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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

There is an essay like that - https://medium.com/the-mission/your-life-is-tetris-stop-play...

And here's my rebuttal to it - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2016/01/for-some-people-life-is-har...

I'd suggest that life is neither Chess nor Tetris, it's Magic the Gathering:

- You have to learn to relentlessly blame yourself for the mistakes you make, but also to accept that you can't change everything, and sometimes you WILL lose to random luck, no matter what you do.

- Actually understanding probability goes a long way.

- Regrettably, a large chunk of the game depends on your initial hand.

Which is probably why my favourite card game is now Dominion - everybody has the exact same starting position and access to resources. Too bad it doesn't extrapolate to the life analogy.

... and sometimes your opponent can just afford a better deck than you.

This is perhaps why Magic the Gathering is a better metaphore for life than Poker, which also has the elements above, but not this one.

Although with poker you have the house that always wins...

- Wizzards of the coast will take all your lunch money.

No, wait.

But actually true.

>In life, your only opponent is yourself.

This argument reminds me of people who try to deny things like white privilege by describing how hard they had to work to get where they are now. Yeah, well, for a lot of people working hard (or not) isn't the only important factor that's determining their odds of success. That's the privilege...

>That's the privilege...

Only experienced by white people of course which also by your implication are incapable of experiencing

>Yeah, well, for a lot of people working hard (or not) isn't the only important factor that's determining their odds of success

It's great you lead a privileged enough life you've never had to interact with poor struggling white people before.

Thanks for proving my point. I assume at this point that people who still don't understand the concept of privilege are being deliberately obtuse, so I'm not going to bother with you. The information is out there. You can choose to make an effort to understand or not.

I think the point is that whole collectively one group may be more privileged, people are individuals and not a collective.

For example a black child born into extreme or moderate wealth is undoubtedly more privileged than a white child that is orphaned at a young age.

There is always statistical outliers in any large data set, but they don't affect the median value significantly.

This is in no way a rebuttal to what they said. The point is that privilege very well may exist and be a valid concept surrounding an aggregate, but be a invalid tool for comparing individuals.

Who's using it to compare individuals? The entire discussion revolves around populations and institutions.

Conditionality is applied in the concept: Privilege is essentially the difference in outcomes ascribed to two otherwise identical people due to a particular disadvantage that members of one group suffer but members of the other group don't.

This is also known as an ecological fallacy [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy

I hate the framing of 'privilege', because it portrays these things as some special. unfair advantage, rather than other groups having a unfair disadvantage. You could say that poor people are 'housing privileged' as homeless people have it even worse, but I think it's absolutely clear what an awful thing that would be to say.

Being rich, famous or well-connected, that is 'real' privilege and should rightfully be called out. Not having to fear encounters with the police, not being discriminated in regards to employment or not being harassed on the streets are fundamental rights. Even if you don't care about being sensitive, telling people that they are privileged for having these is just so obviously counterproductive.

It sure sounds like you're the one being overly sensitive given that you're describing two equivalent states of affair and finding one of them offensive because you don't the words attached to it.

Well of course, there's a difference in connotation of blame between "privileged" and "disadvantaged", even if they both refer to the same relative difference. It's as if the terminology of "privileged" is purposefully trying to offend.

It is. The -point- of the term is to reverse the usual dynamic between the privileged and the disadvantaged. What that dynamic is depends on whether you see the categories in this comparison as only two (the haves and the have-nots) or three (including a "normal" category which lies somewhere between the two), or perhaps as a spectrum (where privileged and disadvantaged arguably lie at the extremes of the bell curve).

I'm saying I consider it insensitive to not care what effect your choice of words has on how people perceive things. If you think that makes me 'overly sensitive', then I'd recommend reflecting a bit on who is hurt by bad messaging. And if you don't believe me that it's bad messaging, just look up the studies on the effects of framing racial inequality as privilege.

Ah those humans with their sunny day privileges. Don't you think about all those who live in the UK?

I think the term “privilege” was coined on purpose to flip the viewpoint and make us think about life in others’ shoes. “What you consider normal life is something they can only dream of”

I don’t think it’s meant to be a serious description of the situation

It is a really bad framing except when used on the original context, that is interacting with the kind of people that blame poverty on the poor life choices.

People using it to refer people that aren't acting like assholes should indeed drop that wording. It does nothing but antagonize people.

In a global perspective, it’s defined privilege if you are a white male in Europe or North America. You already have more opportunities than 99% of the world population.

But I wouldn’t use the words unfair advantage. Most of us didn’t cheat or do anything immoral to be born in this position, and trying to make our lives worse won’t help anyone else. The point isn’t to try to make us feel bad (not how I interpret it at least), but that we try to remember that we are very lucky people being born into this position, and that the overwhelming majority were less lucky than we are.

Perhaps the only thing that life is, is life, and tetris is a slightly less-wrong metaphor than chess?

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