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Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

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Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#161

Post by vasilipupkin »

nickff wrote: post #64
yeureka wrote: post #38

This sounds very familiar. When I was in University I didn't understand why some people didn't care about grades and partied so much. When we left school and got into the real world I understood why: they had rich parents with contacts that could get them good jobs or seed capital for their own businesses. I had lots of ideas and worked in a lot of startups for more than 10 years but now the following phrase from the…

The other possibility is that going to the parties is a good use of time, and that is where many students develop their networks. In addition to that, signalling theory would indicate that what classes you take and how well you do are much less important than the university you attend and the faculty you graduate from.

yes, and also I am not sure it's really that hard to be a reasonably decent student and attend parties. I mean you could study 8 am to 8pm on a Saturday, go to a party, be in bed by 1 am and study 9 am to midnight the next day

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#162

Post by xiaoma »

nickbauman wrote: post #71

There's a strong thread of meritocracy in the tech community, but there is no such thing. When you choose the clearly better developer over the other, you're often choosing the one who had better resources growing up, not just natural ability. The poorer developer may have had a natural advantage over the other one, but didn't have the money to develop it as much. So you're really just selecting for wealth all over a…

genetics != merit

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#163

Post by vasilipupkin »

nugget wrote: post #131
__jal wrote: post #87

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 fu…

I've known deca-millionaire trust fund kids who ended up broke (or dead). I've known immigrants who started with nothing and ended up fantastically independently wealthy. And the vast, vast majority of people who settle somewhere near the middle. What nobody teaches you is: it's all about luck. Below that, the fine print: the harder you work and the more you sacrifice, the luckier you will get. ''If only'' works both…

luck is a big factor but being in the right place at the right time maximizes the probability of getting lucky

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#164

Post by [deleted] »

nickbauman wrote: post #71

There's a strong thread of meritocracy in the tech community, but there is no such thing. When you choose the clearly better developer over the other, you're often choosing the one who had better resources growing up, not just natural ability. The poorer developer may have had a natural advantage over the other one, but didn't have the money to develop it as much. So you're really just selecting for wealth all over a…

[deleted]

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#166

Post by NhanH »

brandmeyer wrote: post #149
CamatHN wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a ridiculous comment. Certain ways of behaviour, certain nuances, cannot accurately or reliably be picked up through reading online, only through interactions.

Reading about a topic involving social interaction can definitely serve as a first step to raise awareness of why you're socially awkward. I'm only slightly ashamed to admit that the Good Guy Greg and Good Girl Gina image macros were a source of basic social enlightenment for me. Once your eyes have been opened you can start to improve yourself by paying attention to those interactions when they happen.

"Socially awkward" seems to be a loaded term in your use case. If you are "socially shy", then yes reading would help. But in the case you're not socially awkward in your natural environment (ie you just lived in a different culture), the nuisances are impossible to learn unless you encountered it. Just think of it as a different culture, no East Asian will come to the US without fucking up something small or big a few times, and vice versa. Same for people of different classes.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#168

Post by kuschku »

cloverich wrote: post #143
yeureka wrote: post #38

This sounds very familiar. When I was in University I didn't understand why some people didn't care about grades and partied so much. When we left school and got into the real world I understood why: they had rich parents with contacts that could get them good jobs or seed capital for their own businesses. I had lots of ideas and worked in a lot of startups for more than 10 years but now the following phrase from the…

> I didn't understand why some people didn't care about grades and partied so much. When we left school and got into the real world I understood why: they had rich parents with contacts that could get them good jobs or seed capital for their own businesses. I think thats overly generalized. When I went to college I was (by design) mixed into a group of students whose parents were migrant workers; they were at college…

And even those who party all the time might be able to finish with the best possible grades.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#169

Post by [deleted] »

ginsurge wrote: post #103

This really resonates with me, I was the first person in my family to go to university, and my grandparents had to work multiple jobs when they migrated from Europe in order to survive. My dad did slightly better, but both my parents only had high school education and worked blue collar jobs. It does make it really hard to change your mindset when you come from this sort of background, when you've achieved more than…

[deleted]

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#170

Post by vasilipupkin »

haberman wrote: post #108
mikestew wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's frustrating, not a single critique I've seen of PG's essay (including this one) seem to understand what he is actually saying. It's time to start considering that either PG made his point poorly, or that maybe you're the one that didn't understand it. I don't know what other reasonable options there are.

If by "PG made his point poorly" you mean "PG didn't communicate in a way that was misunderstanding-proof", I can agree with you. Inequality is an emotionally-charged subject that is prone to misunderstanding. I think PG underestimated how thoroughly the intellectual basis of his argument would be missed once he uttered the words "I've been helping to increase economic inequality." Most of the critiques of PG accuse…

the problem with PGs essay was that it is full of strawmen and non sequiturs made up by him. For example, the sentence you just described. Let's attack poverty - what does that mean in practice? in practice, that means spending money on solutions to poverty, ala Sweden. Where does that money come from? from taxes. So, the conversation about raising taxes on the wealthy ( or "attacking wealth" as he says ), outside of a very small fringe, is just really a conversation about raising funds to attack poverty. And PG made it sound as if the conversation is about attacking wealth for its own sake, which nobody but the fringe is having
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