lexcorvus

YC(a) is serious about being politically correct, while YC(b) merely cares about appearing to be politically correct.

Political correctness is common to the two cases for the simple reason that YC(a) would inevitably help wealthy, well-connected female and black/Latino founders to the exclusion of, say, poor, less-privileged Asian founders. It's hard to explain this behavior in humanitarian terms, but it's easy to explain in political terms. Nobody gets in trouble these days for expressing the sentiment that we need more women, blacks, and Latinos in tech, no matter how rich and well-connected they may be.

The only other possibility I can think of is that YC(a) genuinely wants to help especially deserving founders, and such founders are so overrepresented among women and blacks/Latinos that specifically targeting those groups achieves the goal well enough for YC's purposes. In other words, the cost of reaching such founders may be so much lower when targeting specific self-identified groups that it's worth the minor cost of helping the occasional privileged member of one of those groups. Still, it's hard to avoid the observation that this policy is generally aligned with political correctness, which would appear to justify some skepticism.

(My guess is that YC's policy isn't Machiavellian in the least, but it works adaptively because of a political environment in which explicitly helping women and blacks/Latinos is strongly favored both by custom and by law.)

Like most Whigs, Burke was a supporter of the American Revolution, but he was horrified by the excesses of its French sequel. He famously wrote his major work on the subject, Reflections on the Revolution in France, as a letter to French aristocrat Charles-Jean-François Depont, and later expanded it into a short book. In the Reflections, Burke predicted—over three years before the Reign of Terror—that the French Revolution would lead to disaster. Moreover, he specifically cited among the causes its abstract foundations disconnected from the reality of human nature.

La Terreur proved Burke right, of course, and yet the French Revolutionary principles—among them liberté, égalité, and fraternité—are for the most part as fresh as a daisy. Perhaps in the 21st century we could add diversité and inclusivité to the mix, but the basic lesson is clear: the Revolution hasn't ended. Burke's Reflections is thus more than a historical curiosity—it's also an urgent warning for the present.

The group I mentioned is precisely defined, and 100% opt-in—it's the set of all people who say "I'm only intolerant of intolerance."

all members of the group are irrational and should be ignored

Are you accusing me of thinking that? Because I didn't say that, and I don't think that. Reread my comment: saying "you'll likely be met with vitriol" implies that the converse—that you won't be met with vitriol—is also possible.

This has a rationalization, of course; it's OK because straight white males perpetuate "structural racism," imposing a "heteropatriarchy" on gays, women, and people of color. The practical result involves stripping power from straight white males and giving it to everyone else.

From an adaptive point of view, ripping off chunks of power and giving them to your supporters is a winning political formula. But pleasant nostrums about sticking up for the downtrodden are little more than a thin veneer over a good old-fashioned tribal throwdown.

The solution is to explain that feeling unsafe is unjustified when there is no credible threat. This strategy is not presently a reliable route to political power, which is why it's not being pursued. On the contrary, every concession to the delusion—e.g., the creation of "safe spaces" to protect people from largely imaginary threats—is testament to the present power of complaint. As long as there are special "protected" classes under the law (in the name, of course, of equality), we can expect more of the same.