Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley • Hacker News Board

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#251

Post by Frondo » Sat, Jan 23, 2016, 5:32 PM UTC

marknutter wrote: post #250

Frondo wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that's part of the point, the invisibility. Like, for example, there are those studies that show how people with names that sound traditionally black don't get called for job interviews nearly as often. Take the name off the resume and they get called with parity to traditionally white-sounding names. Or, for another example, it used to be that orchestral auditions were conducted where you could see the player…

Or maybe it's just human nature to identify with those who possess similar qualities. This isn't "systemic racism/sexism", it's perfectly natural. Minorities often favor other minorities in their own circles, women definitely favor other women, but because they're in the minority the behavior somehow becomes ok. If people are upset about broken job interview processes, then maybe we should fix the fucking broken job…

Thanks for not denying that privilege exists, and for pointing out that some of it is likely due to the unconscious bias we can politely dub "human nature"! E.g. we hire people who look like us, even if they're not the best people for the job...

You know, in situations like this I'm often reminded of that Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

I think a lot of the pushback against awareness and understanding of privilege comes from that idea.

Being told that you're getting some lucky break because you're a hetero white dude, whether it's preferential treatment in job interview callbacks or orchestra hiring or any of the million other things that have been so insanely thoroughly documented.. well, kinda draws attention to the possibility that, if we were living in a meritocratic world, suddenly all us lucky white dudes would have to compete with a much wider group of people. A man's salary and all that.

As far as swinging the other way and preferring people for their minority status, quite frankly, I'm totally ok with doing so for a generation or two, since I would at least be trying to compensate for hundreds of years of systemic bias against those beleaguered groups of people. Forever? Naw. For now? Sure, even if it means I personally would lose out on contracts or whatever.

But our disagreement here is something to work out in the political arena, not something I think it makes sense to try and bridge from first principles or anything; I at least used to feel the way you do, and came to change my mind about it only through a lot of life experience that told me it made sense to change my mind.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#252

Post by tbrownaw » Sat, Jan 23, 2016, 5:47 PM UTC

gnaritas wrote: post #207

tbrownaw wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

impossible to learn unless you encountered it Why? How can there be such a thing? What is there that prevents someone from recording what they encountered and learned, and passing that knowledge on to others?

Nuance. Words are not sufficient to convey all things; some things take practice, not knowledge. You cannot learn to play a guitar merely by reading everything there is to know about playing music on a guitar and humans are far more complex than guitars.

But the guitar (or driving, or typing, or ...) practice isn't nuance so much as moving things from (slow) conscious thought to (fast) unconscious processing.

The practice isn't about acquiring information, so much as it's about moving that information to a different internal subsystem.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#253

Post by peter303 » Sat, Jan 23, 2016, 6:17 PM UTC

Im sorry, but if you graduate from Stanford you start near the top of the opportunity heap. Maybe people arent satisified with what they have and want more.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#254

Post by Domenic_S » Sat, Jan 23, 2016, 6:33 PM UTC

Frondo wrote: post #251

marknutter wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe it's just human nature to identify with those who possess similar qualities. This isn't "systemic racism/sexism", it's perfectly natural. Minorities often favor other minorities in their own circles, women definitely favor other women, but because they're in the minority the behavior somehow becomes ok. If people are upset about broken job interview processes, then maybe we should fix the fucking broken job…

Thanks for not denying that privilege exists, and for pointing out that some of it is likely due to the unconscious bias we can politely dub "human nature"! E.g. we hire people who look like us, even if they're not the best people for the job... You know, in situations like this I'm often reminded of that Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not u…

I'd like to see some of those insanely documented things and look at them critically. For example, the job callback thing pertains to people with black-sounding names, not whether the the applicant is actually black. Perhaps that speaks to cultural privilege instead of racial.

Consider scholarships: if you're a white male, you have to be exceptional vs your cohort in some other way (academics, athletics, etc) to find a scholarship. If you're a minority, you have to... be a minority. That's a disadvantage of being Generic White Male #434242.

To be clear, I fully recognize that real, actual race-based discrimination on a systemic scale happened fairly recently in the US, and to an extent still happens today. 100% no argument there.

The problem with "privilege" as a label is that it describes a population, yet is applied consistently - sometimes weaponized - to individuals.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#255

Post by dang » Sat, Jan 23, 2016, 6:37 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #104

"I'm a self made millionaire [0]" [0] - Apart from the safe suburban upper class childhood, the prep school and Harvard education my parents paid for, the job at Goldman Sachs my uncle got me straight out of school, and the finance network from that experience that eventually helped me with my first funding rounds, but yea, besides all that I'm TOTALLY SELF MADE!

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10956699 and marked it off-topic.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#256

Post by dang » Sat, Jan 23, 2016, 6:41 PM UTC

[deleted] wrote: post #198

tomcam wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't say much other than thank you for sharing. What a powerful story. Heart goes out to you. My contact info is in my profile. Please use it.

[deleted]

I was moved by your comments in this thread as well, and would be happy to exchange some thoughts if you're ever interested. (Email the address in my profile and I'll send you my personal one.)

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#257

Post by dang » Sat, Jan 23, 2016, 6:44 PM UTC

peter303 wrote: post #253

Im sorry, but if you graduate from Stanford you start near the top of the opportunity heap. Maybe people arent satisified with what they have and want more.

That seems uncharitable. Going to a prominent school is a big boost—would anyone deny that?—but it doesn't cancel years of personal or family trauma, or economic or social adversity like the poverty the article is talking about. Indeed the article is all about how those things persist and continue to affect one at depth. If you'd read it with empathy, I think you'd agree, or at least phrase your criticism differently.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#258

Post by Retra » Sat, Jan 23, 2016, 7:25 PM UTC

vasilipupkin wrote: post #163

nugget wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"Being in the right place at the right time" is a vast majority of what luck brings you.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#259

Post by eropple » Sat, Jan 23, 2016, 7:26 PM UTC

akjetma wrote: post #223

anovikov wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easily. If someone comes from a rich family it's in a way harder for him to build a startup: he will not belong to the demographic of 90%+ potential users of any startup, and it will be hard for him to understand what they want and how to pitch it to them, same thing about employees - it will be hard to lead and motivate people not understanding what the people who need to work to pay their bills feel. This is my per…

A rich person can throw money at this problem or at least has the financial and temporal capacity to research it and gain an academic understanding. I know the conventional wisdom is to build something that you would use yourself, but towards the later stages of most b2b companies--especially ones that deal with enterprise customers--the customer is just as alien to anyone as poor people are to you. This is such a ti…

Seriously. "I am rich so I don't know how to make a vehicle to make even more money" is so transformatively different from "I grew up without enough opportunities to know how to function in polite (white) society" that my jaw bunched reading it.

This industry makes me profoundly sad sometimes. Often.

Re: Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley

#260

Post by Retra » Sat, Jan 23, 2016, 7:31 PM UTC

TrevorJ wrote: post #101

AlexWest wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's really the whole point of privilege - belonging to the group is enough to grant you the advantages of it. Period. It doesn't mean your life is great, it doesn't mean you don't have problems, but the members of a privileged class absolutely possess those privileges - that's how it works.

The problem with that definition is that it's nearly impossible to apply that to an individual without bias. It predisposes us to assume that the privileges possessed by an individual are one of the primary drivers of the experiences they have had in their life. Privilege isn't uniformly distributed across all members of a group. Let's say that group Y enjoys a much higher college acceptance rate. Due to their privil…

It's not 'nearly' impossible; it is impossible. It's impossible to make any decisions without bias. The important thing is knowing what your biases are and knowing what decisions you're actually making and the effects they actually have.

People like to imagine that they don't actually make policy decisions, then they have no influence on the world. That's really not the case, and the best course of action is to be aware of the influence you have, and make sure your biases aren't influencing things in a negative way.