4 ms·

I think it's naive to believe it's possible to drop assumptions all together. Without assumptions this thread wouldn't have happened Taking the word "privilege

I think it's naive to believe it's possible to drop assumptions all together. Without assumptions this thread wouldn't have happened Taking the word "privilege" as an example, you have an assumption about what I mean when I use it and that it entails "moral judgement". These are not things I've expressed in any of my posts > try to back leaders who want what's best for all. I'm confused how you can know what's best for all without making assumptions. Could you elaborate?

beaconstudios 6y ago
> I think it's naive to believe it's possible to drop assumptions all together. Dropping assumptions altogether isn't what I meant and is trivially shown to be nonsense. We couldn't live our lives if we didn't assume the sun would come up tomorrow. What I mean is making unfounded assumptions about other human beings and their experiences. > Taking the word "privilege" as an example, you have an assumption about what I mean when I use it and that it entails "moral judgement". These are not things I've expressed in any of my posts Then I've made a mistake, by making an assumption that was unfounded. I'm not claiming to be perfect at avoiding unfounded assumptions about people or what they say, just that it's a better ideal than growing out your set of assumptions. After all, if you take people and keep dividing them into groups based on shared characteristics, take that to its terminal limit and you're simply treating people as unique individuals. [edit] having reflected further, I think there might be a legitimate meaning behind my thinking of it as a moral judgement, but I'm interested to see if you agree. It's on my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343064 > I'm confused how you can know what's best for all without making assumptions. Could you elaborate? I don't know what's best for all, nor do I believe that anyone else does - and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims they know what is best for any other person. What I try to do is look for people who navigate through empathy. The way I see it, politics is predominantly driven by finding the "bad people" to blame your voters' problems on and make them stop doing the bad thing. In reality people's behaviours are driven by structural incentives, so I am more inclined to trust people who, instead of pointing fingers at other humans and their moral deficiencies, focus on changing the incentives. I think a lot of green initiatives contain this kind of systems approach, as an obvious candidate; but so do some people of many different political movements. It's basically an individual rather than an ideological thing, hence why I say backing individual leaders.
- Scandiravian 6y ago
  > just that it's a better ideal than growing out your set of assumptions. After all, if you take people and keep dividing them into groups based on shared characteristics, take that to its terminal limit and you're simply treating people as unique individuals. I'm confused as to how becoming aware of how my privilege, which has lead to wrong, sometimes harmful, assumptions, would lead me to expand my list of assumptions Removing assumptions about others is exactly the goal of checking ones privilege. The reason for privilege being a focus point is that assumptions arising from social class differences causes more harm in the world than any other cognitive bias When you write "dropping unfounded assumptions about other humans and their experiences", you're describing half of what "checking ones privilege" is about The second part is to find out how and why those privileges are not extended to everyone by contributing to causes that promote and work towards a more fair and equal access to those privileges regardless of social class, race, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, etc
  - beaconstudios 6y ago
    > I'm confused as to how becoming aware of how my privilege, which has lead to wrong, sometimes harmful, assumptions, would lead me to expand my list of assumptions To be clear, I don't think privilege-checking causes more harm than not-privilege-checking. But I think it causes less good than the version of privilege-checking that is applied to everyone regardless of demographic privilege, which is to say, empathy. By being choosy about who deserves empathy, rather than your ideal being focused on general human equality you propagate class divides but simply change which ones you value. I think it's a mixup between empathy and sympathy. You end up valuing the humanity of the disenfranchised more than the privileged, which is dangerous. You can think that people who are marginalised deserve better without either thinking those who are privileged deserve worse, or that they are active perpetrators of said marginalisation. I'm not saying you necessarily make this mistake yourself - I don't know your feelings on the matter - but I see people go down this line of reasoning all the time after acknowledging the concept of class privilege and I just think we can do better than that.

beaconstudios 6y ago

> I think it's naive to believe it's possible to drop assumptions all together. Dropping assumptions altogether isn't what I meant and is trivially shown to be nonsense. We couldn't live our lives if we didn't assume the sun would come up tomorrow. What I mean is making unfounded assumptions about other human beings and their experiences. > Taking the word "privilege" as an example, you have an assumption about what I mean when I use it and that it entails "moral judgement". These are not things I've expressed in any of my posts Then I've made a mistake, by making an assumption that was unfounded. I'm not claiming to be perfect at avoiding unfounded assumptions about people or what they say, just that it's a better ideal than growing out your set of assumptions. After all, if you take people and keep dividing them into groups based on shared characteristics, take that to its terminal limit and you're simply treating people as unique individuals. [edit] having reflected further, I think there might be a legitimate meaning behind my thinking of it as a moral judgement, but I'm interested to see if you agree. It's on my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343064 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343064 > I'm confused how you can know what's best for all without making assumptions. Could you elaborate? I don't know what's best for all, nor do I believe that anyone else does - and I'm suspicious of anyone who claims they know what is best for any other person. What I try to do is look for people who navigate through empathy. The way I see it, politics is predominantly driven by finding the "bad people" to blame your voters' problems on and make them stop doing the bad thing. In reality people's behaviours are driven by structural incentives, so I am more inclined to trust people who, instead of pointing fingers at other humans and their moral deficiencies, focus on changing the incentives. I think a lot of green initiatives contain this kind of systems approach, as an obvious candidate; but so do some people of many different political movements. It's basically an individual rather than an ideological thing, hence why I say backing individual leaders.

Scandiravian 6y ago
> just that it's a better ideal than growing out your set of assumptions. After all, if you take people and keep dividing them into groups based on shared characteristics, take that to its terminal limit and you're simply treating people as unique individuals. I'm confused as to how becoming aware of how my privilege, which has lead to wrong, sometimes harmful, assumptions, would lead me to expand my list of assumptions Removing assumptions about others is exactly the goal of checking ones privilege. The reason for privilege being a focus point is that assumptions arising from social class differences causes more harm in the world than any other cognitive bias When you write "dropping unfounded assumptions about other humans and their experiences", you're describing half of what "checking ones privilege" is about The second part is to find out how and why those privileges are not extended to everyone by contributing to causes that promote and work towards a more fair and equal access to those privileges regardless of social class, race, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, etc
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  > I'm confused as to how becoming aware of how my privilege, which has lead to wrong, sometimes harmful, assumptions, would lead me to expand my list of assumptions To be clear, I don't think privilege-checking causes more harm than not-privilege-checking. But I think it causes less good than the version of privilege-checking that is applied to everyone regardless of demographic privilege, which is to say, empathy. By being choosy about who deserves empathy, rather than your ideal being focused on general human equality you propagate class divides but simply change which ones you value. I think it's a mixup between empathy and sympathy. You end up valuing the humanity of the disenfranchised more than the privileged, which is dangerous. You can think that people who are marginalised deserve better without either thinking those who are privileged deserve worse, or that they are active perpetrators of said marginalisation. I'm not saying you necessarily make this mistake yourself - I don't know your feelings on the matter - but I see people go down this line of reasoning all the time after acknowledging the concept of class privilege and I just think we can do better than that.