Hacker News Reader

Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

But my point is that such a misunderstanding of other people is not a symptom of privilege, its a symptom of being human. You probably don't know how billionaires as a class (and generalising people by a demographic is overgeneralising too) are experiencing covid either, but that isn't a question of privilege.

I guess I just don't like the idea of taking a universal human experience and casting it in terms of privilege. You're not blinded by privilege, you're blinded by the lack of generalisability of the human experience (or the lack of omniscience).

View on HN

David Graeber made a really good argument for why misunderstanding others is exactly a symptom of privilege. The whole article is worth reading (as is the whole book I originally read it in, "The Utopia of Rules"), but here's the argument in a nutshell:

"Those born to working-class families invariably score far better at tests of gauging others' feelings than scions of the rich, or professional classes. In a way it's hardly surprising. After all, this is what being "powerful" is largely about: not having to pay a lot of attention to what those around one are thinking and feeling. The powerful employ others to do that for them." https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/26/caring...

The short version of which is "the privileged are just selfish", which is a class based stereotype, ie dehumanising.

If someone starts off poor but becomes wealthy, do they lose the ability to empathise? Or do those those lack empathy seek the power to pursue selfish ends? I would argue the latter makes more sense.

Could this be explained by class/cultural differences in the manner of expressing feelings? Maybe poor people would be just as bad at reading the feelings of rich people, but each group can read well within the group.

I agree that this type of misunderstanding is something every human experiences. Those assumptions will however impact my decisions - who I vote for, what charity I donate to, how I approach other people in life, etc

My current situation is very safe and secure, so if I'm not aware that this is a privilege that is only enjoyed by a small subset of the population, my assumptions could lead me to making decisions that negatively impact a disproportionately large part of the population who do not share that privilege

I want to leave things better than I found them and to me this a helpful tool for doing that. Other people have different goals and different tools, and that's great as well

Maybe rather than expanding your assumptions one checked privilege at a time, just drop your assumptions altogether? You simply can't know the experiences of others; even direct communication only transfers a very loose approximation of experience, and that's if both sides are both communicating earnestly and are skilled communicators. So if you can't know the experience of just one person then you certainly can't group people by their experience.

Generalisations are a poor substitute for empathy and curiosity.

But that's all very abstract so to concretise my point:

> Those assumptions will however impact my decisions - who I vote for, what charity I donate to, how I approach other people in life, etc

I try to support people who don't play zero sum games, who create lasting systemic changes. Some fraction of most political movements are based on this, while other parts are about tribalism - so try to back leaders who want what's best for all.

To cast people in terms of privilege is to make moral judgements on people based on pure circumstance.

And approach people as if you know nothing about them - because you don't. To think you know something about someone you don't know is literally the textbook definition of prejudice.

I think it's naive to believe it's possible to drop assumptions all together. Without assumptions this thread wouldn't have happened

Taking the word "privilege" as an example, you have an assumption about what I mean when I use it and that it entails "moral judgement". These are not things I've expressed in any of my posts

> try to back leaders who want what's best for all.

I'm confused how you can know what's best for all without making assumptions. Could you elaborate?

> I think it's naive to believe it's possible to drop assumptions all together.

Dropping assumptions altogether isn't what I meant and is trivially shown to be nonsense. We couldn't live our lives if we didn't assume the sun would come up tomorrow.

What I mean is making unfounded assumptions about other human beings and their experiences.

> Taking the word "privilege" as an example, you have an assumption about what I mean when I use it and that it entails "moral judgement". These are not things I've expressed in any of my posts

Then I've made a mistake, by making an assumption that was unfounded. I'm not claiming to be perfect at avoiding unfounded assumptions about people or what they say, just that it's a better ideal than growing out your set of assumptions. After all, if you take people and keep dividing them into groups based on shared characteristics, take that to its terminal limit and you're simply treating people as unique individuals.

[edit] having reflected further, I think there might be a legitimate meaning behind my thinking of it as a moral judgement, but I'm interested to see if you agree. It's on my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343064

> I'm confused how you can know what's best for all without making assumptions. Could you elaborate?

I don't know what's best for all, nor do I believe that anyone else does - and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims they know what is best for any other person. What I try to do is look for people who navigate through empathy. The way I see it, politics is predominantly driven by finding the "bad people" to blame your voters' problems on and make them stop doing the bad thing. In reality people's behaviours are driven by structural incentives, so I am more inclined to trust people who, instead of pointing fingers at other humans and their moral deficiencies, focus on changing the incentives. I think a lot of green initiatives contain this kind of systems approach, as an obvious candidate; but so do some people of many different political movements. It's basically an individual rather than an ideological thing, hence why I say backing individual leaders.

> just that it's a better ideal than growing out your set of assumptions. After all, if you take people and keep dividing them into groups based on shared characteristics, take that to its terminal limit and you're simply treating people as unique individuals.

I'm confused as to how becoming aware of how my privilege, which has lead to wrong, sometimes harmful, assumptions, would lead me to expand my list of assumptions

Removing assumptions about others is exactly the goal of checking ones privilege. The reason for privilege being a focus point is that assumptions arising from social class differences causes more harm in the world than any other cognitive bias

When you write "dropping unfounded assumptions about other humans and their experiences", you're describing half of what "checking ones privilege" is about

The second part is to find out how and why those privileges are not extended to everyone by contributing to causes that promote and work towards a more fair and equal access to those privileges regardless of social class, race, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, etc

> I'm confused as to how becoming aware of how my privilege, which has lead to wrong, sometimes harmful, assumptions, would lead me to expand my list of assumptions

To be clear, I don't think privilege-checking causes more harm than not-privilege-checking. But I think it causes less good than the version of privilege-checking that is applied to everyone regardless of demographic privilege, which is to say, empathy.

By being choosy about who deserves empathy, rather than your ideal being focused on general human equality you propagate class divides but simply change which ones you value. I think it's a mixup between empathy and sympathy. You end up valuing the humanity of the disenfranchised more than the privileged, which is dangerous. You can think that people who are marginalised deserve better without either thinking those who are privileged deserve worse, or that they are active perpetrators of said marginalisation. I'm not saying you necessarily make this mistake yourself - I don't know your feelings on the matter - but I see people go down this line of reasoning all the time after acknowledging the concept of class privilege and I just think we can do better than that.

The entire point is that people are inherently unaware of many of assumptions or personal "theories of the world" they are applying to their evaluations of people, places, and things. Asking people to "drop their assumptions altogether" is like asking people "just don't behavior with any cognitive biases." You may as well punch the ocean for all the good it will do. People, like the OP, just will not be self-aware enough across contexts and moments, especially when thinking and reacting in real-time.

And I do not degree, nor do I really understand (which is likely the issue) the idea that trying to become aware of your own privileges that you take for granted others don't have is somehow tied to a moral judgment of others.

EDIT: But I do think in support of your point that all of us could do with more intentional mindfulness in how we see and react to the world. I don't want my comment to be a signal that efforts to have fewer pre-baked assumptions or biases are futile. But saying "drop your assumptions" is like telling someone upset to "just calm down."

I totally agree that fully breaking down your own assumptions is very, very hard, and basically an impossible ideal. But the great thing about impossible ideals is that they give you a goal to strive towards where the closer you get, the better you get.

The end goal is replaced with the process of gradually increasing mindful self-awareness of your biases and generalisations.

> And I do not degree, nor do I really understand (which is likely the issue) the idea that trying to become aware of your own privileges that you take for granted others don't have is somehow tied to a moral judgment of others.

My apologies, I'm still trying to formulate my thinking in this area. I think it's because considering people from the dichotomy of privilege/underprivilege leads to empathy with the less privileged but not the more privileged, which implies that people who are more privileged are less deserving of empathy. Saying that one person is more deserving of empathy than another is what I mean by a moral judgement. And while people who are less fortunate are in need of more support (inherently), failure to empathise with the privileged (key here being empathise, NOT sympathise) can lead to the bad things associated with dehumanisation - scapegoating, us vs them narratives, that sort of thing. I think this is a major failing of the progressive movement that is so very close to being a powerhouse for positive change. It's inches away from being both postmodern and system-oriented, so I'm liable to focus on its failings as a critic who wants it to improve.

"Privilege" is a terrible word to have become entrenched for such a useful concept, because many people instinctively get their backs up about being told they're privileged when they don't have to face a challenge that someone else faces.

And it's not just a question of generalization, but a question of whose stories get told through the media. Whose lifestyles make it into the "lifestyle" section.

> Privilege" is a terrible word to have become entrenched for such a useful concept, because many people instinctively get their backs up about being told they're privileged when they don't have to face a challenge that someone else faces.

I think people get their backs up because privilege checks as a concept are based largely on stereotypes/generalisations and confrontational behaviour, not empathic individual relating.

> And it's not just a question of generalization, but a question of whose stories get told through the media. Whose lifestyles make it into the "lifestyle" section

That's because the mainstream media is, by definition, normative - so it caters to what are considered cultural norms. The great thing about the Internet (and one of the good things about the postmodern breakdown of the metanarrative) is that while there are still dominant cultural norms, they're not standards to live up to anymore in the sense they might have been in the modern era. We're fragmenting into subcultures of subcultures where everybody can find a place where others share their tastes or beliefs. I find the idea that competing narratives have to share space in the mainstream media to be a strangely modernist-apologetic approach for a (progressive) movement that could do much better by embracing the breakdown of the normative standard by creating competing spaces.

> creating competing spaces.

Creating a competing space in which everyone agrees your norms are true is completely inadequate if that's not the space that policy gets made in. And within each country, there is effectively only one of those.

It doesn't matter if you create a "competing space" in which black lives have equal worth to white ones if the police are operating in a very different one defined by "killology". Nothing says "normative" like the barrel of a gun.

Besides, when people do create competing spaces they get denounced as "safe spaces" or "filter bubbles", even if everyone in the space knows full well what goes on outside the bubble.

Man, progressivism is so close to an ideology I could get behind, but it's like half a cup of postmodernism and a teaspoon of systems theory. I'm a glass deep on both.

As an ideology you have correctly identified an inequity in treatment by law enforcement based on race, but the lack of systems theory and postmodern understanding leads you (as an ideology) to ascribe this to human perpetrators who actually want this to happen. I'm sure there are racist police out there, but systemic racism is not caused by racist individuals; its caused by the behaviour of systems (the justice system, systems around poverty, long term effects of previous explicitly racist policy). Until progressivism fully discards modernism and embraces postmodernism and systems theory, I don't believe it will be able to solve any of the problems it has identified.

> Besides, when people do create competing spaces they get denounced as "safe spaces" or "filter bubbles", even if everyone in the space knows full well what goes on outside the bubble.

For what it's worth, people criticise safe spaces for the use of the term "safe" implying that opinions are violence (which is just a bad formulation of the fact that bad opinions can lead to violence), and filter bubbles lead to a lack of dialogue, where in my ideal people can live freely in their bubble but agree to join a dialogue with someone from another bubble with mutual consent so we don't all spiral into self referentiality (ie hyper reality) through bias reinforcement.

> As an ideology you have correctly identified an inequity in treatment by law enforcement based on race, but the lack of systems theory and postmodern understanding leads you (as an ideology) to ascribe this to human perpetrators who actually want this to happen. I'm sure there are racist police out there, but systemic racism is not caused by racist individuals; its caused by the behaviour of systems (the justice system, systems around poverty, long term effects of previous explicitly racist policy). Until progressivism fully discards modernism and embraces postmodernism and systems theory, I don't believe it will be able to solve any of the problems it has identified.

Weren't all of those systems designed, implemented and enforced by individuals? Racist policy makers, racist voters... from a systems perspective, systemic racism is the function of individual racism aggregated over time.

If anything, it seems modern and not post-modern to extract racist individuals from systemic racism as they are part of and the origination of the systems themselves. It's treating humans as something outside of the system, which is a view I'd align more with modernism.

> Weren't all of those systems designed, implemented and enforced by individuals? Racist policy makers, racist voters... from a systems perspective, systemic racism is the function of individual racism aggregated over time.

No, that's not always the case. Take for instance, the racially biased outcome that webcams more easily recognise white than black faces. That probably happened because the webcam was built and tested primarily by white people. Is it an encoding of racist intent? No, but the outcome was racially biased. The intervention, instead of firing all the developers for being racist, would be to simply include more people of different ethnic backgrounds in testing.

The same can be true of more complex systems. A classic not-related-to-inequality case of backfiring being the Cobra effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect).

Obviously some factors in modern day racial inequality are caused by racist individuals, but that does not make a system of racial inequality - it makes bad people causing hostile interactions on an individual scale.

There are clearly instances where policy is wilfully racist - slavery, redlining, and so on. But even once the system is gone, the repercussions continue until corrective systems are put in place.

> If anything, it seems modern and not post-modern to extract racist individuals from systemic racism as they are part of and the origination of the systems themselves. It's treating humans as something outside of the system, which is a view I'd align more with modernism.

A large piece of the modernist narrative is that we are masters over reality - if I'm a governor and I want to stop burglary, I implement a "no burglary, burglary will be punished" rule and sit back, satisfied that I've done all that I can. Modernism ignores complex causality, which is the field of study of systems theory.

A systems-aware governor would be asking "why does the burglary occur in the first place?" and seek the root cause of the problem in order to redress the outcome. Of course this tends to cross jurisdictions, but the idea that we can draw jurisdictional distinctions and have the justice person fix crime while the economy person makes jobs is also a failure to act systemically and no real systems change will occur in that setup.

> It's treating humans as something outside of the system, which is a view I'd align more with modernism.

To this specifically I will point out that humans exist inside overlapping systems, not apart from them. You are a citizen, a family member, a human being, your job, a member of your communities. We serve many functions inside many systems, but changing systems happens from within them, ie grassroots politics.

> There are clearly instances where policy is wilfully racist - slavery, redlining, and so on. But even once the system is gone, the repercussions continue until corrective systems are put in place.

I’d argue this has far more impact than poorly trained AI.

obviously. The point being, the effects last even when the racist policy makers aren't there any more and the policies have been removed.

You can't just oust all the racists and expect things to start getting better. It's a good start, but you're not going to solve systemic racism that way. You have to look at the system itself, not the people who exist within it.

The systems only exists because people continue to prop them up though, which often does require explicit racist intent. This is why I say that your point is more modern than post-modern. It’s placing humans external to the systems they create and maintain.

I agree that systems can have a racist effect without the participants realizing it. Progressivism is in large part creating awareness of these systems so people can actively realize their own role in perpetuating them. I don’t think we’re actually disagreeing on much other than degree of implicit vs explicit participation in systems.

"the mainstream media is, by definition, normative"

ELI5 please? or, you know, 10ish.

sure thing - so the idea is that the mainstream media exists to prop up the status quo. Not in the sense that it was invented for that reason, but the incentives at play force the media to essentially play to the confirmation bias of their audience in order to be competitive. Given that the media also pretends to present an objective truth (the idea of objective truth is also a very modernist ideal, but I don't want to go too deep into the postmodern rabbit hole here), the outcome is that the status quo is presented as the objective ideal. Thus if you believe that narrative, anything that isn't the status quo is treated comparably as inferior.

Thank you. :-) Although ..you seem to have used as many jargony or cliché phrases in this paragraph as the previous one, it doesn't seem at a significantly lower level. "exists to prop up the status quo" .. "the incentives at play" .. "play to the confirmation bias of their audience" .. "the status quo is presented as the objective ideal"

All these seem a bit murky, rather hand-wavy. Maybe it's not possible, or would be too lengthy, to ELI10. I kind of know what you mean, but I feel there are unexamined assumptions buried in those murky phrases. Who can tell if they're right or not? It's impossible to say exactly what they mean. e.g. How would you go about finding out if something actually "exists to prop up the status quo" or not? (Sorry if this comment is a waste of time.)

It's jargon-y because I'm using terminology you don't regularly use. I talk like this all the time, not to try to sound smart or academic (I really value clear communication, some ideas are just hard to communicate clearly) but because these are the terms I think in. I am trying to translate from my terms into what I assume are yours though (leaning on some cultural assumptions here), so please bear with me.

> (Sorry if this comment is a waste of time.)

I find these exercises inherently valuable because I need to learn to make these ideas understandable if I am to try to help popularise them, which I would like to.

> How would you go about finding out if something actually "exists to prop up the status quo" or not?

So I'm using a concept called teleology here. It's a way of thinking about the purpose of a system in terms of its outcome. The media "props up the status quo" in the same way that Darwinian evolution "adapts species to their environment". There's no conscious agency there; no one is at the helm of evolution, making it do so (with apologies to biblical literalists).

So how do you find out if the media props up the status quo? The same way you find out if Darwinian evolution adapts species to their environment: you observe it and see if your hypothesis holds up over time. If the media's reporting lines up with assumptions you would make from your deepest beliefs, then either both the media and you are perfect truth-uncoverers (which would be impressive given epistemology, ie the study of how we can know things, is still a hotly-debated topic 2000 years after its creation), or the media is blowing smoke up your ass.

When I have to explain something to people who don't know all the specialist terms, I like to state things in terms of concrete real-world examples.

After all, I can think of several concrete interpretations of "propping up the status quo" that are pretty different.

For example, perhaps you think the media's gossip coverage props up the status quo by making already-famous people more famous.

On the other hand, maybe you're arguing that media brands are all owned by Jeff Bezos types, and they prop up the status quo by denying airtime to eating the rich and overthrowing capitalism.

Or you could argue that Fox News tells its viewers what they want to hear and every other media outlet does the same; and what all readers want is the status quo reinforced.

Or perhaps you see propping up the status quo in the media's attempts to be 'unbiased' in political reporting, like when one party says X should be higher and they find someone from the other party to say X should be lower.

Perhaps you're thinking of newspapers' comment sections, where newspapers hire pundits with political opinions that their readers will find right on.

Maybe you see the latest twitter storm is the current status quo, and reporters who follow such things as helpless to do anything but chase the latest trends to get clicks.

Perhaps you see 'propping up the status quo' in the area of broad, unquestioned ideas like love of country, the flag, mom and apple pie.

Maybe you feel reporters are too credulous when listening to politicians, and they're propping up the status quo every time they take someone in government at their word, or fail to point out when someone contradicts themselves.

Perhaps you see the media as a smokescreen, distracting people with low-impact high-emotion issues like who can use which toilet to distract people from The Real Issues.

It's hard for people to know if they agree with you, as some of those interpretations are a lot more radical than others.

> When I have to explain something to people who don't know all the specialist terms, I like to state things in terms of concrete real-world examples.

Yeah I do tend to do that too, but I'm also wary that concrete examples in this case tend to make people switch off their minds and think with their ideologies. It's a hard balance to strike - I usually try to concretise the example with an analogy if the topic is messy. But the failure to communicate successfully here is mine, so I'll try to clarify.

What I mean is that the media props up the narrative of its audience. A concrete example is the idea of cultural norms. So to concretise the parent I was originally replying to:

> And it's not just a question of generalization, but a question of whose stories get told through the media. Whose lifestyles make it into the "lifestyle" section.

becomes:

> the media promotes WASPy values, lifestyle sections promote very "white" lifestyles

So my point was that yes, they do, because it sells, because most of their audience is white and share those cultural values - and that is because that is the biggest audience segment available. Hence large WASP-cultural population => media wants large audience => media targets WASP-cultural audience => everywhere you look, WASP cultural standards are promoted. The norm is reflected and promoted by the media. Role models are mostly white and represent WASP values.

But where in a modernist setting, these values are treated as ideals to live up to (and thus that if you have different norms, you'd better shape up), in a postmodern context the idea of "objectively best" cultural norms breaks down because people simply disperse into their own groups with their own media that reflect their own norms. Every groups creates an echo chamber where there is no competing narrative because they shut it out.

My criticism of progressivism is that it hasn't abandoned the idea of a central narrative, and instead of creating parallel media is mostly concerned with reforming the old media to represent every cultural bloc, ie tokenism. Also for confusing race with culture.

> prop up the status quo.

> play to the confirmation bias of their audience

I wonder how much overlap their is between the two. It seems to me that lately, if anything, the media pushes the narrative that the status quo is hopelessly corrupt in order to confirm to their audiences conformation bias.

People on all sides of the political spectrum are eating up stories about who's to blame, whether it's the government or the billionaires or probably, more typically, both with the assumption that whatever both are doing is at the expense of the common man.

I'm not trying to imply that those stories are accurate or inaccurate, just that they are the stories you see rising to the top of reddit or FB or other social platforms as proof of what the poster believes.

It gets interesting when the status quo becomes "everything is corrupt, including the status quo". See also: selling of expensive anticapitalist clothing, revolution as a brand, etc. Self referentiality and the emptying of meaning from symbols is an important symptom of postmodernism.

> People on all sides of the political spectrum are eating up stories about who's to blame, whether it's the government or the billionaires or probably, more typically, both with the assumption that whatever both are doing is at the expense of the common man.

I'm hoping that the dam breaks and systems theory and postmodernism drive a new cultural revolution, but I'm not holding my breath.

The truth is usually that bad things happen because of unintended consequences of systems behaviour, not because of conspiracy, but to look for an agency behind these things is what people tend to do.

I sometimes go through the thought exercise of making myself responsible of decisions with wide-ranging consequences.

I'm sitting here architecting a little project here and I had plenty of bad ideas and assumptions. In my space, that's fine, it's part of the design process.

If I was head of the CDC and trying to figure out how to handle this unprecedented global pandemic I'd also make plenty of mistakes and missteps. In this case, however, mistakes and missteps mean criticism from all sides and probably people dying.

It's a horrible responsibility and it's sure that rather than people are going to call it encroaching socialism or government incompetence or corruption.

yes being a decisionmaker in charger of a large organisation must be hard because you are given responsibility for its failings, and you aren't directly in control - you are in that you can make rules and whatnot, but rules are really just guidelines and fall apart when they make contact with reality.

But we all know this is true, but we still act the same way and then get mad when the leader fails to perform magic. It's 21st century scapegoating.

Sadly we do actually have tools for fixing big problems but we seem to prefer scapegoating to actually doing anything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com