Lost Diamonds: How our current system is failing underprivileged talent

Very simply, there's a reason the rural joke goes like this:

"I'm from the government and I'm here to help".

It's just not appreciated. If you want to genuinely assist, you have to find ways that cohere with the culture and traditions of the place you're trying to support.

The Outsider from California is an old meme. It's captured in this very very popular postcard found throughout Montana/Idaho:

http://duckboy.com/postcards/all-postcards/more-californians...

I'm willing to bet based on certain comments earlier this year, the Outsider from NYC is a similar figure in the eastern part of the US. And, of course, "DC" or "Washington" is similarly vilified across the nation.

So, you're an advocate coming in from your position of privilege: you are, in humor, an alien, and you purport to teach the people, in all best of intentions, how to do better. It's not that you're wrong. You just can't get to where you want from here without profound and deep disruption.

Does this make sense here?

If this is the sort of thing that interests you, you'll want to be looking at working with the local civic minded community pillars. Pastors, teachers, principals, mayors, doctors, etc. People with influence and understandings of the local culture. People with generational roots, bluntly.

There is a fierce, fierce, fierce independence and individualism: coming in and telling people how to live isn't appreciated.

This is, by the by, virtually a Hollywood stereotype- the well intentioned urbanite helping out the rurals. :-)

I don't know that I have much more to say on HN... if you want to take up this thread at length, my email is in my profile. :-)

I wasn't trying to be an ass. I was just saying that poor people have it tough than people without money. As you point out, sometimes even people with money cannot get themselves out of bad choices. I refuse to believe people are born either good or bad. Its the environment people were exposed to and the will power to do the right thing even when its hard that make people good and bad. People do bad things because it takes some effort to do the right thing.

Also about amazon, I wasn't trying to judge you or anything. I was just pointing put how amazon treat their low level employees like shit. Yes there are real costs to running a business. Your amazon team being great workplace for you is a good thing. Your team and the low level employees in warehouses all work for the same person, Jeff Bezos. If you were Jeff, and this came to your notice, would you actually do something about the bad working conditions of low level employees? They are humans after all and they are trying to make a living. Just because this is the only job they can do, doesn't mean they can be treated lowly. If no one reacts to it, then it will continue to be status quo(not advocating violent/rude confrontation). Agree to disagree.

Sure, a small child, infant, and nascent zygote human are helpless and cannot be self-sustaining. Great point. I'll restrict myself to adults who have the capability to act upon the world for this discussion from here on out.

> How much agency does a human raised illiterate far away from civilization have?

Is your definition of agency in this context,

* the state of being in action or of exerting power; operation, or

* a means of exerting power or influence; instrumentality?

Nothing in those definitions have anything to do with literacy or society. It seems to me that an adult far away from civilization has as much agency as his brains and muscles can deliver: there's no rules for that person to be concerned with other than laws of nature. They're able to exercise their raw humanity.

Obviously, such an adult lacks the amplifying powers of chemicals, electricity, computers, transport, etc that we have. But, who are we to judge the power/potential/quality of a feral human adult in the wild to do incredible things with his environment? Agency is a trait, not a quantity, and that's why it's a birthright. (It can be denied a person, however.)

Just do some thought experiments. What's the most powerful thing you could imagine yourself accomplishing before you died if we dropped you off in the wilderness with nothing but the clothes on your back? Don't just stop at "curl up and die", really shoot for the moon. I came up with some amazing things.

Now, if you were to argue that humans have nearly limitless potential but are impotent to realize that potential without the work of others, then I'd say you're on to something really profound and worth exploring and optimizing for, philosophical.

But, I think what you've stated here is that an individual apart from society somehow has diminished agency. You're either confusing concepts or underestimating man.

That's the real issue: example. It's like the plumber who bills the customer $20,000 for tapping a steam valve with a wrench, not because of the tapping, but for the expertise of knowing where to tap.

Kids from rich families are exposed to a lot more information and guidance. I went the route of investment banking, et cetera, and I was flying blind a lot of the time.

There was an a-ha moment when I realized that advice from my parents was about as good as random advice, because sometimes they didn't really have a good mental model for my life and career.

I took a lot of bad advice before this became clear to me.

Meanwhile, one of my buddies could lean on his family for advice because they went the business route before he was born.

It's not the cushion, it's the coach on the other side of the rope that makes the difference.