[jfarmer]

First, privilege is not a bogus concept. If you really believe that — about anything, not just privilege — you'll have a hard time learning it or amending your understanding of it because of things like confirmation bias.

Second, your probability is bad. You're confusing P(A|B) and P(B|A). This is understandable — lots of people do this all the time without realizing it, myself included.

Third, your understanding of privilege is confused. As a successful, white male who has started living in Silicon Valley, I acknowledge my privilege but do not feel guilty about it. That you've bound up the idea of shame in privilege might explain why you find it hard to understand — not because it makes the idea harder to understand but because your "body" is going to have a hard time swallowing an idea that tells you you're a bad person.

Here's one way to think of privilege. Privilege is the sum total of all the things big and small that you don't have to think about on a day to day basis but other people do.

For example, as an innocent white person being approached by a police officer, I never have to wonder whether this police officer is coming to help me or harass me. Indeed, I might even presume something like, "Oh, the officer must be coming to tell me something useful."

As a male, I never have to worry about getting raped while walking down a city street at night, or plan your evening so that I won't be in that situation.

As someone with means, I never have to think about whether you have enough money to buy food to last a week, or what it feels like to have to made a trade off between food or gas this week. Or the terror of being sick without insurance.

Now, you might know these things. I don't know and I'm not presuming. I don't even know whether you're white, male, or anything else. I'm just trying to paint a picture.

If you want reading, I recommend these two essays by John Scalzi: Being Poor (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/) and Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is (http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...).

[baddox]

I still don't understand what to do with the concept. Anyone would be a fool to think that you can group people by some attribute (like ethnicity) and show correlations with other attributes (like income). (Granted, we might want to do a bit of work to see if the correlations are stronger than would be expected in a purely random distribution of attributes, but we can assume this is the case.) And, given those correlations, anyone can recognize that they are statistically likely to follow those same correlations based on their own group memberships. If that's what privilege means, then so be it, but it's not much more meaningful than saying "I'm thankful that I'm statistically more likely to be successful than people who die as children. John Scalzi could just as easily write an article about how not being born with a terrible disease or deformity is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

[jfarmer]

I have a hard time believing you're genuinely interested in understanding the concept since you're putting up resistance at every step. I'm not here to make you want to learn — I was presuming you already did.

If not, my mistake for engaging.

[baddox]

I'm putting up resistance because there is still very little I have heard that makes sense. I do consider myself a skeptic, and I think skepticism is a requirement for critical thinking rather than an obstacle to it.

[jfarmer]

A person willing to learn says, "That's interesting and it doesn't make sense to me for X, Y, and Z reasons. I'm obviously not getting something and am probably confused about something important." That is not what you're saying.

Being a skeptic is orthogonal to having that attitude.

Anyhow, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, ...

I'll just end it here and you can reply however you'd like or not at all. :)

[pwang]

> That is not what you're saying.

That's very much what baddox is saying, but with less self-deprecation. He/she is continuing to ask questions and indicating that the concept does not make sense to him/her. Asking critical questions about the utility of the concept, etc. are all very well in line with skeptical approaches towards anything.

[baddox]

I said:

> My questions are actually genuine and not rhetorical. I would appreciate responses, or perhaps corrections of my impression of the concept of privilege.

Whether or not I was lying then, I am unable to express any more clearly or convincingly that I am willing to learn.

And I believe I have explained what doesn't make sense to me.

[redbad]

    > And I believe I have explained what doesn't make sense 
    > to me.

You haven't explained those things, but rather attacked them.

[hajile]

While the first article describes poor rather well, the second article is meaningless. I grew up in one of those poor families. I know (unlike him apparently) that the biggest problem with escaping is the good'ol boy system that exists in many fields (but is far less prevalent in technology in my experience and doesn't discriminate on gender or even race so much as it discriminates against the unknown)

That said, technology is FAIR. My first interactions with programming were through a throw-away book on IBM BASIC at around age 10. Despite not having the computer access to program for real (much less of a problem today), I wrote many programs before getting my hands a book on a "real" programming language (my apologies and thanks to the author as it was pirated onto a school computer). A few years and an engineering degree later (courtesy of government loans), I have been able to break out moreso than I believe I could have in any other profession.

You see, for those who can understand technology, the barrier of entry is lower than it has ever been. Quite literally, all you need to know to start toward a job is to study any one of the hundreds of free resources available.

I do not believe that the poor must be at the mercy of Lady Serendipity. Despite all the problems, the person willing to expend the energy and (most importantly) learn continually may rise above their earlier standard of living as have I and many others. The issue is the will to take action -- the intent to rise above the status quo no matter what obstacles exist.

Jfarmer, were you ever that poor person? Are you that minority? If not, then the privilege argument indicates that no matter the article, it is impossible for you to understand (and for the record, I believe that anybody can understand if they desire). If so, then you stand with me as proof that there exists a way out. You should also recognize that the victimhood endorsed by the that privilege argument discourages and de-incentivizes people from taking action.

What is the solution to "privilege"? Does being aware of privilege change the way business is conducted? Will an employer suddenly hire an inferior candidate because that candidate is unprivileged? In the reverse, will the employer hire an inferior privileged candidate because that employer wishes to "keep the better candidate from becoming privileged"?

Those persons with money don't continue to make money because they fail to recognize and utilize talent wherever they find it. I've worked with people who complained about working 70+ hours during crunch time because they don't have my perspective (the one with two full-time jobs that aren't behind a keyboard), but that doesn't mean they don't recognize and utilize talent when they see it.

Finally, women (the group of discussion) are decidedly privileged compared to men. A poor woman still works indoors and often has people willing to assist (plus significant government aid). If she becomes the victim of violence, she has places to go. If she has no home, she will be able to find shelter.

In contrast, a poor man works dangerous jobs (I remember stitching up injuries because I couldn't afford going to a doctor) in bad working conditions (93% of workplace deaths are men in the US). He cannot rely on anybody as noone wants to help a man. If he is the victim of violence (76% of homicide victims in the US are men, his only source of "help" is incarceration (According to a major CDC study in 2010, the number of men raped (including those overlooked as "forced to penetrate" where they were raped by a woman, but the system labels it different) was almost equal to the number of women. When you account for all the men who go to prison for non-violent crime and are raped repeatedly for years, the number of male rape victims FAR outweigh female victims).

If he is homeless (80% of homeless are men in the US), he has nobody to go to. Men are discriminated against in school where female teachers grade them lower, penalize them for not acting like the girls in their class. Men drop make most of the failing grades and account for the vast majority of the dropouts. Men are then the minority in going to college and obtaining a degree (at all levels from an associates to a doctorate). It's little wonder that 80% of suicides in the US are men.

While these numbers are skewed away from white males toward minority males, the white males (by percentage and by total count) still vastly outnumber white females (and outnumber females of other races by a smaller margin). I wonder if we shouldn't be asking women (especially the upper-middle class white women who make the majority of such complainers) to "check their privilege".

Perhaps technology doesn't discriminate against women. Perhaps there's a reason why the countries considered the most egalitarian have FEWER women in STEM fields than other countries. Perhaps men having 6.8x more gray matter (while women have 10x more white matter) or mens brains being better at communicating from anterior to posterior (while womens brains are better at communicating laterally across hemispheres) isn't just for show. Perhaps studies showing that male and female children as young as one HOUR old already act different (male children preferring objects and female children preferring faces) shows that the brains of men and women are different. Perhaps there is a biological reason that when given the choice, the jobs that men and women appear to prefer are different.

If indeed there are biological preferences, then men (specifically Paul Graham) are not discriminating against women so much as privileged women are enjoying their freedom to do whatever job they want. Another factor that applies to startups is risk. Women tend to be much more risk-averse than men (it makes sense biologically as risk would not only kill them, but their children as well). If we consider that very few tech people create startups and relatively few women are in the technology fields related to those same startups (there are fewer women in these areas than there are overall women in tech) and we know that these women are far less likely to take such huge risks, then it stands to reason that extremely few women would even ask (with even fewer having marketable ideas). Once again, this is far closer to self-selection than bias.

[aredridel]

From the study abstract:

"Men and women apparently achieve similar IQ results with different brain regions, suggesting that there is no singular underlying neuroanatomical structure to general intelligence and that different types of brain designs may manifest equivalent intellectual performance."

So as always, MUCH more research needed before drawing that conclusion

[hajile]

You are correct, the IQ results are similar, but it is the differing biology and how it may affect career choice that is of interest (I am in no way implying that these differences make one gender intellectually superior to the other any more than I would argue for the superiority of Turing or Church).ther, some algorithms are more desirably expressed in one or the other.

I supplied information (without sources, but you appear to know google well enough) that there exist differences in human biology and hypothesize that these differences may offer explanation for observations of human behaviour. If a lack of absolutely irrefutable causal data is your only objection, then I suspect that the realm of psychology is not for you as such evidence is practically non-existent in that field.

[jfarmer]

Look, the most important thing here is to make sure that study can be used to confirm hajile's prior beliefs, ok? Let's keep our eye on the prize.

[hajile]

What prior beliefs? That observed behaviour may have a reason beyond "privilege" which cannot be disproved? (for proof I refer you to the mantra that "privileged people cannot realize they are privileged" which makes an accusation of privilege indistinguishable from a self-serving accusation from the perspective of the accused)

[jfarmer]

I am privileged and realize I am privileged. What are you talking about? Mantra?

[andrewliebchen]

Great definition of privilege in this context, thank you.