Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justin66 | Hacker News Reader

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> Generally the idea of privilege is dealing with something you didn't work for.

I'd rather depend on the dictionary definition which is more subtle and less judgmental, but I'm aware that it's become a rather loaded term recently. (A special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.)

> Is a kid who studies and gets all A's in class privileged with getting the reward for all A's?

Overwhelmingly the answer is yes. Children who come from a privileged background tend to make better grades as a rule, and the privilege continues from there. There is no need to get defensive about it or guilt-ridden, either, if you're one of the people in that position. (what, I'm supposed to perform badly so others can catch up?) It is just useful to recognize what is happening.

If nothing else this kind of awareness prevents people from having to ask questions like "Do I just live in that much of a bubble?" Well, yes.

> Earning a scholarship anyone can earn? Not privilege.

It wouldn't be a scholarship if anyone could earn it. No organization that awards scholarships awards them to all applicants performing above a certain objective threshold, as far as I know. It's a contest with winners, and the winners enjoy a certain privilege. There's nothing inherently wrong with that.

(although it might be a big-picture problem if there aren't enough scholarships to go around, if increased credentialism requires too many people to win that particular lottery, etc. etc.)

> (A special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group.)

In which case doesn't the word become entirely pointless because everyone alive is privileged? The discussion then can only happen when comparing the amount of privilege between two people, which becomes almost entirely subjective since it involves comparing different privileges and deciding some sort order. The subjectivity is even worse when we look at the intersection of different privileges. And what of the privileges which we don't even consider to measure, or which the lack of such privilege is socially taboo to call out the lack of?

I feel like we need some formal calculus to discuss privilege, which to my knowledge doesn't exist.

I don't know why you see it as so complicated.

A sociologist might discuss factors in the home like household wealth, childhood exposure to crime or violence or disease, quality of education, parents' education level, and a whole bunch of other things and their effect on a child's future wealth and educational outcome and so on. (and yeah, something like IQ is a little more taboo, but you can always look at that) That's sociologists, but even among normal people that looks like a reasonable list of things that would constitute privileges, at least as a first approximation.

Oh yeah, I don't know where you live, but in a country like the one I live in, where money by design tends to trump just about everything in importance and effects the ability to obtain or maintain everything else, guess which factor tends to constitute the most important privilege?

None of this makes me want to wave my arms around and cry out "oh my, this privilege thing is so complicated we do not even have a vocabulary to talk about it!" but YMMV.

>in a country like the one I live in, where money by design tends to trump just about everything in importance

That 'just about' gets overlooked to an extreme degree. How much money makes up for being autistic? From having a learning a disability? From a history of abuse?

And even if the sociologist are looking at all the right factors, once we are a single level removed from them lots of those factors are dropped from the vocabulary and not picked back up. For example, sex is often brought up in regards to some issues, but completely dismissed from others. Other issues are considered to minor to be worth mentioning, and while that may be true for any single one, someone who suffers from multiple such small ones can end up being declared privileged despite the combined effect of multiple minor issues completely eliminating privilege granted by others.

How does a wage gap and expectations of putting children before career compare to having a law preventing genital mutilation? How much benefits stereotyped to men are to be canceled out by someone with a gender neutral name who sounds female over the phone? How does being white, tall, and handsome compare to auditory hallucinations?

The 'normal people' discussion of privilege is an abstraction of what privilege actually is, and it is a very leaky one. That some can choose to ignore those leaks and the impacts of those leaks on themselves does not validate the abstraction as a good one worth using.

Holy moly, we're not talking about an "abstraction." If you thought the definition of "privilege" was promising you a scorecard by which you could cleanly and easily judge where people fall on a line, that's about you and your expectations, not about reality.

I do recall reading that the bulk of scholarships end up going more to privileged, caucasian children than of minorities.

Anecdotally, my well off college friend still applied for many scholarships and got a decent 50% chunk of her education paid for via scholarships.

So is everything everyone who's parents didn't act like complete deadbeats just the result of "privilege" and any effect of individual achievement, merit, hard work, etc. is marginal at best?

You can't hand wave and cite some difficult to quantify "privilege" in early childhood to explain all the differences in individual achievement among a group of people who share a common trait.

At what point does privilege stop and taking advantage of opportunity begin?

I'm not denying the role of luck in determining the course of one's life but to treat it as the global predictor of what one will achieve is basically denying the ability of people who do not have good luck in one way or another (e.g. who you were born to) to move up the ladder in spite of that.

Yes, it's better to be lucky than be good but being good can still get the job done.

Running a race is a good analogy here. Privilege is the equivalent of starting the 100 meter dash 20 meters past the starting line, while someone else starts at zero. You can both work equally hard and achieve vastly different results. If you make the advantage large enough, no "extra effort" can overcome that advantage.

Hard work and personal achievement is not all that matters. I believe I worked plenty hard to get where I am today but I had the fortune to be born to stable parents who could always put food on the table, took an interest in my education and could afford to send me to college without massive loans. Take away any of those things and my same effort would likely not have yielded the same results - I was set up for success.

I don't feel guilty about that, but I do try to recognize that people who are struggling can't just "work harder" to fix their problems.

I'm not sure what leads to defensive questions loaded down with so many false dichotomies and strawmen, but I would not ask anyone to feel bad about winning what Warren Buffett calls the "birth lottery." What I'm saying is that it's useful to recognize its existence.

The other thing that's useful to recognize is that while where we start is not destiny, you really can study what happens to entire populations of people. It is absolutely not difficult or "hand wavy" to quantify early childhood privilege to a meaningful extent. Nobody is saying the correlation between privilege, academic performance, economic performance, even crime and so on explain "all" of anything or treating them as "the global predictor of what one will achieve."

I assume people are defensive about this stuff because they're sick of feeling like they're being accused of having something they haven't virtuously earned, or perhaps more thoughtfully, because being studied sociologically as part of a population makes people feel like ants instead of beautiful, unique snowflakes. Well.

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