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Comment by unapproved4lyfe | Hacker News Reader

You stated it in terms of social privilege ("jumped right from their undergraduate career to making a six-figure salary in a city...") but it's just as well intellectual privilege. I have a blue collar background and high school criminal career that looks like any poor person buying $20 scratchers, but after four years working in software I was a 22 year-old making six figures also. It makes it harder to feel sympathy for those struggling: Indeed, repeatedly making wrong decisions has poor outcomes. At 18 it was pretty obvious that in the most basic sense, code = money.

It's not the poverty that makes it hard to relate, it's that they seem to almost live by instinct and emotion. I wish them well but don't know what's wrong in their heads or have the slightest idea of how to durably improve their lot, apart from setting an example of worldly rationality (aye, there's the rub).

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"It makes it harder to feel sympathy for those struggling: Indeed, repeatedly making wrong decisions has poor outcomes. At 18 it was pretty obvious that in the most basic sense, code = money."

You have a LOT of work to do on emotional intelligence and having empathy for others bud. I am sure you worked really hard to get where you are and that you are also an intelligent person, but you obviously have some massive blindspots about how cruel society is and about how your own struggle through life has stunted your capacity to feel empathy for others.

Even if you were right and other people were struggling because they kept making wrong decisions when they simply could have made the right decisions, do you want to live in a society that treats these people with an intense degree of cruelty? What is the point of you being rewarded for making all the right choices when all around you people who aren't as smart or hard working as you are being utterly ground to pieces by the society you live in? Sure if you develop a sense of distance from the suffering of those people I suppose you can sleep good at night but that is doing a damage to your soul (in a vague meaning here, not implying religion necessarily) by numbing your capacity to connect with the rest of humanity.

Exactly.

As someone who has been privileged to be naturally inclined towards the more lucrative parts of STEM, I still don’t want to see a society which rewards people like me in a vastly outsized way, while being indifferent or punitive to others whose interests or abilities or life experiences landed them outside a handful of in-demand professions. It’s very easy to attribute success to the choices we make, but so much of it is out of our control (where we live, what our society values, what advantages and disadvantages we inherit).

That's why I self-deprecatingly concluded with "(aye, there's the rub)". My thinking is irredeemably worldly if not outright myopic. Then there's the futility of "setting an example" -- when I was young and poor, would I listen to or learn from someone like my older self? Doubtful. The exaggerated bravado of a Jay-Z was more meaningful, that is, fuel for meditations.

So, away from rationality and towards Romanticism? In any case, I contend that our smug, enlightened "emotionally intelligent" society wears no clothes as far as treatment of the poor is concerned. It looks a lot more emotional than intelligent.

As bad as America treats their poor it's far better than any other country truly contemporary to the US. Which is a high bar at any rate. The European social safety nets exist only due to the massive support given by the US over the last 100 years. Same for SK and Japan.

I have no sympathy for those who decided to spend high school smoking weed and screwing around and for those college students deciding to get a useless degree only to end up at Starbucks as a barista.

I know people who were _actually_ poor and had to drop out of high school to support their family. Those same people worked their ass off to go to community college and transfer to a better school and ended up successful. The idea that we should tax successful people like that to prop up leeches is just fundamentally wrong to me.

I know people who are poor and therefore were too poor to have their learning disabilities addressed early on with unsupportive families inflicting childhood trauma which results in them smoking weed as a teenager because there are no structures to support them towards health, but fuck them right? It’s so easy to judge people making seemingly bad decisions. Teenagers are still children whose behaviors are caused by their environments.

At what point do you draw the line between individual responsibility and blaming the system? When do a person's failures become their fault?

Frankly I believe people always make reasonable decisions once you account for their circumstances(this includes the circumstance of being too mentally ill or poorly socialized to make better decisions). If you want people to make better decisions then you must incentivize appropriately.

Bitterness and finger pointing are easy cognitive shortcuts using the just world fallacy. I’ve decided not to use easy logical fallacies to simplify the behavior model of other human beings.

Given that we don’t consider minors to be “individuals” for legal purposes until they become adults, waiting until they’re adults to assign responsibility seems like a reasonable first blush for a standard.

(More flippantly: we all know kids are stupid, even the smart ones. We also all understand, intuitively, that strong support systems are some of the best predictors for social and economic success in children. It doesn’t make any sense to sentence future adults to lives of indigence and poverty because someone else hasn’t given them the support they require.)

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