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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

If you want to define "privilege" as pretty much anything which causes merit to be non-uniformly distributed, then the fact that Asian males are overrepresented due to privilege is tautologically true.

Similarly, water is wet.

All you've really said is "I assign the word 'privilege' to whatever the cause is for Asian males performing well in tech." That's not really relevant to this discussion.

[edit: Sago, I think you've gotten off track. hackeruser was using the term "privilege" differently than you, treating it somewhat analogously to wealth and power and orthogonal to merit. When you use the word to describe anything that might cause disparities in merit, you are describing something far different than him.]

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Nope, I've pointed out that the way you are using 'merit' overlaps with the way social scientists use the term 'privilege'.

Change the word 'privilege' for 'boondoggle', it doesn't matter, the point still stands. But as I pointed out, the use of the word 'privilege' is often such anathema that it prevents certain groups of people listening to the point, instead having them focus on the word.

To demonstrate that it's not a tautology, can you describe a world in which a group is overrepresented but not privileged?

If you can't construct such a scenario, then by definition it is a tautology.

Why are you so exorcised by the word privilege? My point was nothing to do with what you seem to have a problem with.

My point was that what is seen as 'merit' is a function of a whole bunch of other factors, which means it isn't somehow a racists discussion stopping thing to point out that Asian men have higher levels of 'merit' (when merit is defined in the way I understood it to be in the post I was responding to). My point in using 'privilege' is to say that the idea of 'merit' overlaps with 'privilege' in the ways I described, and that the people the OP might thing of as wanting to 'stop' the discussion, do, in fact, have this discussion a lot, though they'd use 'privilege' instead to mean those things, because that is the term of art.

You seem to have a problem with a word. Call it 'probabilistic causes of non-equal representation', then. Point out there are many such causes, and some of them are hardly things we could easily change (there are very few people with very low IQ in top tech jobs, so higher IQ is a 'privilege'). Your reaction to the word, rather than the point, seems rather ideological.

Tautology is not a synonym for synonym. And the equation you accuse me of making is a strawman, my point was to unpack merit, not to define privilege. I'm sorry if it was unclear.

I don't know why you think I'm "exorcised" by a word. I'm simply pointing out that you are using a completely different definition of it than myself and hackeruser, and as a result your posts are completely missing the point.

If privilege means "probabilistic causes of non-equal representation", then that's a very broad definition and every non-deterministic unequal representation is caused by privilege. But you were responding to a discussion where we were using "privilege" to mean something along the lines of "social biases unfairly favoring one group".

By definition, Asian males have 8x the "probabilistic causes of non-equal representation". It seems highly unlikely that they have 8x the "social biases unfairly favoring one group", which is what hackeruser and myself were actually discussing.

You also don't seem to be using this definition consistently. For example, if I take this comment of yours and substitute this definition in, it makes no sense:

"When you find achievement highly correlated with a cultural group, however, it is pretty likely to be a function of probabilistic causes of non-equal representation. The alternative hypothesis is that, for example, Jews are just innately better at science."

I'm beginning to think you are attempting a Motte and Bailey: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric...

Nice link on the "Motte and Bailey" article. I might link to this in my blog since I independently came up with the same argument.

In this case, I think one version of "privilege" is the idea that our society involves unipolar power relations where one group/ideology is privileged and enjoys special advantages. Individual people might in some ways align with this group/ideologies, and in other ways not (this is called "intersectionality"). But when they do align with this group/ideology they receive some of its benefits.

Sago's version is that privilege is just another word for any group having any advantage for any reason. I.e. "privilege" stripped of its underlying assumptions about societies power structure. It's unfortunate that Sago feel so strongly that they represent sociological research, when I think that almost all sociologists use the other definition.

Sago says that Asians might be privileged simply because their culture [0]. The orthodox view would be that Asians only receive White privilege, by their willingness to accept both the White lifestyle, working under a capitalist system, and adopt White views on Black/White race relations. To the extend that Asians also study harder, that would be an accident of history, and probably something an orthodox sociologist would try to downplay (e.g. by looking at Nth generation Asians).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9126189

Didn't I specifically list some of the things I was talking about, explicitly?

Privilege is used in various senses: both the narrow power one group has over another, propagated by their ability to pass it to others in the group and more generally (in the later camp I gave the example somewhere on here of privileges of high IQ). I was trying to be clear in my OP by listing what I meant, so I really don't see why the word is what you're hanging on. OR why you think my purpose was to define it. As I said, call it boondoggle, I was explicit what I meant by it.

Why would the factors have to be equal for the point to stand? If something isn't 100% the cause, then it isn't significant? If it turns out that 4x the effect is due to cultural privilege, of the kinds I listed, and 4x is due to demographic, bias, so what?

You did not specifically list the things you were talking about - you ended the list with "and many other factors". That's not explicit at all. Then you said Call it 'probabilistic causes of non-equal representation', at which point I thought you were finally being clear. My mistake.

If it turns out that 4x the effect is due to cultural privilege, of the kinds I listed, and 4x is due to demographic, bias, so what?

Scroll up - as I said, you completely lost the context of the conversation.

Hackuser was asking "if a system is truly meritocratic then why would 38% of a population[1] produce 90%[2] of the winners?" The implicit assumption here is that "money, power, privilege" (as defined by hackuser) and merit are distinct, otherwise the question makes little sense.

Now if only 4x the effect is due to cultural privilege, then the answer to his question is "yes" - a perfectly meritocratic system can have disproportionate representation of Asian males.

Right, I think I understand why we're shouting loudly over each other's shoulders.

If you scroll back, you'll see I was responding to a particular point that I quoted: the idea that, pointing out the over representation of Asian men would be considered racist and lead to (I assume) proponents of equality and social justice (or the "Pretty People" as you wrote) stopping intellectual discussion.

My goal was to provide evidence for my disagreement with that point. So I wanted to show that, embedded in this idea of 'merit' are a whole bunch of factors that absolutely are talked about by those Pretty People (or, perhaps not them, but the intellectuals from whom their derive their outlook), albeit in different terms. And, modulo that change in terminology, not only do they not stop intellectual discussion, they are absolutely central to that discussion.

So, given that was the point I responded to, and what I was trying to say (and, again, sorry if I was unclear). Can you see why being badgered about whether my definition of 'privilege' is overly broad seemed obtuse? Can you see why I felt that the definition of 'privilege', whether tautological, specific or not, was irrelevant?

I suspect, in contrast, you tried to read my comment arguing against the entire point you were making, and therefore, trying to support hackeruser's argument in some sense. And therefore you missed what I was attempting to get at. Fair enough. Again, I could have been clearer. And I should have thought more carefully about why you seemed to be missing my point. It seemed I'd hit some nerve just using the word 'privilege'.

Reply to your edit, I read hackeruser as using the term informally, to mean 'a good thing someone possesses', I was using it in the way it is normally used in discussions of equality, racism, sexism, and so on.

I didn't actually note hackeruser's use of the term, so I wasn't responding to that. My point, I think, stands alone. It doesn't become a tautology, it has a specific meaning, and one important point is that when folks say 'merit' they are often bundling a bunch of stuff in there which is problematic and discriminatory.

Merit sounds like a good thing. (Who wouldn't want to be Pro-Life, right?) But there are structural oppressions within it that deserve to be challenged.

hang on, but where are you drawing the lines between "merit due to innate skill/aptitude" and "merit due to favourable environmental factors"?

Because similarly if you define merit as "anything that causes one person to do better in the tech industry than another" then the tech industry is tautologically a meritocracy - water is wet.

Until and unless we can unpack merit and privilege in the manner that Sago is attempting then we will continue to misunderstand our problem and continue to let the best programmers become nurses because of that misunderstanding.

I'm defining "merit" as the ability to get the job done and make the company money. For example, I'm trying to hire a data scientist/data oriented generalist. Knowledge of statistics and aptitude for learning contributes to merit, as does the ability to write scalable and deployable code.

Sex appeal does not contribute to merit, nor does being a nerdy-but-attractive hipster.

Does that clarify?

Note that Sago's definition, "probabilistic causes of non-equal representation", quite deliberately doesn't unpack anything. All it does is apply the label "privilege" to the cause, whether that cause is explicit deliberate racism (to take one extreme) or completely biological factors with entirely unbiased decisions (to take another).

You do like ignoring that I actually gave a list, don't you:

money, aspiration, parental ambition, education, culturation, in-group bias, and many other factors

(note, many was not intended to be exclusive)

that you continue to think my point was to apply the label "privilege" seems obtuse, bordering on the willfully ignorant, since I've explicitly said that was not the point at all, and that the label is irrelevant.

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