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Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

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Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#151

Post by enraged_camel »

Htsthbjig wrote: post #83

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…

One of my closest friends is Chinese, and what you are saying confirms my observations and what he has anecdotally told me.

After finishing college here in the US, he got a very lucrative job at a consulting firm and was doing very well. Yet his parents (especially mother) kept pressuring him to go back to Hong Kong because, according to him, that's the rightful place of a family's only son. Keep in mind that such a move would mean upending his life and also taking a big pay cut (he compared salaries).

He also told me that Chonese schools reward conformity above all else and strongly discourage (sometimes with physical violence) sticking out or taking initiative.

That's not to say the author's observations and opinions are wrong. In fact what he shared is very valuable - people who come from middle class or above families tend to take their privilege for granted, and in fact can't even imagine what it is like to be poor. I myself only learned it by volunteering at homeless shelters and soup kitchens. It's very heartbreaking that the world's richest and most powerful country has so many struggling people, but it can also be instructive in terms of what one can do to help fix it. So I commend the author for writing this piece.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#152

Post by nish1500 »

I grew up other side of the world, amazing by what I heard in the news - that there existed a world beyond mine where smart people with smart ideas built great companies overnight. I am smart. I have merit. I dropped out at 19, taught my self how to code, and built a 6-figure business with my projects online. I want to learn more.

I got turned down by 15+ companies and startups in the past few weeks because they couldn't sponsor my work visa. This is Canada.

The USA? Being a dropout makes me ineligible for any US work visa.

So much for merit.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#153

Post by josephjrobison »

rdlecler1 wrote: post #35

I had a similar experience starting life with opportunity debt. Single parent family whose mother had no high school education. Have ADD and dyslexia, moved around a lot with a good part my life in subsidized housing, and never graduated from high school. No one teaches you the basics, so that when you do start coming into your own and taking control of your own life you are so incredibly behind your peers socially,…

The main story, this comment, and many other user comments are really interesting and human. Would love to see someone compile a series of them, HONY style. These stories don't get talked about enough in the startup world.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#155

Post by bbcbasic »

jtolmar wrote: post #48
ryanwitt112 wrote: post #2

interesting take. I'd like to hear what PG and others think. Coming from a middle class background, I can relate a bit and see-observationally-the other components to what Ricky's calling "mindset inequality". It's almost like "new money" vs folks that have bigger dollars to spend growing up. I know a lot of friends that have deeply entrenched psychological elements they need to overcome before reaching that "next le…

My parents started out very poor and climbed into the middle class by the time I got to high school. The extended family is still poor, so I'm still exposed to how they think about money. I think the mindsets can break down into three levels, but not cleanly. Poor: You may have to make decisions about which bills to pay or which needs to meet, and being able to pay all your bills and eat is considered a moral virtue.…

I am planning a transition from middle class to capital class, which will take 10-20 years and require investing in real estate.

Real estate is a great investment (at least in Australia) because it allows you to get access to larger amounts of credit to purchase assets which will generally go up in value over time because of the policies of central banks to target inflation. In addition buying in the right location will insure that on top of location future scarcity will add more value to the investments.

It is also super transparent compared to stocks, where you don't really know what is going on inside a company, land is land and all the data you need to assess the investment is available. And you can control the asset (think renovations, rebuilds, subdivisions etc.) so there is more you can do compared to the stock (buy, and perhaps short the similar stocks)

The downside to real estate is you have to be a little bit patient. Did I mention 20 years? :-)

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#156

Post by mempko »

Excellent post. But I feel that we need to go beyond talking about what we can personally do to improve our situation. Either the vast majority of people are ill-adapted for success, or something else is going on. I think we should go beyond the classic argument "If we just all recycle, the world will..." Or "If we all buy electric cars, global warm....".

This post had some of that individualistic attitude to a much broader and obviously systemic problem.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#157

Post by Terr_ »

67726e wrote: post #15
Frondo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, one thing you can do is retrain yourself to be un-allergic to words like "privilege", and see their use as the consequence of a lot of people's suffering systemic unfairness and injustice. When I see that word, "privilege," especially tied to attacks on white/male/hetero/whatever, my response isn't "oh jeez, not that again".....it's "yeah, that is a problem, and I really wish the other white male hetero…

Or you could stop using the fact that someone is white, male, or straight as some kind of attack, insult, or excuse. There are certainly issues in society, real problems but I'm tired of hearing it. Somehow all of my hardships in life are reduced to nothing, because I'm "privileged".

Came across this a little while ago:

> “Even if you do not feel yourself to be guilty of {sin,racism,sexism, homophobia,oppression…}, you are guilty because you have a privileged position in the {sinful,racist,sexist,homophobic,oppressive,…} system.”

> For [that argument] to work, the subject must be prevented from noticing that the demand to self-condemn is not based on the subject’s own actions or choices or feelings, but rather on an in-group identification ascribed by the operator of the kafkatrap. [...]

> The subject must be prevented from asserting his or her individuality and individual agency; better, the subject must be convinced that asserting individuality is yet another demonstration of denial and guilt. Need it be pointed out how ironic this is, given that kafkatrappers (other than old-fashioned religious authoritarians) generally claim to be against group stereotyping?

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2122

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#158

Post by fenomas »

enraged_camel wrote: post #151
Htsthbjig wrote: post #83

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…

One of my closest friends is Chinese, and what you are saying confirms my observations and what he has anecdotally told me. After finishing college here in the US, he got a very lucrative job at a consulting firm and was doing very well. Yet his parents (especially mother) kept pressuring him to go back to Hong Kong because, according to him, that's the rightful place of a family's only son. Keep in mind that such a…

Re: conformity, the cliche here in Japan is to point out that where the west says "the squeaky wheel gets the grease", Japanese say "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down".

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#159

Post by timewarrior »

josephjrobison wrote: post #153
rdlecler1 wrote: post #35

I had a similar experience starting life with opportunity debt. Single parent family whose mother had no high school education. Have ADD and dyslexia, moved around a lot with a good part my life in subsidized housing, and never graduated from high school. No one teaches you the basics, so that when you do start coming into your own and taking control of your own life you are so incredibly behind your peers socially,…

The main story, this comment, and many other user comments are really interesting and human. Would love to see someone compile a series of them, HONY style. These stories don't get talked about enough in the startup world.

Agreed. Wrote my story below. Not sure how ranking works on hacker news, it towards the bottom. Wish someone compiles these.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#160

Post by vasilipupkin »

Htsthbjig wrote: post #83

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…

Minimizing conflict is just one minor tangential point in his essay. The main thing, which I think you might have missed, is the insane pressure of being poor and having no fallback and constantly worrying about money. I do think that since he hasn't been not poor growing up, he doesn't realize that the opposite state in many ways can have its own detrimental effects on motivation
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