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Recognize them then do what? Humans are complex and I see no value in using a one dimensional, subjective metric to make any sort of decision or guide a persona

• joshuamorton 9y ago
  Privilege is a lens through which you look at the world and analyze things. It's more or less an analytical tool developed as a response to various flavors of social darwinism. The idea behind privilege theory is to say that, when you compare people, you don't say "the more successful one is more successful because they are better", but instead "there are a number of factors, many of which are difficult to quantify, that contribute to the varying levels of success between two people (or especially groups)". It's not one dimensional, and there's no objective way to measure or compare things as generic as "success". Privilege theory being explicit about this makes it superior to many of the alternatives. "Do what" is such a broad question that I can't really answer it. Are you an academic, or a company or a government or something else? The answer depends on that. It's a malformed question, like asking "What do you do with Kantianism?" or something. The best answer I can give is "use it as an analytical lens to guide your decision making", which is a bad answer precisely because its a bad question. A better one might be "What value does analyzing situations/systems via the lens that privilege provides give?" Which is incidentally also a pretty good question to ask about Kantianism. The answer to that question also depends on exactly who you are and what you're doing, but at least it makes sense. For example, for me personally, I think that looking at things via a lens of privilege helps me to be a more empathetic person, on the whole. For an academic, it might help you decide whether or not you are asking the right questions in an experiment. As a very straightforward historical example, for many years in the US, there was explicit bias against African Americans in segregated schools. This was justified in many cases, through a social darwinistic lens: black people are less intelligent, the proof is that they perform worse, and so we should devote fewer resources to their education. Looking at the same data through a lens of privilege though, one might instead conclude that segregated schools performed worse because they had fewer resources. In other words, the same correlation is explained in two vastly different ways. I use that example specifically because today the same thing still happens, as a result of most school systems getting funding based on property taxes, and historical reasons so you still have a world where, in practice, predominantly black schools have much less funding. Ostensibly, this is "fair", since you use the same rule to fund everyone, but clearly it isn't actually. Privilege is one way of accounting for how things that are ostensibly fair may not be in practice. As an aside, in a much more mathematical sense, I think that privilege theory is all about picking the right bayesian priors when doing an analysis.
  • malvosenior 9y ago
    I think this is a very well reasoned argument that makes sense within your logical and philosophical framework. What it doesn't take into account is different meanings to the term "fair" or the morality of a system based on staunch individualism. > Ostensibly, this is "fair", since you use the same rule to fund everyone, but clearly it isn't actually. 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. I suppose one of the problems I have with the concept of privilege is that I find it promotes a very dangerous mindset. Having grown up poor and non-white and achieved success through hard work, more often than not I saw people being held back by their own sense of victimization than any sort of systematic oppression. The concept of privilege exacerbates that and thus is counter productive.
    • joshuamorton 9y ago
      >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 against. If you want to discriminate against women without making it obvious, you can add an unnecessary height requirement. It's only when you take a look at the correlations between those variables, when you realize that women are inches shorter than men that something seems off. (and to be clear I'm talking about an abstract situation where height doesn't matter for whatever it is we're doing). When you take into account the correlations, the non-discriminatory rules suddenly feel a lot less non-discriminatory. If you really supported a funding principle that was independent of demographics, you should support a system that grants funding solely based on headcount. Otherwise you're implicitly admitting that rich people deserve better education solely because they are rich, which seems discriminatory to me. Granted, there are flaws to that system too, but what it doesn't do is further disadvantage the already disadvantaged. Your "fair" system leads to the poorest areas (and the least-white areas, and a few other similar things) getting the worst education. The result of this is that I, as an individual, receive a worse education do to things that are totally out of my control. That doesn't seem particularly fair to me. (And that's ignoring other arguments that there are probably very compelling reasons to fund the least well off schools more, much like a progressive tax system favors those at the bottom. And as an extension of this, I'm curious if you favor a progressive tax system, or something else). Another user mentioned this study[1], which unfortunately I can't find the paper for, but the video is still worth watching. I'll quote an important bit: >As a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement and deservingness...increases. 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 there are probably good evolutionary reasons for our brains doing this (I say probably only because I'm not an evolutionary psychologist, I can make some pretty good arguments for why this would be evolutionarily good). And there are times when it's probably a good idea to ignore that fact and feel like you're to blame for your outcomes, but there are also times where it isn't. In any case, I hope you understand that there's more to it than just fake-victimhood and an attempt to make successful people feel bad. And that while you may disagree with the theory, its at least not total SJW nonsense :P [1]:https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean