Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

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I guess if I had to summarize my point it would be that those of us who are for historical reasons unfairly advantaged should work especially hard at listening to people who aren't. Especially so when we want to discuss topics relating to that historical advantage.

E.g., all people have opinions on race. But as a white person I try to recognize that my opinions have been shaped by a system that unfairly favors me, and part of the way it does that by limiting the amount I hear about the experience of non-white people with respect to race. (By the way, I don't think this involves much conscious malice; it's just one of the bugs you get when primates have to build a civilization from scratch.) So to the extent that I want to have informed opinions on race, I have a lot of work to do.

I'd add that even accounting for the learning value of listening, I think there's another value to it. Black people are already generally aware of what white people think about racial issues; they have to be. So I try to separate when I want to be heard from when I think I have something to say that is actually helpful to the people I'm talking with. In the former case, I try to favor silence. There are other ways I can feel heard, and helping other people feel fully heard is a great way to create some willingness for them to listen when I actually do have something possibly helpful to say.

>those of us who are for historical reasons unfairly advantaged should work especially hard at listening to people who aren't

I see. Thanks for the explanation.

If you don't mind I have a follow-up question -- actually two related ones. The approach you are suggesting is essentially about ethics and epistemology at an individual level. What I wonder is, how, if at all, should it extrapolate to government action? I.e., to what degree should government decisions about aiding people who are at a disadvantage be informed by listening to them versus dispassionate observation and statistics?

I ask because "listening" is inherently hard to "scale" to a national level in a large nation. In a Western liberal democracy the usual answer on how to do this seems to be "voting." In practice besides voting the supposed public voice of any disadvantaged group is also shaped by self-appointed spokesmen for the disadvantaged, typically journalists and academics. Personally, I have little faith in either doing more good than harm.

My second question is, how should it be determined who is considered advantaged and who is considered disadvantaged?

Gladly.

I think that both people and governments should work from both stories and statistics. Statistics help us understand one way. As narrative creatures, stories help us differently. In particular, I think empathy is much easier to find with stories than raw data, and empathy is vital for functioning societies.

As to noticing privilege, I think we have good ways to measure some sorts of privilege. E.g.:

http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

http://www.nber.org/papers/w5903

http://www.pnas.org/content/109/41/16474

But I think it's incumbent on all of us to understand what power we have and use it wisely. For me, both stats and stories have been useful. The stats are widely available, but here are some collections of stories:

http://everydaysexism.com/

http://projectunbreakable.tumblr.com/

And I also really benefited from Project Implicit, which helped me understand how my own subconscious biases were contributing to various societal problems:

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

For me, privilege checklists have been helpful in seeing how I got lucky, what advantages I happen to have:

http://danilocampos.com/2013/02/unpacking-my-knapsack-the-pr...

http://amptoons.com/blog/files/mcintosh.html

I also really benefited from seeing these issues as the tail end of long historical imbalance. E.g.:

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-He-That-Controlling/dp/042519...

I definitely agree with your point that spokespeople and media gatekeepers are often part of the problem. That's what makes me hopeful about things like Twitter. There I can make a decision to seek out individual voices and add them to the mix of what I see every day.

Is that helpful?

Quite so. Although I was already familiar with some of the material you link to I think I understand your position better now.

One thing that is still unclear to me is how the government should work from stories. If you mean a write-your-congressperson kind of approach I am very sympathetic to that. However, nearly all other means of aggregating stories I think are prone to distortion by the middleman is involved (not necessarily deliberate).

Thanks.

I'm not sure I understand your question about government. To my mind, a government isn't really a coherent actor. The individuals within it should have a good understanding of the problems they're working on, and for me that should include a personal, empathetic understanding of the individuals affected. Which I think is mostly what happens. I think a lot of our problems happen where government actors (officials and staff alike) are not representative with respect to the problem. E.g., Ferguson was such a mess because there was a strong race/class differential between the government and the governed. That not only created problems, but kept them from getting solved and prevented an effective response when things boiled over.

So if I understand the question correctly, I think that everybody should collect stories and that the aggregation should mainly be internal and via trust relationships. E.g., a congressperson can't meet everybody, and they'll have a particular set of biases depending on how they grew up. But their can cultivate a diverse selection of staff and advisors, and they can encourage those people to seek out broad contact with society.

That said, I think statistics-driven checks on things can help point out holes in that aggregation of stories. I recently heard about a city that was working on their long-term housing plan. Their main means for citizen contact was through public meetings about the plan. But a little looking at stats showed that the people at the public meetings were all homeowners, while the city was half renters. I'm sure city officials were disproportionately homeowners as well, and also more likely to know homeowners.

I'm also excited to see to what extent the Internet lets us avoid the various filtering biases. Even today a St. Louis politician could have manually used Twitter to get a semi-random sampling of stories as a check on what they were learning officially. I have a lot of hope for how technology shifts can help us transform citizen engagement in government.

This does answer my question in a very satisfactory way.

Since you mention Ferguson, the theory I currently hold is that tensions between the police and the policed are, in practice, inevitable if the two differ in race, ethnicity, language or religion. Through their sheer visibility these differences have more weight than any difference that otherwise exists between the government and those it governs. The only plausible way to resolve this tension that I see is by ensuring the police force of a community is recruited from that community and represents its ethnic and cultural makeup.

I definitely agree. I think the great apes, us included, are naturally tribal. As the various sportsball empires show, we just like picking sides. If we want society to work well, we have to consciously work against that tendency. And I share your view that self-policing works way better than other-policing.

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