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Comment by newswasboring | Hacker News Reader

My heart broke when reading your article. There are some very different kinds of accusations put on Shor. The most hilarious is definitely the "you are not black so shut up" argument. I understand lived experience and how it impacts a person's ability to speak on a matter. that I have never seen a person even attempt at explaining how the author's lived experience corrupted their chain of thought. Also the original paper was written by a non white person. In my view this is worse than an ad hominem attack because in this tactics you feel like a whole community just insulated you. I don't understand what exactly the people restricting speech in this way are trying to achieve.

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> I don't understand what exactly the people restricting speech in this way are trying to achieve.

When your ideas can’t be sustained on their merits, your only option is to eliminate people who don’t share your world view. It’s a complete disaster and only breeds fragility.

I will attempt to speak their position, though I disagree with the left on identity politics.

They might respond that, as a nation, US slaves and native americans and their descendants were exploited brutally by white English colonists. Over generations, this disparity was solidified by white male laws like jim crow, voter disenfranchisement, and overtly racist and harmful attitudes.

Where they go wrong, IMO, is what you've stated. I'm a white male posting this, does that matter? Should it? Or is it merely the historical fact that matters? And how fair is our current society?

I my view the problem is these objections (though valid at face value) are used to shut down the conversation, not to advance it. I'm not white, does that matter in this instance? Yes, because my lived experience will be very different from yours. But this whole thing is only valuable if I can explain what's missing from your mental model. Lived experience was supposed to give you cover over not knowing racial conditions upfront and give an avenue and tools for us to incorporate more information.

This argument originated to facilitate nuance but is being used to shut it out. That fucking sucks.

> They might respond that, as a nation, US slaves and native americans and their descendants were exploited brutally by white English colonists. Over generations, this disparity was solidified by white male laws like jim crow, voter disenfranchisement, and overtly racist and harmful attitudes.

Very few people would deny this, and I highly doubt Shor disagrees with any of this.

> I understand lived experience and how it impacts a person's ability to speak on a matter.

I don’t. „Lived experience“ is just experience, but woke.

Lived experience is different from experience. But I think its illdefined and widely misused term. The way I see it lived experience differentiates internal and external experiences. For example a white person, black person and an indian person all can have the same police encounter (external experience) but live it in very different ways. Its because the white person and to an extent Indian person do not carry the fear of negative stereotypes because they have not lived the life of a black person who has had these counter multiple times and knows people for whom the exact same encounter turned out really badly.

There is a difference because one party has lived a completely different life so the same exact physical conditions lead to very, very different mental impact. Thus terms lived lived experience are important and the concept is worth looking at. It enables use to think in a more nuanced way and incorporate more information than what is exactly in front of us.

There is no such thing as "external experience", this is just called reality.

Experience = reality + human filter (mood, prejudice, ...)

Experience is a human concept, therefore it is necessarily subjective. Humans are not machines. Thus "lived experience" is just an empty phrase, invented to give a virtuous appearance to prejudice.

I see what you are saying but the connotative meaning of experience is not that. At least not in the media I consume. Usually experience means "I have been in that situation" but it does not take into account how the person arrived there. It's like trying to do a simulation without knowing any starting condition

It's a totally normal thing in english to add redundancy to emphasize. Global pandemic isn't wrong and nobody has to pay more to use two words instead of one. Lived experience is the same thing. Nothing wrong with emphasis.

All "lived experience" means is "anecdotal evidence, but I'll call you a racist if you disagree."

> I don't understand what exactly the people restricting speech in this way are trying to achieve.

Hegemony.

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