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Yes, my town was a hellhole and very, very small. I'm the only person who has achieved professional success. Most are dead, in jail or hooked on drugs. My relat

Yes, my town was a hellhole and very, very small. I'm the only person who has achieved professional success. Most are dead, in jail or hooked on drugs. My relatives included. > You were the valedictorian of your high school No, I was a very poor student as I knew back then that school had little to do with success. > worked jobs on the side to make money There were no jobs in my town. I admit I'm making some assumptions about you since I've literally never heard a poor person say the things you're saying but many, many middle-upper middle class people say them. I could be very wrong though. > you appear to have had reliable access to computers 20+ years ago My school had some very dated Apple IIes. The rest I got from magazines and library books. If there was a privilege there it was that I was alive at a time that booting up a machine dumped you into BASIC. I'm 100% sure I'm biased. Everyone is, including yourself. Our conversation has drifted far from the original topic but I do appreciate you taking the time to have it. I don't think we could ever agree on many of these issues but its interesting to see them juxtaposed.

joshuamorton 9y ago
>No, I was a very poor student as I knew back then that school had little to do with success. See, this is the kind of thing I mean. This is essentially a post-hoc justification of your success. Why did you "know that school had little to do with success". Why didn't your classmates? Did the valedictorian also end up on drugs and in jail? Or did they just end up less successful, despite working hard? I mean I can actually take this same argument and apply it to some absolutely terrible choices: "I knew school had very little to do with success, so I decided to forgo school and start hustling and selling drugs at a young age, and here I am now an upper ranking member of a street gang, by many measures a fairly successful person". It's not like everyone who does the first does the second. A lot of them end up dead or in jail. But given what you've said so far, you would believe that individuals should follow that advice. And if that's not the case, I ask what the difference between > Take my advice, ignore your schoolwork and work with computers instead, you could become a millionaire, just look at Bill Gates! and > Take my advice, ignore your schoolwork and start selling drugs instead, you could become a millionaire, just look at [insert local gang leader or dealer]! I could be wrong, but it really sounds like you're looking at your past through rose colored glasses. And as a result of this, you ascribe your success more to the "smart choices" you made than to the "lucky choices" or "lucky breaks" or "random opportunities" you got. I'd suggest you go out and look for people from similar backgrounds who made similar choices to you, I think you'll find it will be sobering how many of them didn't find success, despite the hard work, and that you're luckier than you think. Heck, I think if you really try and take an objective look, you'll find that some of the people who you feel like made worse choices than you were more similar to you thank you think, but didn't get the same lucky break. Just in general, I think it's a good idea spending more time listening to unsuccessful people. It reminds me how they're not so different from me, and that's why I think privilege theory is both important and often correct. I hope you take the time to do that too. Edit: I also think you're misunderstanding my use of the word bias in this context. I mean "evolutionarily hardwired to view things through a certain, objectively wrong, lens". See my earlier citations for how that reveals itself, but the result is that you, like everyone, are likely to take more credit for your achievements than you objectively deserve. This isn't unique to you, but it means that I basically have to take your entire description of your success and everyone else's failures with a grain of salt.
- malvosenior 9y ago
  Your assumptions about me are pretty off base and that’s the problem. You’ll never be rhetorically successful by invalidating people’s personal experience. I have a lifetime of making decisions and viewing their outcomes to draw from. You have theory. I can look at what works for me, do more of it and see it pay off. I can see people do the opposite and fail. This is why I think the concept of privilege will never grow beyond the people who already believe in it. It’s just too smug at its core.
  - joshuamorton 9y ago
    >I can look at what works for me, do more of it and see it pay off. I can see people do the opposite and fail. And this is the fallacy in your thinking. I can find people who made terrible choices and became more successful than you. I can find people who made similar choices to you and are much less successful. If that's all you do, then plain and simple, your experiences are invalid. They don't matter. They're not data. And anyway, you're already successful now, so your choices practically don't matter anymore. Success begets success. To put it simply, you need to accept that there are people who made good choices as you did, and aren't successful despite their hard work and good choices. Because that's fact. That's the world we live in. That's not smug. It's a hard pill to swallow, sure and I don't really blame you for refusing to. But there's nothing smug about it.
    - malvosenior 9y ago
      Do you really believe that nothing we do matters? That it’s all a roll of the dice or uncontrollably riding the waves of systematic oppression and privilege? I don’t see how that’s useful. Yeah, life is not always fair but if you don’t believe in free will or that you can actually have some impact on your own existence, then what’s the point of even living it? And let’s be real, if you’re good at what you do, you’ll be fine. Every good developer can get a job. That’s the economic reality we live in. People are capable of achieving that with hard work. Like you said though, it doesn’t matter. It worked for me and it worked for millions of other people so whether you think that was luck, privilege or something else it doesn’t impact my success. What you may accomplish is encouraging people who could help themselves to not do so. Probably not even that though because the kind of people who can help themselves are already used to ignoring the naysayers.

joshuamorton 9y ago

>No, I was a very poor student as I knew back then that school had little to do with success. See, this is the kind of thing I mean. This is essentially a post-hoc justification of your success. Why did you "know that school had little to do with success". Why didn't your classmates? Did the valedictorian also end up on drugs and in jail? Or did they just end up less successful, despite working hard? I mean I can actually take this same argument and apply it to some absolutely terrible choices: "I knew school had very little to do with success, so I decided to forgo school and start hustling and selling drugs at a young age, and here I am now an upper ranking member of a street gang, by many measures a fairly successful person". It's not like everyone who does the first does the second. A lot of them end up dead or in jail. But given what you've said so far, you would believe that individuals should follow that advice. And if that's not the case, I ask what the difference between > Take my advice, ignore your schoolwork and work with computers instead, you could become a millionaire, just look at Bill Gates! and > Take my advice, ignore your schoolwork and start selling drugs instead, you could become a millionaire, just look at [insert local gang leader or dealer]! I could be wrong, but it really sounds like you're looking at your past through rose colored glasses. And as a result of this, you ascribe your success more to the "smart choices" you made than to the "lucky choices" or "lucky breaks" or "random opportunities" you got. I'd suggest you go out and look for people from similar backgrounds who made similar choices to you, I think you'll find it will be sobering how many of them didn't find success, despite the hard work, and that you're luckier than you think. Heck, I think if you really try and take an objective look, you'll find that some of the people who you feel like made worse choices than you were more similar to you thank you think, but didn't get the same lucky break. Just in general, I think it's a good idea spending more time listening to unsuccessful people. It reminds me how they're not so different from me, and that's why I think privilege theory is both important and often correct. I hope you take the time to do that too. Edit: I also think you're misunderstanding my use of the word bias in this context. I mean "evolutionarily hardwired to view things through a certain, objectively wrong, lens". See my earlier citations for how that reveals itself, but the result is that you, like everyone, are likely to take more credit for your achievements than you objectively deserve. This isn't unique to you, but it means that I basically have to take your entire description of your success and everyone else's failures with a grain of salt.

malvosenior 9y ago
Your assumptions about me are pretty off base and that’s the problem. You’ll never be rhetorically successful by invalidating people’s personal experience. I have a lifetime of making decisions and viewing their outcomes to draw from. You have theory. I can look at what works for me, do more of it and see it pay off. I can see people do the opposite and fail. This is why I think the concept of privilege will never grow beyond the people who already believe in it. It’s just too smug at its core.
- joshuamorton 9y ago
  >I can look at what works for me, do more of it and see it pay off. I can see people do the opposite and fail. And this is the fallacy in your thinking. I can find people who made terrible choices and became more successful than you. I can find people who made similar choices to you and are much less successful. If that's all you do, then plain and simple, your experiences are invalid. They don't matter. They're not data. And anyway, you're already successful now, so your choices practically don't matter anymore. Success begets success. To put it simply, you need to accept that there are people who made good choices as you did, and aren't successful despite their hard work and good choices. Because that's fact. That's the world we live in. That's not smug. It's a hard pill to swallow, sure and I don't really blame you for refusing to. But there's nothing smug about it.
  - malvosenior 9y ago
    Do you really believe that nothing we do matters? That it’s all a roll of the dice or uncontrollably riding the waves of systematic oppression and privilege? I don’t see how that’s useful. Yeah, life is not always fair but if you don’t believe in free will or that you can actually have some impact on your own existence, then what’s the point of even living it? And let’s be real, if you’re good at what you do, you’ll be fine. Every good developer can get a job. That’s the economic reality we live in. People are capable of achieving that with hard work. Like you said though, it doesn’t matter. It worked for me and it worked for millions of other people so whether you think that was luck, privilege or something else it doesn’t impact my success. What you may accomplish is encouraging people who could help themselves to not do so. Probably not even that though because the kind of people who can help themselves are already used to ignoring the naysayers.