Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley | Hacker News Reader

Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

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45 pointsbdr13 comments

Reminds me of the Stanford marshmallow experiment. Researchers offered children one marshmallow, but if they didn't eat it, they promised a second marshmallow later. The children who had the "willpower" to wait for the second marshmallow did better in life on many measures.

An attempt to replicate this study found that childhood economic background was the best predictor of both willingness to wait for the second marshmallow and later life success. It wasn't "willpower" per se - it was that some of those children had grown up believing, from experience, that a second marshmallow is never promised and you're better off eating the first marshmallow now.

It’s much easier to take risks when you have a safety-net in case of failure. People who aren’t born into financial privilege more often have nothing or nobody to fall back on if there’s a problem. Just knowing that can impact whether or not you really chase your dream or play it safe.

This guys dad crossed the Pacific Ocean, immigrating to the US without speaking english - how is that not a huge fucking risk

Mom was so proud of her son - he was successful just by walking out the door every day to pursue his dream

Is the measure of success to build a unicorn ? Going to Mars ? A billion dollar exit ? Or raising a kid that can thrive in this world ?

Everyone is measured differently

Ultimately, the success is not ending up homeless, without healthcare and food. Plain old survival. (And for populations, replacement level demographics or better.)

Families, especially big ones, both temporarily stack and mitigate this risk.

How many immigrants ended up in perpetual precariousness? Or worse?

I was speaking generally, not about one particular exceptional person. For every amazing story like that one there are 10 more who had such dreams, made one mistake and never made it.

I get that, and I know this is HN, but you don’t need a full ride at Stanford + be a founder to be a successful person

You also need to be able to pay your rent, food and health insurance while you change direction. Any improvement plan takes time, and carries the risk of failure.

It's easy to get - and to remain - stuck. You don't/can't viscerally understand that if you've never been in that position.

It's easy to tell someone to just do x, y and z. It's not easy to do x, y and z when there is a substantial risk of catastrophic failure.

The author does sort of realize they beat the odds, but does not quite realize by how much, and how little of it is actually "mindset". Just getting into Stanford and not flaking out means big potential network of rich contacts, and if you actually did anything, skill backed by credentials. This alone is less than 1% shot. How many we have not heard about, had these or better qualities and failed to get anywhere?

Anywhere lesser, the story would be one of no startup service industry dead end job, or at best a corporate one getting nowhere. One that is written too rarely.

This is the real inequality: the lack of knowledge, the mindset, and the lack of a backstop.

Agreed, and another takeaway I saw was the importance of the student loans in providing a baseline from which he could do other things and find a passion. Essentially, in my mind, an argument for UBI.

Or perhaps for a cheaper variant called socialized systems, which is essentially spreading some of that risk, converting it into mild inefficiencies.

and then somebody tells you "white privilege"

congratz for skewing the odds, but I dont understand "in Silicon Valley" because it works like that almost everywhere

He’s referring to startups. The words are practically interchangeable.

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