Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I actually find the situation you outlined extremely fair and would find it quite unfair to apply different funding principals to different schools based on demographics. But that "fair" method isn't independent of demographic. And that's what privilege tries to highlight. It's almost always possible to dress up policies that are de-facto prejudicial as independent of the thing that they're supposedly prejudiced aga…
> I'm curious if you favor a progressive tax system I favor a flat tax if we must pay tax at all. > The crux of this is that while you may disagree, its possible, and even perhaps likely, that your success is less "yours" than you believe, and that your mind is rewriting history, so to speak, to make you feel more in control of your outcomes than you actually were. This is by no means your fault or anything, and ther…
It doesn't really matter who you are, it's unlikely that you're immune to bias. I absolutely listened to what you said, it's just orthogonal to the point I made, which is that no matter your experience, how your brain works is probably not unique. You're almost certainly subject to the psychological quirks as everyone else. Do you want me to give your experiences special deference because you come from an underprivileged background? I thought that's explicitly what you were arguing against.
>Do you believe that poor people cannot succeed without help? If the answer is yes, then why would you question someone telling you that's what happened? If the answer is no, then I think you need to reexamine your philosophy as it's fairly dehumanizing to be told that you're not capable of success.
No. And I don't think I've ever said that poor people cannot succeed without help. I've said it's more difficult for poor people to achieve the same success as rich people, all else equal, but I don't see anything dehumanizing about that. I'd ask that you take another look at what I'm actually saying, because you're turning my words into something that they very much aren't.
>Poor people who became wealthy are told they're experience is invalid, an outlier, not useful. Really shouldn't they (we) be the ones that have the most valuable opinion since we've proven it can work?
No. Not at all! For the same reason that I wouldn't ask Jeff Bezos for life advice. Its survivorship bias, plain and simple. For every person with your story, there's someone else who had a similar background, worked just as hard, and isn't successful.
The common explanation for this is that a lot of successful people say that a good things is to take risks. They all have this in common. They took risks. But so did tons of other people who ended up broke or bankrupt or otherwise unsuccessful. Only listening to successful people will result in exactly what you're doing now: thinking that [hard work/risk taking/keeping a strict schedule/buddhist minimalism] is enough to do succeed, ignoring the fact that there are many people who did exactly the same thing who have failed.
Just to be clear, are you arguing that you worked harder/smarter than every person from your hometown who has seen less success than you? Because I'd find that highly unlikely. It certainly wasn't true for me.