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Comment by lordleft | Hacker News Reader

Before I attended and graduated from an ivy, I attended a CUNY school for a year. I remember speaking to a classmate in my calc I class who explained to me that he was taking a full course load on top a 20 hour a week job at a local department store. All while commuting from the depths of Queens.

Life is just much harder for lower income students. They have less bandwidth, across every dimension, than many of the students I studied with Columbia, some of whom stayed in apartments purchased by their parents and enjoyed very comfortable allowances. (There are actually many lower income students at Columbia, just to clarify, and despite some assistance from the school I’ve heard more than a few tales of students being unable to feed themselves).

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It's true, but also has corollaries across different groups than just low income. I remember working with a university who was trying to tailor programs to military veterans. One of the things that came as a shock to them is that many veterans used their GI Bill money to cover necessities like rent and utilities (usually in addition to working). Since many were non-traditional, moving home during an off-semester wasn't an option, so they had to be enrolled full-time, year around (including summer semesters). Since the GI Bill only covered 36 months of school and the course offerings were limited in many semesters, it caused many veterans to burn through their benefits before finishing a degree. The goal was to develop a curriculum that would allow veterans to finish a degree attending year-around, but I don't think anything ever came of it. I head (but don't know) that things are better under the current GI Bill iteration.

> also has corollaries across different groups than just low income

Nonsense! Nobody who wants to go to college joins the military unless they are low income. The US stopped drafting in 1973!

I am not a fan of categorical statements; doubly so if those can be easily disproved. There are benefits to joining military beyond 'perk' you described.

That said, I would like you to consider existence of two populations that refute your statement:

- surge of recruits immediately following 9/11 - military families

If you say nobody, you may want to consider qualifying that statement somewhat.

Firstly, I wasn't making that claim. Secondly, that claim is easily falsifiable. The majority of the American military actual comes from middle-class households.

"Most members of the military come from middle-class neighborhoods. The middle three quintiles for household income were overrepresented among enlisted recruits"[1]

When you look at the educational attainment of those recruits, it erodes your claim. Just talk to some of them and you'll see there's virtually as many reasons for joining as there are recruits. The idea that there is one path for the college-bound (e.g., attending straight out of high school) is probably a contributor to some of the problems we see in college.

[1] https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/demographics-us-military

That was pretty much my experience. Immigrant family and since I went to high school in Europe, I did not have much of a choice for university and ended up at CUNY. Worked evening in supermarkets for the first couple of years, then I was able to get an internship due to my grades, but basically installing computers, not development. There were not many internships available. Eventually went to a top engineering uni for grad school. Despite all of this, I am still considered privileged and white. When you have no circle, no network, no money, when no one in your family went to college, everything is more difficult.

> I am still considered privileged and white. When you have no circle, no network, no money, when no one in your family went to college, everything is more difficult.

Now imagine being a Black person with no circle, no network, no money, no one in your family having gone to college. Everything identical for your skin color. Statistically, the hypothetical black person is likely to have worse outcomes than the hypothetical equivalent white person. This is what white privilege is.

It is possible that you benefitted from white privilege, despite all of the hardships you faced.

You can pretend all day that white privilege doesn't exist, but that's just not what is observed.

<< You can pretend all day that white privilege doesn't exist, but that's just not what is observed.

Here is an alternate way of looking at this. An immigrant from Kenya comes to US with nothing and little to no support system and succeeds despite things stacked against him. A local black person that should have turf advantage can't compete with an immigrant, who is actually hungry to get ahead.

What do you want me to do? Cripple the immigrant so that the local black person can have a leg up?

Are you sure is about white privilege? Are you sure it is not about something more systemic?

We can pretend. We can even have a real conversation.

But white privilege is an actual social construct ( ie. made up bs ).

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-bus-drivers-white-customers-fr...

You can pretend all you want that white people dont receive preferential treatment, but neither research nor the historical record show evidence for that belief.

Allow me to rephrase, because this whole thing is getting silly.

Everyone is different. Everyone is treated differently. It is only because we have society that we managed to have some level of enforced playing field going.

There is no need to pretend. You can succeed while having deck stacked against you. Naturally, you can also play the victim card.

I honestly do not care. I am done with this conversation. Cuz you know. White privilege and all.

There's no need to get defensive!

>You can succeed while having deck stacked against you.

I agree! It's also less likely when the deck is stacked against you. If only there were a phrase that conveyed the idea that some people have a bunch of factors out of their control, i dunno say a deck of cards, were like shuffled or maybe stacked in a seemingly random way that broke against them. Of course, theres no cliche like rhat, because that kind of thing doesn't happen. Ever. Not once in science or history.

I think what you may find in many of these discussions is that people understand privilege may exist across many domains, but that it's an error to think those privileges can be distilled down to just a single domain. We can do better to acknowledge all these different domains, but it's not like there's a single "privilege index" to rank people.

> it's an error to think those privileges can be distilled down to just a single domain

Youre right, we are all hugely multifaceted individuals. It is hard and maybe even weird to try to isolate the notion of privilege down to a single domain, but often, this is what science is trying to do: control all but one variable and try to observe and measure an effect.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes, science does that to measure the effect of one variable. This isn’t to be confused with assuming the entire global effect is caused by one variable.

We can, for example, try to measure the effect of one carcinogen to cancer risk. We can’t say all cancer is attributable to one carcinogen.

To relate it to the topic at hand, you would have to measure to total variation of privilege attributable to race as compared to other factors like nationality, socioeconomic status, hell even height, weight, and physical attractiveness. In other words, it’s an incredibly complex model that shouldn’t be reduced to a single variable to estimate effectively.

we can say, ceteris paribus, p(successful outcome|white) > p(successful outcome|nonwhite). That's what I am claiming. It also is possible to say that p(successful outcome|nonwhite) > 0. In fact, both of these things can be true simultaneously.

Right, but aren't we after the joint probability if we're really talking about equity? I.e., we can't make strong claims about an outcome unless we factor in the joint probability across all dimensions.

So, to extend your example, we can't necessarily say p(successful outcome|white)*p(successful outcome|poor) > p(successful outcome|nonwhite)*p(successful outcome|wealthy) until we measure those other socioeconomic conditions. It gets more complicated when we consider they may not all be independent of one another.

And that's just one extra variable. As you say, most agree we are multifaceted individuals. Adding dimensions like p(successful outcome|disability) or p(successful outcome|female) further complicates this as do all the other variables of a social species. So we can't really make strong statements about outcomes of a system very well unless we measure across the entire system of variables. I think that's what people are poking at. We may be able to make conclusions about individual variables but that doesn't always translate to an accurate model of the system at large. It's interesting and perhaps useful, but certainly incomplete. It only works under a "ceteris paribus" assumption, which is to say: "it only works in contrived circumstances that don't reflect reality."

How is this a surprise to anyone? Wouldn’t you be more surprised if this weren’t the case? Imagine rich students not realizing they didn’t have to work 20 hrs/week.

These are all life choices. I’ve seen many un-optimal college decisions.

Going to college out of state. Taking out too many loans. Studying something with poor ROI. Not going to community college. Looking at what others have instead of concentrating on your own situation. Not realizing the game isn’t over with graduation, you still have to hustle hard core.

Funny how even poor immigrants tend to rise above these obstacles very frequently. It’s largely a mindset issue.

>These are all life choices.

I think the point is that some of these are not life choices for some people. A wealthy student may have the choice to work or not, while a low-income student may not.

If we value meritocracy, we also need to value opportunity. This means not creating a system that is arbitrarily that erodes that opportunity. The top whatever-percent of a society will always find a way to succeed, but I tend to think we want a society that doesn't make it very hard for a large swath to make a middle-class living. Even then, I'm not sure creating a society that forces the masses to "hustle hard core" to manage a middle-class life is a good tack.

I tend to agree with you on some aspects though. There's a mindset and life choices that impact the outcome. I generally say there is a path to middle-class for anyone if you 1) avoid substance abuse, 2) avoid having children before financially ready, and 3) avoid large amounts of debt on depreciating assets. Unfortunately, we've created a system that breaks rule #3 for a lot of people. Some would also argue #2 is getting harder, given the amount training required to become financially stable in a modern economy.

> These are all life choices. I’ve seen many un-optimal college decisions.

This is all hidden curriculum stuff (just like knowing that applying to 200 places is not what will get you an internship), that you know when you're upper middle class / know people in the field but not as someone who's not in the know.

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