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"Privilege" is an everyday word with established meanings. If academics want to redefine it to serve their political goals, the burden is on them to make their case to the people. We don't have to accept that a word means something different than what it's always meant before just because some ivory tower elitists said so.

When someone wants to introduce a term to clarify meaning, they generally put two or three words together and create a unique term. When someone with a political agenda wants to create confusion and division, they choose common terms and give them new, contentious meanings.

A sibling has a better approach for this particular term: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26247166

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

The Google definition is the same definition that academics use. Exactly the same.

The sibling you references is correct - "privilege already had widely used emotional connotations that made it an insult to call someone privileged." but it's not academics that implied that meaning onto it.

Also, can we have a discussion about these academic concepts without immediately ascribing "political goals"? We're talking about specific sociological concepts. Can we stick to that instead of ascribing subjective "goals" to people's research or ideas?

I'm trying to find a way to give a meaningful reply, but I honestly get stuck on this part about academia's supposed neutrality. I don't believe for a second that sociologists are somehow blissfully unaware of the way their work is used to shape policy, to shape debate, and even to shape the language itself, nor that they are somehow angels who can't have impure motives. In addition, it's common knowledge that petty political in-fighting is the rule in academia. There's no reason at all to think that academics are neutral in any way, but plenty of reasons not to.

Does the work of open source maintainers and technologists shape policy, debate, and language itself?

By some definition no one is truly neutral. Everyone has some ideas and motives, and goals.

The problem is when technologists look at those in the humanities and ascribe THEIR goals as "impure" or "political", and therefore somehow a class worthy of derision and dismissal.

Don't you see that?

I think it's a different situation because no one is citing open-source maintainers in their studies, and they have very little influence in policy.

I do see your point about everyone having bias, and it's not fair to stereotype one group as being especially biased. I apologize for showing undue bias myself.

Scott Alexander just posted a very interesting article[0] with a section "2. War On Experts" that covers some of the issues that I was so poorly trying to communicate. His take is probably more harsh than I would want to adopt, but he is deliberately addressing Republicans here so maybe his tone is different for that reason.

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-...

Yeah, my experience is similar to deanCommie's.

Annoyingly the definition is correct to the established meaning (in the dictionary), no redefining necessary. But surely just a trial run in the real world would tell you that it doesn't communicate well, given it's common connotation.

>If academics want to redefine it to serve their political goals, the burden is on them to make their case to the people.

It's not a redefinition as much as it is overloading the term with new meanings. Much like technical language, in which 'memory' takes on a particular meaning in computing, or 'information' takes on a particular meaning in information theory, or 'scale' takes on a particular meaning in music theory, 'power' takes on a particular meaning in mathematics, 'roux' takes on a particular meaning in speedcubing, and more contentiously, 'justice' takes on a particular meaning in distributive economics, as does 'exploitation'. It is often obvious from context what meaning is implied by an overloaded bit of language.

However, if someone were to ask "What do you mean by 'exploitation'? Doesn't that mean x,y,z?" then the user of the term as technical language should be able to reply "No, I mean p,q,r. We call it 'exploitation' in the field because of a,b. You shouldn't confuse it for having properties implied by x,y,z."

I basically agree with what you've said, except I do think that some terms are intentionally overloaded for political purposes. As long as the language is within the field, between academics, then overloading can be fine. It's understood that the technical meaning can be completely divorced from the common meaning. The problems come about when people try to force technical definitions into the common vernacular.

There are two main problems that arise: (1) As deanCommie's root-level comment exemplifies, contempt for non-academics and a complete lack of respect for ordinary usage. This is divisive and toxic for obvious reasons. (2) It's not uncommon to see people commandeer an extremely weighty term like "racism" to take advantage of the emotional power, but when examined they fall back to a technical definition which has only a small fraction of the power. This allows them to destroy someone's livelihood with accusations of racism, but then it turns out that what they really meant by "racism" was something like that person really likes Chinese food and wants to make a living serving it, which is precisely the opposite of what is ordinarily considered to be racism.

It doesn't have to be that in particular which is characterized as racism. It can be many things: Wearing a dress to prom from a culture you admire, declining to support a partisan, openly Marxist corporation, expressing admiration of Jewish accomplishments, or expressing sympathy for the plight of young black men, but we see it all the time. Words are turned into weapons, and this overloading sleight of hand in an important enabler.

"Racism" is by far the most destructive overloaded term, and the easiest to find stark examples for, but the same problems exist to a lesser degree in other terms. @coagmano's approach is great, because he wants to talk about real differences and find real solutions, not to play word games. But there are plenty of people who just want to destroy, or to pursue a divide-and-conquer strategy in their pursuit of political power.

I completely agree with your first 2 paragraphs. People pretend like describing a person or action as racist (in the academic definition) is a non-judgemental callout of our society's continued opportunity for improvement. However they ignore (willfully) the automatic mob that will invariably form to not educate but to chastise the person into oblivion (and taking their livelyhood in process).

I do think we need a better way to callout subtle and insidious racism in people's beliefs and actions but make it an educational opportunity for growth for the person and for society, not the instigation of a pile on.

Having said that, your specific examples are really strange, and I'd like to dive into why. Please make sure you understand, I do not do this to indict you, or accuse you of anything remotely of racism yourself. But your choices of example are strange because unfortunately I do think they are generally associated with malicious racists who use them as cover to have subtle plausible deniability.

> openly Marxist corporation

Speaking of words completely devoid of technical meaning. Can you clarify what you mean by openly Marxist corporations or offer an example?

Because, I'm going to be honest, 99% of the usage of this term online today is not treated respectfully by neutral parties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th...

> expressing admiration of Jewish accomplishments

Jewish or Israeli? The context matters significantly. It's naive to not be hypervigilant about both positive and negative discussions of Israelis and Jews online. You have everything on the spectrum: You have fully well-intentioned supporters of Palestianians and Palestine. But you also have duplicitous conmen who use the support of Palestine as a cover for blatant anti-semitism. You have fully well-intentioned supporters of Jews and Israel. And you have duplicitous conmen who use the support of Jews and Israel as a cover for blatant islamophobia, or worse Christian Supremacy. (Evangelical Christians in the US are militantly pro-Israel not because they so love their Jewish bretheren or hate Muslims, but simply because Israel has prophetic meaning in Evangelical Christian expectations of the Apocalypse/Rapture).

The problem is that while the majority of people hold neutral/centrist beliefs on Palestine and Israel, the extremists are overrepresented online. Most likely when people react negatively to concepts like "expressing admiration of Jewish accomplishments", they are reacting to those in context

> or expressing sympathy for the plight of young black men,

Again, this seemingly uncontroversial concept is completely weaponized online. White supremacists (actual ones) will openly proclaim their concern for the plight of young black men. And they'll say that nobody can take care of them better than other black folks. Which is why 1) They should stop killing each other in greater numbers than white police do, and 2) This is why we need segregation so that White society can take care of itself, and Black society can do so also.

This follow up isn't always visible and isn't always revealed. It comes later once the person who is operating in bad faith has earned trust and credibility.

> I do think we need a better way to callout subtle and insidious racism in people's beliefs and actions but make it an educational opportunity for growth for the person and for society, not the instigation of a pile on.

Terms like "unconscious bias" and "cultural appropriation" are fine. They have clear meanings, and AFAICT the terms themselves are never in dispute. In my personal experience, racism is a Very Big Deal, like murder, and it seems fundamentally wrong to diminish the meaning of the word by applying it to subtle, unintentional acts with debatable implications. It's as if one were to use the word "systemic murder" to describe the inefficient (in one's opinion) allocation of resources in medical research, and then used that term to characterize an entire society as essentially murderous and fascist. It just does not compute, and I don't think it does any good to insist on such terminology when it inevitably causes the conversation to derail into semantic disputes. Then the terms become useless for evangelizing, but very useful as litmus tests to enforce political allegiances and attack heterodox and non-conformist thinking.

I'm guessing that you were fine with my first two examples since you didn't point those out, so I'll just provide sources for the last three. (Two are combined). Note that I rarely view anything on social media, so I'm not in that conversation. My views are my own. If they seem to echo the "talking points" of someone I've never heard of or some organization that I don't pay attention to, that is a coincidence. HN is my biggest news source by far. If you should happen to find my views distasteful, I assure you that it is due to a vastly different perspective and not bad faith.

The admiration of Jews had nothing to do with Israel or Christianity. (As you noted, that could have made it a terrible example). The English lecturer Stephen Lamonby was fired as a result of his admiration of Jewish academics, saying "I was excited to think she might be one of them – excited to meet a Jewish physicist, who had been my heroes since boyhood."[0] This is precisely the opposite of what I would consider racism. It gets more interesting in that he defended the progressive position that blacks are disadvantaged by society, and this was somehow twisted around to make him a "racist". Not only did he say this, but he's apparently devoted significant time to helping out in disadvantaged countries and while in the UK gave special help to overseas students, and was attacked as racist for this: "Mr Lamonby noted that some of the overseas students were struggling to grasp even the most basic elements of engineering and said that he stayed behind to help three of them. ‘She said I shouldn’t have done this,’ he recalls. ‘I said I had a soft spot for young black men because they are often from environmentally disadvantaged societies.‘"[1] This reads like admirable activism, the rare person who practices what they preach, and about as far from real racism as you can possibly get. If one is using a definition of "racism" that can be twisted into making this man's actions racist, then that definition should be discarded. I will note that some of his comments, mainly asking a woman if she was Jewish because he thought she was talented and was excited to potentially be meeting one of his heroes, does seem obtuse and perhaps deserving of a minor rebuke. But not being fired as a "potential racist", which essentially nukes his whole career. The BBC reports a single allegation that he said black students did not have it "in their DNA to do engineering"[2], but he flatly denies this. The allegation comes from a single person who could be lying or have misheard, and it goes so directly against the spirit of his other quite progressive comments that it's hard to believe he would have ever said that.

About "declining to support partisan, an openly Marxist corporation", this is controversial and the import is highly disputed, so I will try to be very precise with my language. The common defense is that "the founders being Marxist doesn't mean that it's a Marxist movement", but this defense only works if you ignore the context. The context is this critique: "And one of the critiques that he shared–a loving critique, as I would want to point out, by the way–is that he was concerned or is concerned that there’s a lack of perhaps ideological direction in Black Lives Matter that would allow it to be, to fizzle out in, as he said, in comparison to Occupy Wall Street. As you advance in your own organization, as you all are headed to Cleveland to participate in this Black Lives Movement conference, how do you respond to that particular critique?" To which BLM founder Patrice Cullors responds, stating why she thinks that the BLM movement has the ideological direction to succeed: "Um, I think that the criticism is helpful. I also think that it might–. I think of a lot of things. The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk. We don’t necessarily want to be the vanguard of this movement. I think we’ve tried to put out a political frame that’s about centering who we think are the most vulnerable amongst the black community, to really fight for all of our lives. And I do think that we have some clear direction around where we want to take this movement. I don’t believe it’s going to fizzle out. It just gets stronger, and we see it, right... We’re in a different set of circumstances, a different generation that–social media may feel like it’s diluting the larger ideological frame." [4] That is, BLM has adequate ideological direction because it's in a larger ideological frame. She makes it sound very much like that larger frame is the frame of Marxist ideology, but we don't have to agree on that. Now I was originally referring to the BLM corporation rather than the movement, but I have to be very precise with my language, and her interview was discussing the movement, not the corporation. I will bring the thread back now to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, Inc., of which Patricia and Alicia are founders. Hopefully we can agree that the corporation itself is closely associated with Marxist ideology. We don't have to get into the complexities of the larger movement.

The "declining to support" part comes from the Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's apparent endorsement of the BLM's more mainstream goals, but his refusal to endorse the BLM organization itself (the corporation) and its radical, ideologically-driven goals. (BLMGNF has since remove some of the more controversial goals from its website). "The CEO’s apparent redefinition of company culture felt personal, hinging on the pressure Armstrong felt from employees to say Black Lives Matter. They view the statement as moral, not political or activist. “A lot of people feel that saying Black lives matter is an ethical statement. They feel it should be an easy thing to say,” one engineer says. Armstrong said in June that he agreed with the statement, and that police brutality was a problem. But he wavered on whether a statement that included “Black Lives Matter” would mean endorsing BLM as an organization and set of policies, like defunding police."[4] This famously provoked Dick Costolo's thinly veiled threat that Armstrong would be shot in the (presumably Marxist) revolution.[5] (Sorry if you dislike the source, but the tweets have been deleted since and that source still has them). Armstrong was harshly criticized for his neutrality, with the more extreme non-violent responses reading like this "NEW: @Coinbase announces new commitment to a white supremacist workplace."[6]. It's interesting that a "committed white supremacist workplace" can be sympathetic to the wider BLM movement even while remaining politically neutral. I'll also note that BLMGNF receives allegedly hundreds of millions of dollars in donations (but I can't source exact numbers because it's not public) and funnels them to the Democratic Party through ActBlue[7]. An endorsement of BLMGNF constitutes at minimum an endorsement of the Democratic Party, and can easily be perceived as an endorsement of Marxist ideology. I think it goes without saying that a CEO should be able to remain politically neutral and not have to endorse a particular political party or ideology, whether directly or indirectly. But prominent, influential progressives apparently feel like neutral people should be slaughtered.

[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8544279/University-... [1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8560707/Lecturer-sa... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-53489171 [3] https://therealnews.com/pcullors0722blacklives [4] https://www.wired.com/story/turmoil-black-lives-matter-polit... [5] https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/01/former-twitter-ceo-fant... [6] https://twitter.com/nandoodles/status/1310654284674015237 [7] https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019

Great points, I have some reading to do...

As an aside, I surely don't always agree with your comments, but they are always well-reasoned and thought-provoking. Even when I disagree, it is a very respectful disagreement.

Thanks, it means a lot to know I'm not just shouting into the void sometimes.

You're in my "show new comments from particular users" Telegram bot, and I find you to be among the better commenters here, so you're definitely not shouting into the void :).

> However, if someone were to ask "What do you mean by 'exploitation'? Doesn't that mean x,y,z?" then the user of the term as technical language should be able to reply "No, I mean p,q,r. We call it 'exploitation' in the field because of a,b. You shouldn't confuse it for having properties implied by x,y,z."

We desperately need more of that. The problem comes when someone reads an academic who means p,q,r, and repeats what they said to non-academics, and then they have a discussion where (almost) everybody thinks the academic meant x,y,z, and therefore everyone concludes that the academic is totally divorced from reality.

I don't know what to do about it. We don't want to make academics less accessible to the public, and demand that the public take it on faith that the academics know what they're talking about, and the ordinary public shouldn't worry their limited heads about such things. We also don't want to force the academics to use non-academic language in their academic work. And we can't expect the general public to put in a month or a decade to learn all the nuances of the academic definitions.

The only thing I can see that could work is translators - people who can explain (a simplified form of) what the academics are saying, in language that ordinary people use, pointing out along the way that the academics mean p,q,r and not x,y,z. People that can do that well are, I think, rare. It might help to have more of them - but how do we make that happen?

The problem is that everyone has opinions on social issues and humanities. Everyone can look at a public policy and say "That's a terrible policy" disregarding the work of experts who worked to balance many different constraints in the pursuit of some societal goal. It's the same as how anyone can look at a piece of art and say "That's terrible. My kindergarten son could have drawn that." and think their opinion is as valid as art critics.

As opposed to STEM where people generally keep to opinions only in their domains.

Now, you could say that this means proves that humanities are less rigorous and less worthy of respect, and that might take you so far. But ultimately the world is full of humans, and dealing with their habits, emotions, and motivations is not the work of biologists or chemists or physicists or mathematicians.

The challenge is that when a software engineer encounters a hardware engineer and they try to reach an understanding, there is an implicit baseline of respect, and if some terminology or phrasing doesn't fit one side, they default to assuming the term must mean something different in the other domain, and they ask for clarification.

When technologists on HackerNews encounter terms like privilege, justice, or exploitation from those in the humanities, they offer none of the same respect, and react to their own personal unstudied interpretation of the term.

I think the difference is that hardware and software people usually know when the other side is using a technical term, even if they don't know the full definition of it. They know when they don't know. Whereas with the humanities, they're using words that are regular words, and non-humanities people don't recognize them as being technical terms.

As Claudia called out - scale, memory, and information are all technical terms in our context but have layman meanings in the language too.

Is that not the same as justice, racism, and privilege in humanities?

It is, except that a hardware and a software person both expect them to have technical meanings. That is, hardware and software people have enough in common that they can (usually, perhaps not always) tell when a term is being used in a technical way.

And the same may be true in the humanities. A philosophy person and a sociologist, say, may have enough in common to be able to detect when the other is using a term technically, even if they don't know the exact definition.

The problem comes when talking to laypeople, both for the humanities and the technical people. (And the technical people are laypeople to those in the humanities, and vice versa.)

It is a bit ironic to take issue with folks not respecting the authoritative, objective definition of privilege as decided upon by academic hierarchy.

I say this because the concept of privilege is deeply entwined with postmodernist philosophy which strongly believes in the subjectivity of the meaning through ones own lived experience and the rejection of hierarchial social structure attempts to assert ownership of meaning.

The word privilege has strong connotations of undeserved luxury which can be personally insulting to individuals that legitimately feel their own personal sufferings and hardships are being trivialized by the other party. Now do some folks really have undeserved amounts of personal luxury, yes of course, but luxury is by definition available to only a few. So why make it so essential to the word being used for the concept?

The real interesting talking point behind privilege is that you are arbitrarily spared from a set of societal injustices that other people are exposed to by virtue of arbitrary identity attributes. With only moderate amounts of reflection it is easy for most folks to buy into this idea and take some action in their life to reduce the negative effects of this phenomenon.

The cynic in me feels that the word privilege is used precisely to illicit defense responses from a subset of the population. Creating an irredeemable other and deepening division is never going to build a better society. What that does do is make the practitioner receive dopamine hits from their perceived moral and intellectual superiority. Sadly, self dosing dopamine will not bring about improvement to society at large.

If you're looking to have dialogues that have some chance of making all the participants better people than they were before, the tough work of going past charged language, being empathetic and assuming good intent are table stakes.

Otherwise you're just fishing for dopamine hits.

> The word privilege has strong connotations of undeserved luxury

Taking your point further, the crazy thing is that this part also fits! If you take academics at face value about the concepts of white privilege (and you don't have to agree with it, we're just discussing the terminology) in western society, then one aspect of it might be: "As a white person, you have the privilege not to be assaulted indiscriminately by the police."

Is that a Luxury? Well, compared to the alternative, not being beaten by the cops is damn luxurious compared to being beaten.

And it's completely undeserved! You did nothing to earn this except be born white.

Now, here, I acknowledge is where Academics made a huge mistake. The key is that the people advocating for social justice say that "EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE THIS LUXURY."

The idea of acknowledging privilege isn't to then follow up "and you should give it away", but instead "and you should make sure that EVERYONE is afforded the same privilege."

But the thing is, the end result is the same. Once a just society is achieved (hypothetically) and police treat all races the same (for example), then there is no more advantage to being one race or another.

So in essence, the point IS to give up the privilege by ensuring it becomes a non-entity.

> The cynic in me feels that the word privilege is used precisely to illicit defense responses from a subset of the population.

Depending on who you ask, humans are either social/collaborative/altruistic, or individualistic/selfish/xenophobic.

This spans race, culture, and class lines. Those that are in power and also in the second group seek out likeminded folks in the lower classes and preach to them that their life isn't so bad so long as they are better off than <insert other race here>.

Can every human being be convinced into seeking the common good? Can every human be assumed to have good intent? I don't know. You say you're cynical but you're more optimistic than me.

I never thought of this language being an INTENTIONAL divisive force, but in some sense as a way to identify those allied with you, and those who would fight against you it's not awful.

Like i said at the beginning - I do remember having an angry response at the first mention of this concept. But I realized in time that was my own immaturity and lack of empathy for others. Ironically it's the same privilege of being sufficiently well off and having my foundational needs being met that allowed me the space to start thinking of others. I acknowledge others may not be so lucky. If you are a coal miner out of work in West Virginia, the plight of black folks in inner city Minneapolis is hardly a concern.

And if we were talking about reaching THOSE people, I would agree with you. Every tactic and skillful negotiation idea should be on the table.

But a bunch of (privileged) well educated technologists on hacker news? I do expect a little more from them to do the bare minimum of reading a couple wikipedia pages before freaking out that someone is claiming they have some undeserved luxury.

"The best move..."