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Comment by qntty | Hacker News Reader

> This is part of why I get enraged whenever somebody on Tumblr says “People in Group X need to realize they have it really good”, or “You’re a Group X member, so stop pretending like you have real problems.”

One of these is not like the other. You can have it good by being white and still have real problems.

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You're right.

I think it's unremarkable to say:

People who are not straight and/or white tend to have worse outcomes than people who are straight and/or white.

-- and --

Straight white people can have hard, miserable lives.

His specific anger is at the notion that members of minority groups suffer THEREFORE members of majority groups do not suffer. But as you said, you can still have it better than people in a minority group--on average--and also suffer.

There's so much annoying crosstalk when it comes to these issues. That being said, his call to empathy is a good one.

> His specific anger is at the notion that members of minority groups suffer THEREFORE members of majority groups do not suffer

Yeah this is where his anger comes from, but perhaps he's being a bit too sensitive. He doesn't seem to recognize the validity of the idea that some people really have it better.

Send these miserable, privileged people to Africa to dig latrines for a year. They'll be a lot happier when they return.

Deprivation is a necessary dimension of human experience. I was looking at setting up one-month trips for snowflakes through Canadian muskeg guided by special forces veterans, but it turns out that only the government can legally form a meeting of minds sufficient to conclude a contract where one party agrees to what amounts to boot camp.

Empathizing with people whose only problem is that their experience does not include overcoming adversity is a challenge that I think is best met with tough love. More of the same clearly is not going to do any good.

The fact that somewhere other people have it worse has never been a valid or meaningful response to suffering. It is so facile it works on almost any level of horror.

You could fallaciously say I'm sorry you had your legs eaten by bears but did you hear about joe, joe was eaten alive by ants!

Your anecdote regarding your would be boot camp is probably off topic but allowing people to abrogate basic human rights so you can have a camping trip seems like an atrocious idea.

It would be the worst idea I'd heard this week but I just conversed with a guy planning to deliberately make chlorine gas to go to war with the weeds in his garden.

It is not facile to ask if experiencing deprivation is a necessary condition for experiencing happiness. Consider that strength training develops muscles. Does facing genuine adversity develop emotional response such that people become capable of enjoying a world of plenty?

I think the proximity and ultimate fact of death first around us and then ultimately happening to us is sufficient deprivation to appreciate life.

Suffering is more likely to stunt then enrich.

Suffering that does not respond to effort is definitely stunting. The thesis motivating my muskeg boot-camp concept is that participants exit the wilderness under their own power and therefore develop agency.

My perspective on this is somewhat unusual; I chose to canoe across Manitoba because I felt like I was a weakling who had never truly confronted necessity. It took three weeks, and I remember thinking, many times, "this absolutely and completely sucks, but I'm going to remember this as a great experience." Sure enough, that is the case.

There is a lot of masochism in my life because I depend on it to keep depression away. It is for my spirit what gravity is for my body - in the sense that long term zero-G exposure is unhealthy. I can't help but think a persevering experience would help these folks, whose lives are apparently so unchallenged that the mundane necessities of day-to-day existence grow untenable.

That's a result of my perspective, which is the perspective of a masochist. I am aware that pain and pleasure are linked for me to an unusual degree. I feel like it should be that way for everyone, and they're really missing out! I guess I'd be a pretty terrible therapist.

If only we all had suffering as an immediate consequence of not living up to our potential, you know? It would be better. So I'm prescribing shock collar controlled by an iOS/Android app that monitors subject behavior... It could really help these people realize that they were correct to think that they ought to be happy with their non-shock-collar lives! And they would be!

Maybe, but also groups who experienced serious deprivation have on average worst outcomes. They take drugs more often, they are more violent, they have all kinds of mental problems.

Veterans, former political prisoners, post-war countries, poor social classes etc have a lot of mental health and depression related problems. They may enjoy world of plenty the way we don't, but they have issues we don't.

I have a hard time believing that people who experience war are happier on average than those that don't. People who have trained in suffering and deprivation might overcome it in despite such experience, but I would not bet on the average.

I read that as in response to someone white/Group X being told "What are _you_ complaining about?"

Right, but he seems resistant to recognizing the valid point that some people really do have it better because they're white or whatever.

What's there to "recognize" about the statement that "some people really have it better because they fall on the right side of a normal distribution"?

To a good degree of approximation, the talk about one group having it better than other is a discussion about one group's mean and/or right tail being greater than the other's. The statement you want the author to recognize is equivalent to that in a probability distribution, some samples really do fall on the right side of the mean.

When talking about groups, that makes sense. I think one of the points that the author is making is that it doesn't make sense to apply this to individuals within this group.

"White males are privileged" is a reasonable statement to make with plenty of evidence to support it. "You have it better than me because you're a white male" doesn't, because there's a significant amount of overlap in the bell curves of "better off" (regardless of how you define it) between white males, and black women (to give an example).

It's more-or-less the same argument as assuming that any given man is physically stronger than any given woman because on average men are stronger.

'"White males are privileged" is a reasonable statement to make with plenty of evidence to support it.'

Is it though? I think you're going to need to be a lot more specific than that to make a reasonable statement. You can try to support your original statement, but that's so vague it could mean whatever you want.

I saw a recent statistic on the talent.works blog that might be interesting to this discussion. They had a sample size of around 6-10k and found that women had a much higher interview rate than men, at all levels of experience, and across multiple categories of industry. Here is the graphic related to their article. [0]

But on that same dataset it was found that Asians and Whites get more disproportionately more job offers than Black and Hispanic applicants in America. So while things might be shifting or evening out for some characteristics, like gender, in others they are still going strong.

[0] https://i1.wp.com/talent.works/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/re...

This data is interesting, but in the blog post the judgment made about it(or heavily suggested) that it's due to stereotypes and discrimination is a very broad stroke and it can't all be attributed to that. Maybe that is a part of it, but how much and in what specific cases? That is the hard part.

And aside from that employment is one dimension of 'privilege'. How could you possibly calculate all the privilege across a human life... there are endless dimensions

Race has nothing to do with falling on one side of a normal distribution. I'm not sure how you got that from what I said.

I think privalage is contextual. It depends on you actually coming into contact with situations where it helps.

- You can't be privileged in getting a promotion in a dead end job where no one gets promoted.

- You can't be privileged in social acceptability if you have a mental health issue that keeps you from going outside.

- You can't be privileged in educational opportunities when you had to quit high school to pay for a parent's medical bills.

It goes on and on. Privalage is real, but it's mostly real for those who are successful, and have a whole pile of luck and privalage backing them up. It's a lot less applicable for everyone else, the suffering masses.

I think the claim of people who talk about privilege is that there is a society-wide context where being white or whatever gives you privilege.

It's not like America has a white police force that discriminates against black people and a black police force that discriminates against white people. We have one police force and it's a white one (in the sense that it tends to be run for the sake of white people and embodies white values).

It's not like we have a white tech sector that discriminates against black people and a black tech sector that discriminates against white people. We have one tech sector that is run (disproportionately) for the sake of white people and embodies white values.

Does that mean that every white person has it good? No. But being white does have privilege associated with it. You're part of the dominant group and have an easier time navigating the social world because of that.

That being said, it's possible to be white and also mentally ill (for example). That doesn't mean you don't have white privilege, it just means you lack the privilege of people without mental illness. Saying someone is privileged doesn't mean that their life is good, it just means it's better than it would otherwise be.

>We have one tech sector that is run (disproportionately) for the sake of white people and embodies white values.

What do you mean by “white values”?

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