply by working and living, you are putting fuel into the machine that powers your elders' retirement.
>Or, you can pass laws and use force in order to compel people to do certain things "for the good of society."
We already do this, try your luck with the IRS after not paying your social security tax. I do not understand how you envision the world.
In the US workforce, there are laws about what constitutes a reasonable accommodation for a disability. If you have a mobility restriction, it’s reasonable to ask for a first floor office, but not that the owner install an elevator.
According to response from the organizer, the offer here was to help the mom get the full experience by offering her accommodations so that she doesn't have to miss any part of the presentation despite having her child with her.
Thanks for this comment, your commentary is uplifting.
I'm worried YC has "jumped the shark". The blocking of constructive criticism from people who have helped build this place is very sad.
Maybe they need Founder Mode again.
Keep in mind, there are many people who can be more susceptible than others to noises. I know a few autistic folks who would have a very difficult time.
Do you have children? Don't you think those of us who do know exactly what the maximum amount of noise a baby can make is? Might we have concluded that even if that maximum noise level was reached (I wasn't there but from accounts I bet it was 1% of that), that it should have been celebrated, and applauded, and spun in a positive way, rather than how it was handled?
Humans have evolved to find baby noises very disruptive, so even a low quiet noise can be distracting. A mother might be more used to baby noises and okay with a level the average person might not be.
And again, people have conditions where they can find quieter noises distracting.
Why does someone’s medical condition suddenly have to take a back seat to exiting a venue when your baby makes noise.
If I ever have children, I wouldn’t subject others around me to things like this. You have a responsibility to other people in society. Your child isn’t special and doesn’t deserve consideration above medical conditions.
Was the talk recorded so we can judge for ourselves? :)
However I kind of wonder if the author would support that or suddenly switch to standard talking points about institutionalized childhood. Are moms and dads in the company she founded bringing kids to office daily instead of dropping them off at daycare?
>If you really want to make a difference for parents, offer on-site childcare.
You're being gaslit by most of the comments here but you're not imagining things - there's been a huge shift from an attitude of "children, even other peoples' children, are our future so it's reasonable to tolerate some noise from them" to "children are a dirty loud nuisance that must be stopped".
Again, the reasons for this seem obvious to me but you're an asshole if you point them out explicity.
Plenty of ancient civilisations treated children as glorified cattle. They weren’t expected to survive, so it wasn’t irrational. The notion of a babbling baby in the Roman Senate, a Victorian ball or Meiji Dai Shin’in is laughable.
We are more considerate of babies and parents than we’ve probably ever been as a society. That’s a good thing. But it’s also regularly abused, as anyone who has been on a plane with a child screaming for their iPad knows.
Same things one does with a misbheaving adult. Note that I specifically mention kids screaming about iPads because I'm not judging parents of infants.
Yes because those institutions didn't have a lot of women or mothers in them, and the people participating in them had servants and slaves that took care of their progeny.
I know the reality of the modern world hasn't reached everyone yet but we don't exclude mothers from public life any more so maybe the idea of having children in public bodies isn't that "laughable" any more.
Correct. I'm challenging the notion that we "tolerate[d] some noise from" children in the past. (Though even in matriarchal societies, e.g. the Haudenosaunee / Iroquois, I don't recall reading about children in the Long House where official business was conducted.)
> the modern world hasn't reached everyone yet but we don't exclude mothers from public life any more so maybe the idea of having children in public bodies isn't that "laughable" any more
Perhaps. But if we are to have that discussion, it has to be honest about that being novel.
Humans are evolutionarily evolved to listen to babies. It makes even quiet noises annoying.
It's funny, once you have kiddos, you learn to be able to tell the type of crying they are doing. Some cries are really for attention that an adult needs to attend to right this second, some are just noise, and then there's everything in between. Once you're around infants enough, you kinda just tune out the less important crying, just like you would a fan or a car engine. But, it is a skill you learn, and can lose.
So, parents of young children, I think, really can't see what the big deal is. They're skilled at tuning out the cries that aren't important.
childless flights
childless restaurants
childless hotels
childless theaters
etc etc
all driven by soulless, self-centered singles and childless couples who cannot abide anything but a world that exists only for their personal indulgence
just wait a generation until these vapid reptiles start to expire and their bloodlines disappear forever...memorialized only in a plaque on a bench in the office plaza where their VC used to be
Also onsite daycare would be a honking great business idea for so many events, including but not limited to company holiday parties.
> I'm not naming this woman because I think the problem is bigger than me or her
Yet they are attacking her in the press and giving a specific enough description to damage her reputation...
In my experience, it's very common to simply exit the room with your kid in these kinds of situations and return after they've quieted down, just as a courtesy to those who are there to listen and to be heard.
I recognize the mother is suggesting her kid wasn't very noisy, but I also know that parents are often biased and protective of their kids and can't always see things the way everyone else does. I guess it all hinges on "was the kid sufficiently noisy", but it's probably not worth litigating the subjectivity in this type of extremely common occurrence.