Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

Props for writing this. Often times I want to tell my (different but similar) story, but never do. I don't know why. It probably has to do with a number of the points you make in the article, so you are a couple steps ahead of me.

I believe this man is confusing lots of things.

I had lived in China for more than 5 years, Boston, Japan or Korea for more than 9 months each.

In my opinion, minimizing conflict has nothing to do with being poor, and a lot with being Chinese educated.

On the contrary, I volunteer helping poor kids like Spanish gypsies or Subsaharan African and they(and their parents) are ultra confident, and spontaneous. Being open is the default thing for them.

I managed Chinese people in China and there was a world of difference between natives and those Chinese educated overseas.

When living on the US, I was shocked to see parents cheering their kids for the most stupid thing, when in Europe as a kid you are forced to do 4x more effort without rewards at all(like learning multiple languages). It is just what it is expected from you.

In Asia, this pressure over kids is even higher than in Europe.

Family is very important for Chinese almost a religion. This has advantages and disadvantages. For innovation, it is a big disadvantage. Innovation means taking risks, being close to your family means having to convince lots of people those risk are worth it. Most people won't understand you and it is very hard.

In the US, everybody is on their own, basically, nobody gives a dam, which is great for changing the world.

I completely agree with this frustration - the bulk of my review of the responses revealed that people reacted to what they felt like PG said (or what others felt like he said), not what he actually said.

My other frustration was that some of what PG actually did saw was indeed flawed, and there's only one response [1] that I could find that spoke to it.

Regardless, writing about political domains riles the most base, tribal instincts in all of us. I expect him to be more careful about how he frames his arguments so that they're not overcome by readers' emotion, but can actually have a positive impact.

[1] https://medium.com/@sethbannon/how-paul-graham-gets-it-wrong...

I found myself nodding along the whole article.

First, let me say that I am happy where I ended up. I'm successful, enjoy my work, and when I compare my personal income with our family income when I was growing up, it is an absurd multiple.

We were a very poor family in a poor part of the South. I went to a top-10 small private university on a full ride, felt completely alienated and never quite figured out how to function in that environment. I dropped out and moved to San Francisco at what turned out to be a very good time (early 90's), and once Netscape dropped, discovered nobody else knew what they were doing with this web thing either, and more or less faked it until I made it.

At the same time, I have had and do have ideas that others have executed on, that I know I could have made a go at, if only…

The if only list is long, and most of it comes back to self-imposed limitations that I can trace back to how I grew up. Frequently it relates to economic security, but there are other habits of thought that stop me from even getting to worrying about that.

One big one is that I never learned to think about entrepreneurship. A big lesson hammered into me growing up was the importance of "finding a good job", not figuring out how to make my own.

I did start a company in my mid-30s, and we did OK, until we didn't. And that failure (I think) had nothing to do with the habits of thought of a poor kid. But failing in a similar way in my 20s would have left me in a position to learn from that and try again, something I'm unlikely to make a go at 10 years later. I do little things for side income, but those are hobbies.

So it ends up being this thing that doesn't really bother me at this point, but does leave me to wonder what would have happened if I had picked parents from a very different walk of life.

And I am quietly amused when people tell me how they built everything themselves "after a seed from Dad", or "with a great connection I made through a family friend" or similar. Those are impossible blockers for a lot of people, even if they get over some of the habits of mind better than I did.

Does it being said in anger make it any less applicable?