Is it perverse to go swimming because you were born near a beach? Is it perverse to visit the Louvre if you are Parisian? Is it perverse to go to a good university because the universities in Elbonia aren't good?
You're not entirely wrong, but that's a very limited view on how the world works. It's not all random. We're not all rolling dice and separating into "haves" and "haven'ts".
Once upon a time: Somebody's parents moved to the coast. Somebody's predecessors funded and built the Louvre (and managed to keep priceless things safe despite war, disease, famine, etc.). Various parties spent decades (or centuries!) of history recruiting and utilizing world-class talent, raising world-class capital reserves, and building world-class facilities for their universities.
If you actively promote or passively allow politicians and legislation that bars other people from having a shot at earning those things themselves, then yes.
Restricting immigration doesn't 'bar' people from making their own country better...
Have you never visited a place that has had it's beauty or charm ruined by the sheer number of visitors it receives?
They do studies, if people are given massive advantages (e.g. rolling two dice instead of one in monopoly and starting with double the cash) that are obvious and explicit, people will still believe they deserved to win, they earned their victory.
Recognizing a lot of your success is because of dumb luck (yes you worked hard, but millions of others worked just as hard or harder and weren't lucky) is a good way to stay humble, and to remind yourself to stop pretending you "deserve" what you have -- we all live in a fundamentally (intentionally) unjust economic system where "desert" has no meaning but we try to superimpose it on our lives because of a need to believe things are fair. Privilege is a word that can be a good way to remember that.
It can also be used as a rhetorical weapon to bludgeon people.
The word itself is terrible and I hate it: it is not a "privilege" in my view to be treated decently, to have a chance at success, to not be discriminated against or assaulted by police or have to face anything that the poor, minorities, women face. It is a right. Everyone has the right to be treated the way straight rich white men are and have been for centuries and using the word "privilege" conjures up this notion that they are getting something they do not deserve: rather, they should be viewed as the model, the goal, they are getting something that we all deserve to have as well alongside them.
In a situation where not being exposed to massive dangers and obstacles is a rare occasion, I think it is fair to classify that as a privilege.
White / wealthy / male / educated / citizen of the US, all indicate the top parts of pyramids of oppression and massive obstacles.
The blind acceptance of these structures by the ones standing on top of them, is the actionable part. We (I am definitely amongst the privileged) can’t easily see the nature of the structures, the way we don’t choke on clean air.
But once we’re aware of them, our responsibility kicks in. Not taking actions to actively challenge these structures makes us complicit and defines where we stand.
The anger of the ones living life on “extra hard” so that we can live ours on “quite/super easy” or even “normal”, is fully justified. We are passive perpetrators, there’s no way around it.
Very uncomfortable.
The term is particularly bewildering to rural and small town poor whites when it's tossed out by a 20-something-year old professional in some big city who's making a $200,000/year salary, or by a trust-fund kid protesting in a university where tuition costs more money a semester than your whole extended family makes in a year.
I realize that many people who use the term "white privilege" may not be targeting such people with the term (although many clearly are). However, when the only qualifier someone uses is "white", it's hard to draw that conclusion.
Again, to your credit, you used the term "straight rich white men". But most people fail to make this distinction.
I also strongly agree with your final paragraph. What we call "privilege" is something that all people should have. Instead of working to destroy privilege, we should work to ensure that all people have that same privilege.
Now, it's not the kind of advantage that feels meaningful, but it really adds up over a lifetime.
Even +/- 1% sales can make or break a small business for example.
No argument, but is that really justification for wealthy urban whites to go around shouting about "white privilege" to poor rural whites? I mean, if you feel that way, continue, but I can guarantee you it won't be a net positive for our country, black or white.
I don't think the term white privilege is great, but it is a massive injustice that's IMO worth talking about.
Are there stats for convictions of poor white people vs poor black latino/black, or just all white vs all latino/black? I don't think the latter stats would be particularly helpful here.
"One in ten Black males in their thirties is in prison or jail in the United States." That's insane.
However, one thing that I fail to see addressed here is reason for the incarceration gap. The way I see it, it can be partially because black kids are prosecuted more (the "white privilege" argument) and partially perhaps because, for whatever reason, rich black kids just commit crimes more often.
BTW how do you know that white and black people smoke weed at roughly the same rates?
If you look, Figures 21 and 22 show usage rates to be about the same. However, if you look down at Figure 10, you'll see a huge disparity in arrest rates.
Even accounting for the racial makeup of those states, I know far more white people than non-white people from poor states who are now making great money.
That is working to destroy privilege.
It's a very privileged perspective to live in a world where these things are considered normal.
Privilege has to do with the idea that these things are so far from being a reality for so many people that it's evident to them that the world does not consider this to be their right.
> In that sense it feels perversly exploitative and priveleged to make so much more money ...
It seems to be more useful for shaming people.
> ... that the world does not consider this to be their right.
This seems to imply that those with privilege think their privilege is a right.
It is sometimes used that way, but is (I think more) often used in a much more analytically useful sense: as a means of indexing passive/automatic advantages that some people benefit from, and as a lens into the ways that advantage might be extended to others.
> This seems to imply that those with privilege think their privilege is a right.
That doesn't follow logically (if group A is bothered that the advantages of group B are not considered to be group A's right, it does not follow that group B considers those advantages to be group B's right), or textually (GP referred to "the world" as the thing not considering privilege a right for some people, which I interpreted as a reference to the context/emergent behavior/power structures that confer advantages; not specific people).
> "...a reality for so many people that it's evident to them that the world does not..."
The dichotomy is those with privilege, and those without.
I think plenty of people understand it, they just don't agree with it. Why wouldn't humans use every advantage available to them to succeed? It's a tough world out there and people want to thrive and survive, they'd also like to pass along the fruits of their labor to their offspring. That's how nature works.
There will always be a will to be the best, it doesn't matter if the demographics of people with economic advantages shift. I don't imagine we'll ever see people willfully make their lives more difficult and we shouldn't expect them to.
The idea behind privilege theory is to say that, when you compare people, you don't say "the more successful one is more successful because they are better", but instead "there are a number of factors, many of which are difficult to quantify, that contribute to the varying levels of success between two people (or especially groups)".
It's not one dimensional, and there's no objective way to measure or compare things as generic as "success". Privilege theory being explicit about this makes it superior to many of the alternatives.
"Do what" is such a broad question that I can't really answer it. Are you an academic, or a company or a government or something else? The answer depends on that. It's a malformed question, like asking "What do you do with Kantianism?" or something. The best answer I can give is "use it as an analytical lens to guide your decision making", which is a bad answer precisely because its a bad question.
A better one might be "What value does analyzing situations/systems via the lens that privilege provides give?" Which is incidentally also a pretty good question to ask about Kantianism.
The answer to that question also depends on exactly who you are and what you're doing, but at least it makes sense. For example, for me personally, I think that looking at things via a lens of privilege helps me to be a more empathetic person, on the whole.
For an academic, it might help you decide whether or not you are asking the right questions in an experiment.
As a very straightforward historical example, for many years in the US, there was explicit bias against African Americans in segregated schools. This was justified in many cases, through a social darwinistic lens: black people are less intelligent, the proof is that they perform worse, and so we should devote fewer resources to their education.
Looking at the same data through a lens of privilege though, one might instead conclude that segregated schools performed worse because they had fewer resources. In other words, the same correlation is explained in two vastly different ways.
I use that example specifically because today the same thing still happens, as a result of most school systems getting funding based on property taxes, and historical reasons so you still have a world where, in practice, predominantly black schools have much less funding. Ostensibly, this is "fair", since you use the same rule to fund everyone, but clearly it isn't actually. Privilege is one way of accounting for how things that are ostensibly fair may not be in practice.
As an aside, in a much more mathematical sense, I think that privilege theory is all about picking the right bayesian priors when doing an analysis.
What it doesn't take into account is different meanings to the term "fair" or the morality of a system based on staunch individualism.
> Ostensibly, this is "fair", since you use the same rule to fund everyone, but clearly it isn't actually.
I actually find the situation you outlined extremely fair and would find it quite unfair to apply different funding principals to different schools based on demographics.
I suppose one of the problems I have with the concept of privilege is that I find it promotes a very dangerous mindset. Having grown up poor and non-white and achieved success through hard work, more often than not I saw people being held back by their own sense of victimization than any sort of systematic oppression. The concept of privilege exacerbates that and thus is counter productive.
But that "fair" method isn't independent of demographic. And that's what privilege tries to highlight. It's almost always possible to dress up policies that are de-facto prejudicial as independent of the thing that they're supposedly prejudiced against.
If you want to discriminate against women without making it obvious, you can add an unnecessary height requirement. It's only when you take a look at the correlations between those variables, when you realize that women are inches shorter than men that something seems off. (and to be clear I'm talking about an abstract situation where height doesn't matter for whatever it is we're doing). When you take into account the correlations, the non-discriminatory rules suddenly feel a lot less non-discriminatory.
If you really supported a funding principle that was independent of demographics, you should support a system that grants funding solely based on headcount. Otherwise you're implicitly admitting that rich people deserve better education solely because they are rich, which seems discriminatory to me.
Granted, there are flaws to that system too, but what it doesn't do is further disadvantage the already disadvantaged. Your "fair" system leads to the poorest areas (and the least-white areas, and a few other similar things) getting the worst education. The result of this is that I, as an individual, receive a worse education do to things that are totally out of my control. That doesn't seem particularly fair to me.
(And that's ignoring other arguments that there are probably very compelling reasons to fund the least well off schools more, much like a progressive tax system favors those at the bottom. And as an extension of this, I'm curious if you favor a progressive tax system, or something else).
Another user mentioned this study[1], which unfortunately I can't find the paper for, but the video is still worth watching. I'll quote an important bit:
>As a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement and deservingness...increases.
The crux of this is that while you may disagree, its possible, and even perhaps likely, that your success is less "yours" than you believe, and that your mind is rewriting history, so to speak, to make you feel more in control of your outcomes than you actually were. This is by no means your fault or anything, and there are probably good evolutionary reasons for our brains doing this (I say probably only because I'm not an evolutionary psychologist, I can make some pretty good arguments for why this would be evolutionarily good). And there are times when it's probably a good idea to ignore that fact and feel like you're to blame for your outcomes, but there are also times where it isn't.
In any case, I hope you understand that there's more to it than just fake-victimhood and an attempt to make successful people feel bad. And that while you may disagree with the theory, its at least not total SJW nonsense :P
[1]:https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean
I favor a flat tax if we must pay tax at all.
> The crux of this is that while you may disagree, its possible, and even perhaps likely, that your success is less "yours" than you believe, and that your mind is rewriting history, so to speak, to make you feel more in control of your outcomes than you actually were. This is by no means your fault or anything, and there are probably good evolutionary reasons for our brains doing this (I say probably only because I'm not an evolutionary psychologist, I can make some pretty good arguments for why this would be evolutionarily good). And there are times when it's probably a good idea to ignore that fact and feel like you're to blame for your outcomes, but there are also times where it isn't.
This is the crux of why I think the concept of privilege is extremely dangerous. You have no idea who I am and I've already stated that I fit some of the demographics that you deem underprivileged. Yet instead of listening to what I had to say (which is a quite simple explanation -- work smart/hard == do good) you fit a very elaborate psychological explanation over my experiences (of which you know nothing about).
Do you believe that poor people cannot succeed without help? If the answer is yes, then why would you question someone telling you that's what happened? If the answer is no, then I think you need to reexamine your philosophy as it's fairly dehumanizing to be told that you're not capable of success.
I also find it somewhat amusing that I've seen this pattern repeated over and over. Poor people claim to know what's hold them back. Rich people claim to know what's holding poor people back. Poor people who became wealthy are told they're experience is invalid, an outlier, not useful. Really shouldn't they (we) be the ones that have the most valuable opinion since we've proven it can work?
I'm not just talking about this exchange or my own experiences. You'll see this conversation happen over and over when someone who is self-made tries to discuss how they did it.
It doesn't really matter who you are, it's unlikely that you're immune to bias. I absolutely listened to what you said, it's just orthogonal to the point I made, which is that no matter your experience, how your brain works is probably not unique. You're almost certainly subject to the psychological quirks as everyone else. Do you want me to give your experiences special deference because you come from an underprivileged background? I thought that's explicitly what you were arguing against.
>Do you believe that poor people cannot succeed without help? If the answer is yes, then why would you question someone telling you that's what happened? If the answer is no, then I think you need to reexamine your philosophy as it's fairly dehumanizing to be told that you're not capable of success.
No. And I don't think I've ever said that poor people cannot succeed without help. I've said it's more difficult for poor people to achieve the same success as rich people, all else equal, but I don't see anything dehumanizing about that. I'd ask that you take another look at what I'm actually saying, because you're turning my words into something that they very much aren't.
>Poor people who became wealthy are told they're experience is invalid, an outlier, not useful. Really shouldn't they (we) be the ones that have the most valuable opinion since we've proven it can work?
No. Not at all! For the same reason that I wouldn't ask Jeff Bezos for life advice. Its survivorship bias, plain and simple. For every person with your story, there's someone else who had a similar background, worked just as hard, and isn't successful.
The common explanation for this is that a lot of successful people say that a good things is to take risks. They all have this in common. They took risks. But so did tons of other people who ended up broke or bankrupt or otherwise unsuccessful. Only listening to successful people will result in exactly what you're doing now: thinking that [hard work/risk taking/keeping a strict schedule/buddhist minimalism] is enough to do succeed, ignoring the fact that there are many people who did exactly the same thing who have failed.
Just to be clear, are you arguing that you worked harder/smarter than every person from your hometown who has seen less success than you? Because I'd find that highly unlikely. It certainly wasn't true for me.
Yeah I'm arguing that. I used to try to help these people. I spent a lot of time doing it in fact. I would try to teach people in my town about computers but was told it was "geek stuff". I would try to get them to read books but again...that's for the nerds. I'd try to tell them there's more to life than football (was told there wasn't). I would tell them that maybe it wasn't a great idea to use crystal meth (this was before they all got hooked on opiods). I'd tell them that joining the military wasn't a path to success. I would tell them that they shouldn't be afraid of people from other cultures and that maybe they could learn from them and teach what was unique to their culture.
It all fell on deaf ears or was met with overt hostility. Even when I started to become successful and it looked like maybe some of this geeky stuff was actually valuable, all I got was anger for "abandoning" my roots. So at some point I just said fuck it. They don't want help. They are lazy and afraid and if you try to help them they will bring you down too.
Fast forward 20 some years and I see very privileged, successful people (such as yourself) making very well meaning but very misguided arguments about how to help underprivileged people. Do they, I and nearly everyone else face some systematic biases? Yes!! I've hit multiple glass ceilings and currently reside at one I don't have the energy to break through. That's not the main problem though. By far the biggest thing holding people back is their own fear of trying to succeed and the lack of strength to stand up to their own community who holds them back.
I don't know your background, but if it were practical I'd suggest actually going to live with some poor people. I think you'll find it's not the "myth of meritocracy" or the "patriarchy" holding them back. It's for the most part their own bad habits. I think most people who have escaped poverty would agree.
And every person in your town was like this? You were the valedictorian of your high school and worked jobs on the side to make money because your parents didn't but you needed to be able to take care of your sister and keep the lights on anyway.
>I don't know your background, but if it were practical I'd suggest actually going to live with some poor people.
Aren't you the one assuming things now? I've lived with and interacted with some very-not-well-off people, more similar to the crystal meth hooked in-and-out of jail people you describe than you might at first think. Some of them are even relatively successful now. And yeah it absolutely took hard work and determination and grit in every case. But that's not all it took, for any of them. They all got lucky breaks, and they mostly admit that readily. I'm not as naive about this as you want to believe.
I mean, to be clear here, you appear to have had reliable access to computers 20+ years ago. That's a huge advantage over many people. And don't get me wrong, I don't mean to belittle your success, success is a good thing. But you seem resistant to recognizing your biases. Biases that everyone has and that are well documented. I don't really know why that is, but the fact that you picked that specific line to target, and ignored everything else I said is revealing. That you think hard work is all it takes is, if nothing else, naive.
> You were the valedictorian of your high school
No, I was a very poor student as I knew back then that school had little to do with success.
> worked jobs on the side to make money
There were no jobs in my town.
I admit I'm making some assumptions about you since I've literally never heard a poor person say the things you're saying but many, many middle-upper middle class people say them. I could be very wrong though.
> you appear to have had reliable access to computers 20+ years ago
My school had some very dated Apple IIes. The rest I got from magazines and library books. If there was a privilege there it was that I was alive at a time that booting up a machine dumped you into BASIC.
I'm 100% sure I'm biased. Everyone is, including yourself. Our conversation has drifted far from the original topic but I do appreciate you taking the time to have it. I don't think we could ever agree on many of these issues but its interesting to see them juxtaposed.
See, this is the kind of thing I mean. This is essentially a post-hoc justification of your success. Why did you "know that school had little to do with success". Why didn't your classmates? Did the valedictorian also end up on drugs and in jail? Or did they just end up less successful, despite working hard?
I mean I can actually take this same argument and apply it to some absolutely terrible choices: "I knew school had very little to do with success, so I decided to forgo school and start hustling and selling drugs at a young age, and here I am now an upper ranking member of a street gang, by many measures a fairly successful person". It's not like everyone who does the first does the second. A lot of them end up dead or in jail. But given what you've said so far, you would believe that individuals should follow that advice.
And if that's not the case, I ask what the difference between
> Take my advice, ignore your schoolwork and work with computers instead, you could become a millionaire, just look at Bill Gates!
and
> Take my advice, ignore your schoolwork and start selling drugs instead, you could become a millionaire, just look at [insert local gang leader or dealer]!
I could be wrong, but it really sounds like you're looking at your past through rose colored glasses. And as a result of this, you ascribe your success more to the "smart choices" you made than to the "lucky choices" or "lucky breaks" or "random opportunities" you got. I'd suggest you go out and look for people from similar backgrounds who made similar choices to you, I think you'll find it will be sobering how many of them didn't find success, despite the hard work, and that you're luckier than you think. Heck, I think if you really try and take an objective look, you'll find that some of the people who you feel like made worse choices than you were more similar to you thank you think, but didn't get the same lucky break.
Just in general, I think it's a good idea spending more time listening to unsuccessful people. It reminds me how they're not so different from me, and that's why I think privilege theory is both important and often correct. I hope you take the time to do that too.
Edit: I also think you're misunderstanding my use of the word bias in this context. I mean "evolutionarily hardwired to view things through a certain, objectively wrong, lens". See my earlier citations for how that reveals itself, but the result is that you, like everyone, are likely to take more credit for your achievements than you objectively deserve. This isn't unique to you, but it means that I basically have to take your entire description of your success and everyone else's failures with a grain of salt.
This is why I think the concept of privilege will never grow beyond the people who already believe in it. It’s just too smug at its core.
And this is the fallacy in your thinking. I can find people who made terrible choices and became more successful than you. I can find people who made similar choices to you and are much less successful.
If that's all you do, then plain and simple, your experiences are invalid. They don't matter. They're not data. And anyway, you're already successful now, so your choices practically don't matter anymore. Success begets success.
To put it simply, you need to accept that there are people who made good choices as you did, and aren't successful despite their hard work and good choices. Because that's fact. That's the world we live in. That's not smug. It's a hard pill to swallow, sure and I don't really blame you for refusing to. But there's nothing smug about it.
I don’t see how that’s useful. Yeah, life is not always fair but if you don’t believe in free will or that you can actually have some impact on your own existence, then what’s the point of even living it?
And let’s be real, if you’re good at what you do, you’ll be fine. Every good developer can get a job. That’s the economic reality we live in. People are capable of achieving that with hard work.
Like you said though, it doesn’t matter. It worked for me and it worked for millions of other people so whether you think that was luck, privilege or something else it doesn’t impact my success. What you may accomplish is encouraging people who could help themselves to not do so. Probably not even that though because the kind of people who can help themselves are already used to ignoring the naysayers.
No, and this is the second time now that you've made a ridiculous strawman out of my statements. I'm saying systematic oppression and privilege matter and have an impact. This is opposed to what you said which, if I understand correctly is "work hard and you'll be successful, no matter the situation". When I say "no the situation matters too", you manage to interpret this as some kind of fatalistic "everything is predetermined" argument, which it is not.
To be clear, I'm not saying that privilege is the only component of success. I'm saying that hard work is not the only component of success. So far you seem to be interpreting the second as the first.
Perhaps if you actually tried to understand what I was actually saying, instead of going out of your way to misinterpret it, you would realize that it wasn't as much nonsense as you think.
>And let’s be real, if you’re good at what you do, you’ll be fine. Every good developer can get a job. That’s the economic reality we live in. People are capable of achieving that with hard work.
There are a lot of people that don't have the means to "become a good developer". I'll agree that good developers can get a good job, but for a lot of people, there aren't enough hours in the day to do what you handwave away as a given.
>the naysayers.
What, specifically, am I doing that is naysaying? Is saying "your success is a product of both your hard work and your circumstances" naysaying? Really?
> To put it simply, you need to accept that there are people who made good choices as you did, and aren't successful despite their hard work and good choices.
I 100% disagree. If you make good decisions and work hard you'll be more successful than you would have been without doing that. If you study something with economic value, you'll get to participate in that value (if you're good).
I've never seen someone who is actually good at what they do (if it's something that's valued economically -- I've seen plenty of poor but skilled musicians for instance) live in destitution. Not once.
> There are a lot of people that don't have the means to "become a good developer".
There are people who don't have the mental capacity to do it yes, but I accept that and have no problem with it. We can't all be successful, utopias are a fantasy. I'm talking about the people with the capability to be successful. They should work hard and not give a moment's thought to anyone telling them to "check their privilege". It's a pointless exercise, you don't owe anyone an apology for doing well.
Sure, but relative success is not particularly relevant to what we've been discussing. I'm sure that many people from your hometown are relatively more successful than others. But you've already said that they aren't successful in a concrete sense.
My point is that
>study something with economic value
>someone who is actually good at what they do
is not an opportunity available to everyone. The opportunity to study something with economic value is a privilege. There are many people who don't have that privilege either due to economic or time constraints. If you're argument is that "people who had the opportunity to study something of economic value are able to be successful with only hard work", then I'd agree.
But those people already got lucky/privileged/an opportunity that isn't available to everyone when they had the ability to spend time and study something of economic value.
You can't "work hard and study something of economic value" if you have to work two jobs to keep the lights on. There aren't enough hours. It doesn't matter what your mental capacity is. Your physical capacity is too small.
>you don't owe anyone an apology for doing well.
And I never said you did. Please, again, listen to what I'm actually saying, and don't continue to make things up. I get that you disagree with me, but that means that you should be careful to read what I'm actually saying, not be biased by your predispositions. Remember that this conversation began because I said you misunderstood what privilege was. Responses like this make it look like you're not engaging in good faith and simply want to argue against privilege because you've been told you should disagree with it, and that you're unwilling to learn what it actually is.
Edit:
>I'm talking about the people with the capability to be successful.
Right, and I'm simply saying that the capability to be successful is not solely your innate intelligence or whatever, but also your in part your circumstances.
To give a simple example, which is more likely: that your children will get accepted into Harvard Law, or that Malia Obama's eventual children will?
This goes back to my early statement about school not teaching valuable skills. I told you I was a poor student, that was because I spent my time learning about computers instead of the curriculum I saw as wasteful of my time. You have to have the strength to make those types of decisions. Was it easy? Absolutely not, I paid all kinds of prices for doing such a thing. I stood by my convictions though, and thus have little sympathy for those who don't.
> You can't "work hard and study something of economic value" if you have to work two jobs to keep the lights on.
As mentioned above, if you're just starting to think about these things when you're old enough to work two jobs, you've already made bad decisions that are going to be very hard to reverse.
> Responses like this make it look like you're not engaging in good faith and simply want to argue against privilege because you've been told you should disagree with it, and that you're unwilling to learn what it actually is.
I'm arguing with you (neither of us are convincing each other of anything at this point) because you literally told me that my life was invalid and my philosophy as defined by my experiences are due to my own cognitive bias. You have no idea who I am yet feel totally comfortable saying such a thing.
If you take anything away from this it should be that if you're going to tell someone that their life experience is invalid, you're not going to convince them of anything. In fact they'll just entrench their positions. I'd eliminate that from your rhetorical bag of tricks if I were you.
And with that I'm done. We both learned nothing, and I'm still convinced that the core of your message is routed in smugness. Maybe you'll have better luck if you avoid making assumptions about people you've never met.
I mean, I know people who were working multiple jobs in their early to mid teens. Are you suggesting that middle school is when you really need to be making choices about your career prospects? Its this kind of comment that really convinces me that you had a lot more "privilege" than you want to admit. A roof over your head, a stable home, and access to technology and resources are privileges that you appear to have had, and are not as universal as you seem to believe.
>my life was invalid
What does this mean? I'm absolutely willing to say that its inane to base your entire moral philosophy on a single person's experience. But that doesn't mean that your life or experiences are invalid, just that generalizing them to everyone is ridiculous. That's the entire point though not everyone's circumstances are the same as yours. That's the whole central point of what privilege is about. That doesn't make your life "invalid", again, I don't know what that means. Its real, I'm sure it happened. It worked for you. That's great. That doesn't make it generalizable. But you seem to once again be misinterpreting my statements that your experiences are not generalizable as your experiences not being real. That's completely untrue, and I don't know why you feel the need to so completely misinterpret my words.
I'm not making any assumptions about you beyond that you are a human being, a human being who suffers from the same cognitive biases as every other human being. In the absence of any compelling evidence to the contrary, that absolutely seems like a sane assumption to make.
That's quite literally what it is. I'm not particularly Christian, but at least it doesn't make me pay for the sins of the father unlike whatever this new orthodoxy is.
Many, many others simply use it as a means of gaining a better (more compassionate) ethical understanding of the world. Unless you subscribe to a Rand-ish "altruism = bad" ideology, it's perfectly possible to understand contextual factors that you benefit from, understand that others do not, and--even if you don't actively spend resources to improve that system--at least keep its existence in mind when interacting with others and understanding the world. None of that requires you to feel shame.
It's like going up to a random person at an international airport: knowledge of the existence of other languages means you don't automatically assume that person speaks English. You don't have to be ashamed of speaking English, or learn their language, but knowing why they might not understand what you say to them can sure help you avoid being an ass.
To a degree, we should feel bad for having access to capital when there are far greater needs for this capital elsewhere. Most of us don't have any real power to change the situation unfortunately. But it is definitely something to be conscious of and you should reflect on what you can do to help turn the tide for those less fortunate.
I don't even really disagree, but the weight of the burden you assume responsibility over is very great. Why not devote your entire life to helping others if you are responsible for them, consume no luxuries, or anything but the most basic of needs.
I'm sure you could save thousands.
It is important to be aware of your place in society. I am a 28 year old white male with only a handful of years of professional experience. I am benefiting from the past and present exploitation of others. But within this privileged class I am not so high up on the totem pole.
By working my way up the totem pole, and always looking for ways to help, I will find myself in a position to make a real impact. And if not myself, then hopefully my children.
It makes sense to enjoy your prosperity to the extent that it allows you to continue progressing toward this goal. In order to climb the totem pole, you have to spend money on luxuries. You have to wear expensive suits and go to exclusive parties.
At the same time, there are always things you can do to help right now. For example, I tip service workers well as they need the money more than I do. I give change to beggars and those who find themselves in tough spots. I also make an effort to spread the perspectives of those less privileged than myself as I've found that straight white males pay more attention to other straight white males.
At least be honest. It's not that it's the most efficient way to spend your money; you simply want to be the hero. While letting your spare coins trickle down to those below. And it's ok cause you'll pay back later. Maybe through the next generation even.
But perhaps it was I who missed the irony?
We must all do our part to look out for others. I give away whatever I can afford to friends and family who are short on money. I accumulate relatively little compared to my earning potential. But I am also laying the groundwork to help others further down the road.
My influence comes from being born a straight white male to a wealthy family in a wealthy nation. I am educated and practice an in-demand vocation. I command a high wage on the labour market, and this allows me to accumulate capital faster than most people. A factory worker makes less than a third of what I do per hour. So I can make a larger impact than them.
Most people do not earn enough to accumulate any meaningful capital in their lifetime. I am more privileged than most, and of course, less privileged than others.
You are presenting pretty much every argument i can think of for why it's a problem that wealth generates wealth. That the very fact that you earn more than others is what prevents them from accumulating meaningful capital. Yet i don't see you fighting for wealth redistribution, which is a proven way of making an impact.
If you had said: "i believe i earn more than i deserve", "i have mostly been lucky", "hard working factory workers should earn more", or "free healthcare and education!", i might have believed that you planned to fight for making people who are rich like you at 60 slightly less rich (relatively). But you didn't. So i maintain my position that you should at least be honest.
Much better to support political movements trying to help spread the wealth and donating money to things that advance the public good in the mean time.
You're a programmer. Maybe you're decent, maybe you're not. It is VERY unlikely that the "millions and millions" of "infinitely more talented" Eastern European/Indian/Chinese programmers you mention actually exist. And even if they did, there are many societal and economic reasons besides "US Immigration Laws" that would prevent them from coming here and taking your job for an order of magnitude less money.
I'm not afraid of a superior person taking my job. They would be no better at it than I am. I would probably be more productive if I were less intelligent (or on booze, but employers frown on that).
Your answers are always based on fuzzy data, experience, and intuition. Your solutions will always affect the local ecosystem of the crops, and cause hard-to-predict chain reactions.
...but I'm not a farmer, so I'm just guessing.
What I don't have even a sense of is how much of a daily concern a lot of this is or if it's a once-a-year kind of thing, or how much of it impacts somebody who "only" farms to support his family and may only have 1-2 workers versus hundreds.
A big one is simply the breadth of the subject matter. To me it feels like learning to program, forgetting everything, and repeating several more times. You have to know about plants, chemicals, machinery, computer technology, business, just to name a few. I don't think you need to be a expert in any of those things, but it seems to me like the most successful farmers approach being that.
Every year is different. If you've built one CRUD app, every CRUD app is going to come with a similar set of problems. If you've grown one field of corn, who knows what next year will bring? I've been farming for more than a decade now and I still encounter situations that I've never seen before. Luckily, which makes it much less of a challenge, but might be interesting being that I'm the sixth generation to work my family's farm, I can ask family for advice and you get the "Well, back in '72 it was like this and we did that." Still, there is lots of problem solving to do. In that respect, it is a lot like programming.
What is not not like programming is an answer for everything on the internet. I truly miss that. While programming, if I have any kind of mental block, a few minutes on Google will turn me right around. On the farm, family is an amazing resource, and there are plenty of academic and other professionals available to be contacted, but it's not the same. Programmers are incredibly fortunate!
I'll just throw in that farming constantly makes me feel dumb. Still, after a decade at it. Not very quantitate, I know, but it's a feeling I have never experienced in the same way as a programmer. I'm sure I could go on, but I have to move on to other engagements. I hope you found this interesting.
Farmers are the most self-sufficient people you'll ever meet.
Students that "get it" are the ones who managed to ignore the "hard" label. That's it.
In the industry I keep hearing that everything is hard:
Dev: "Logging is a solved problem at the rate we are looking at - it is what, 100 messages per second?" VP of Eng: "I dont know man. Logging is hard. We should outsource it."
SRE: "Just build images and spin them up" CTO: "That's hard. We should outsource it"
Dev: "Lets fix this reliability issue. We keep getting disconnects and it does something wacky to our API" CTO/VP Eng: "That's hard. Lets just see if we can spin up enough instances not to notice"
Most of stuff that we do is not hard.
Doing any of those things you describe with effectively in a mid/large-scale engineering organization with many competing tech priorities is not something an amateur or simpleton could do with any real success. I can put seeds in the ground, but that doesn't make me a farmer.
But also - maybe larger point - many of the things that are not coding/math/science are also quite hard. My father fixed auto-bodies for a living and he made some incredibly difficult, detail-oriented, craftsmanship tasks look dumb-simple. He asked me to tape off a car once so it could be painted - something he thought a 13 year old should be able to do because it was "so easy" was a complete disaster. He forgot how second-nature it had become to him.
So..just because you think it's easy doesn't mean it is. And just because it's hard doesn't mean it's fairly characterized in popular-opinion as being as hard as it actually is.
If I'm struggling to understand something that is so easy, maybe I'm just dumb.
No-one is arguing that certain groups have greater aptitude or learning ability for programming; they're arguing that certain individuals might differ.
There are thousands of developers making fractions of what their equally talented counterparts make in the US.
Why is offshore-developed code not the same quality? What is it about living (growing up?) in the US that has developers producing higher-quality code?
I highly suspect that it's merely selection bias. US companies outsource offshore to save money and when your goal is to save money you've already decided that "the best" isn't really what you're going for. So the code we--as US-based developers--see from offshore development often looks like barely-working garbage.
Yet if we look at open source code written by offshore developers it's often of high quality (i.e. higher quality than the crap we see in the world of Enterprise software). Why doesn't it match our experiences with commercial software development?
It probably has a lot to do with incentives. Open source software is often developed for pleasure or as a learning experience whereas US companies outsourcing software development aren't exactly "driving excellence."
I would also be curious what the relative salaries are, e.g. food and shelter are usually much cheaper in foreign countries.
American exceptionalism and absolutely wrong.
I don't think this has to be American to be true.
I have no idea what % of offshore code work that represents compared to just a regular consulting firm that happens to be located overseas, or a branch office of a company located in another country.
Should I assume that American code is usually low quality?
Oh, and also, both the previous paragraph and your comments in the thread are (edited:)nationalist[1]. Not that it's not fun to use stereotypes and a few anecdotes to form an opinion, so don't mind me, just noting.
[1] Not sure if it's the correct word, I mean discrimination by ethnicity and nationality.
Nor do I think my nation is the greatest, and all the others suck. So I don't think it counts as nationalism.
Anyway, you do attribute certain characteristics to members of whole nations without any kind of proof (beyond what "everybody [in the field] knows"). I believe you shouldn't, and that it doesn't matter if the characteristics are positive or negative.
In reality, there are both good and bad programmers everywhere. That you ended up working with the bad - or maybe ill-incentivized due to some circumstances - programmers from here or there does not mean that there are no good programmers there or businesses that care for quality. It just means you didn't meet them.
Perhaps you should not be accusing others then if you aren't even certain what you're accusing them of.
> Anyway, you do attribute certain characteristics to members of whole nations without any kind of proof
Homogeneous groups of people often share similar attributes, I don't see what is incorrect or wrong about that.
You are correct though, I do not have proof, but it is something that I hear from and discuss with colleagues, as well as have observed myself.
I said I'm sorry, and I edited the comment. This is, however, a detail - that you are unjustly discriminating, only on a basis other than race, I stand by.
> Homogeneous groups of people
Assuming homogeneity of any group of people is almost certainly wrong.
Why don't you substitute "black" or "Hispanic" or "Jewish" for "offshore" in your arguments and see what happens? Would you be able to leisurely write that, in your opinion, "black programmers are sloppy and only churn code as quickly as possible"?
You can also hire the better part of offshore developers if you'll pay just a bit closer to US rates. I saw the situation "$15/h developer failed everything, help us $35/h developer!" quite a lot in Russian-speaking freelance communities.
Yes. It usually is.
That is implied, from the comment you replied to. You may need to rephrase.
You can get ridiculously poor quality of code by paying bottom dollar and failing to properly communicate with your developers, no matter what country those developers happen to be situated in.
Even if luxuries are not cheaper, food, shelter, healthcare etc. are, freeing up more monies.
Cheap offshore developed code is usually not the same quality. Pay people the same and it's amazing what you'll get.
I write a lot of it professionally.
I honestly don't think it will last, though. Economically, it just doesn't make sense. My recommendation to any of my fellow US developers: save as much as you can while the money is good.
I've worked remotely for the past 3 years. If you're open to remote work, the challenge isn't finding qualified employees. The challenge is turning off the firehose of qualified applicants once you post a job listing.
It's almost impossible to immigrate to England (much harder than the US), yet programmers in SF are far better compensated than those in London.
Immigration per se may be hard, but working is much easier than the US; I know several Romanians working as programmers in London.
1) Move there. You can do this even without a job.
2) Book an appointment with the Job Centre (usually used by people seeking work), where you must show your passport.
(Start work if you like. Your employer may ask to see your passport, if you don't yet have the tax number.)
3) Tax number arrives a week or a few later; tell employer.
The process is actually the same for British citizens without a tax number, e.g. a child born abroad who moves "home" to the UK.
Most people feel at least sheepish about their own success when faced with others, no less deserving, who experience failure.
You're the one reversing cause and effect. As though I should feel proud and deserving that my ancestors (who, mind, I had nothing to do with) worked hard, got lucky, and gifted me remarkable advantages.
I would argue everyone is privileged to some degree. Hell, being born in a first world country makes you way more privileged than most of the world.
And yes, there is luck involved, but hard work plays a massive role in outcomes. To ignore that is folly.
That's ridiculous. The fact that his parents worked hard is what entitled him to the life he has, all the way up the chain to the ones that emigrated to America and earlier. This 'original sin' stuff that people are trying to push just because we are born in the US is crap.
Bring on the downvotes, I don't give a shit.
This is difficult in most countries and extremely so in the US. Which benefits? How do they prove entitlement to them? By what process are they entitled to them but the military vets living on the street aren't?
I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but I suspect it happens a lot less often than you think.
(also, you've done the old "Schroedinger's immigrant" thing: at the top of the thread we were talking about jobs, you're talking about benefits now. Who are these people who simultaneously go on benefits while also stealing your job?)
At the same time their children, whether "dreamers" or native born get free education and healthcare the average cost per student in the US is around 15k the highest in the world, which these kids receive for free despite their parents never paying into the system.
The end result is that illegal immigration costs US federal and state governments 85-100 billion a year.
I support highly skilled labor ie top .1% of worldwide talent, not unlimited immigration sponsored by corporations to drive down wages for US citizens, whether that be low skilled manufacturing or software engineering
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/...
https://fairus.org/issue/publications-resources/fiscal-burde...
I find this quote confusing. Historically, the poaching of highly-skilled foreigners has been an important step in developing mere import substitutions into products which can be competitive on a global scale.
The Tudor government (Henry VII-Elizabeth I) kicked off its finished-wool-import-substitution program by poaching skilled weavers and machinists from the low countries (e.g. Flanders, Holland, France). Then, as the export of finished wool goods grew, so did restrictions on the exportation of raw materials and the importation of finished wool. Nearly 100 years later, England had the ability to drive European countries to famine by simply banning the export of raw wool.[0]
In the early 18th century, France started poaching British watchmakers, weavers and metalworkers; Britain responded by outlawing the emigration of skilled workers in 1719.[1]
With that context, I find it odd to hear that U.S. immigration policy has started to work in opposition to the what I believe is the largest benefit of immigration. What incentive is there to keep highly skilled workers, along with their advanced knowledge, out of the U.S.?
[0] - Chang, Ha-Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Print. pg. 40-42
[1] - Chang, Ha-Joon. Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Print. pg. 129
Couldn't you say the same thing about other professions?
The whole world uses operating systems, browsers and development tools made in western countries.
Now, the quality of engineering education received at top CS/engg. institutes and a local college is night and day. This means that only a small subset of the graduating engineers get any decent quality of education.
Most of these people, often considered the cream of the crop are poached by the aforementioned western companies or go for graduate studies. Graduate institutes in India are underwhelming, so these students land up in the west as well.
The rest of the cream have to choose between software engineering roles that pay around $15-25k with very little vertical movement and business analyst/ consultancy roles where you might earn a bit more and have a much clearer clearer progression up the ladder. These are often referred to as the MBA crowd.
Look at people like Sanjay Ghemawat, whose achievements are as noteworthy as Jeff Dean, having been a fundamental part of developing MapReduce, BigTable, Tensorflow, GFS and Spanner.
It is actually a very ironic situation. One one hand the US is complaining about negative intellectual biases against Asian immigrants, while both the Indian and Chinese govt. are lamenting how they are losing the cream of the crop to the US as well.
If both are the be believed, India and China's best are leaving the countries, but the US is not getting competent people from these countries. So, I guess these people have vanished into thin air. In the mean time Chinese and Indians increasingly churn out ground breaking papers and research in CS.
This is very much changing, especially in China, but I presume there is still some lag. The other thing worth bearing in mind is that Chinese products are very insular. They are slow to get localized if ever so unless you have a reason to be going out to download them, you are unlikely to ever be using them.
This is right. From my experience working with an offshore team in India, the main problem is cultural. A large majority of the developers in India I've worked with have no interest in furthering their development carrier, but see it simply as a way to transition into management as fast as possible. In practice, this means that you can go from a junior developer to a project manager in the span of 2 years or so. 2 years is not enough time to solidify your knowledge and become the t-shaped programmer that this industry requires. I think one needs at least 5 years of work and experimentation in this field to reach the level where you can contribute positively to a company, without creating huge amounts of technical debt.
Maybe you were born in the right place for the economical opportunity for someone born “lower” (please be generous with my terms here), but maybe it’s that these others were born “higher” to a place where higher education is easier to accumulate granting them a severe advantage competitively should you have to compete in an economic arena on the same level.
Or do we accept that being born to an economic disadvantage due to whatever factors mean you should be solely relegated to your caste of manual labour, service occupations, or direct servitude?
Second to that problem is what value does higher education really have in application in what are varied circumstances.
My understanding was the founding of the US was quite counter to that idea— and it’s one ideal that many countries have thankfully sought to incorporate.
Though I think you’re on to a problem—one that includes the consideration that current rules don’t exactly line up with the values we might wish to pursue as a (human, global) society. Partly because it might be necessary in what appears to be a period of transition.
Don't discount your other abilities that much.
However, capitalism (in the form of Walmart and its suppliers, for example) does seem quite efficient at supplying material things to poor people. More spending power in the right places would go pretty far to fix the problem, along with boosting the economy.
Their profits come from economic coercion and exploiting public subsidies, not efficiency. Walmart's primary competitive innovation historically was union busting.
Does it? I don't know if I'd really agree with that.
Like it or not, the greedy evil capitalists are making the world a better place for all of us.
I feel like this is the real issue here. The reason that the US has great companies is simply from the availability of large amounts of capital. And if the millions and millions of Indian, Chinese, and Eastern European programmers who are inifinitely more talented/driven/intelligent/educated than myself were able to simply move here and seek employment with no immigration restraints, I know that I would be out of a job instantly. In that sense it feels perversly exploitative and priveleged to make so much more money than practically anyone else on earth due to nothing but the physical location I was born.