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Downvote me all you want. But I cannot put myself into these children's shoes. I grew up on the 'other side of the tracks', but in the Bay Area. I grew up in a

Downvote me all you want. But I cannot put myself into these children's shoes. I grew up on the 'other side of the tracks', but in the Bay Area. I grew up in an immigrant ghetto. Our plight was unheard of, unremarkable. Broken families, abusive parents, a failing school district, gang violence. These were all parts of my everyday reality. A couple of students in our school struggled to keep ourselves academically grounded in a world with few academic successes. Every day a small cohort of us would struggle to reconcile the beauty we found in mathematics with the twenty voices in class: "Teacher, why do we even need Geometry? Nobody uses it in the real world." In our world of McDonalds managers, dry cleaners, and landscapers, this was reality. Trigonometry was as useful as learning to mine for coal. So when I see this outpouring of sympathy and intellectual support for kids in Palo Alto, I struggle to stifle a knee-jerk reaction that can only be described by abject cruelty. I understand that the local community is devastated. But the amount of emotional and intellectual outpouring by Silicon Valley engineers for these children baffles me because of how useless it feels. The rich, with their systemic advantages, create a high pressure environment, leading kids to commit suicide. The alumni of the rich use their resources to try and fix this problem. Wouldn't these engineers better spend their time trying to fix the problems faced by hundreds of thousands of underprivileged schoolchildren each day, rather than the localized plight of a few children in a ridiculously affluent community? This continues to remind me that the poor and disaffected are a footnote, whose cause is championed by poor newspaper editors, while the rich champion their own through and through.

iolothebard 11y ago
So you lack empathy and can't understand that the stresses of their community while not equaling yours can easily rival it in stress and seriousness to a teenager. Kudos on making it out, it's sad though that you can't see it from a child's perspective. I guess you just need someone that's in a more harsh ghetto to make your story sound like it's irrelevant since their situation was worse. Try Latin American ghettos, SE Asia, most of Africa, etc.
- throw_it_away 11y ago
  >I guess you just need someone that's in a more harsh ghetto to make your story sound like it's irrelevant since their situation was worse. Try Latin American ghettos, SE Asia, most of Africa, etc. And we're not posting articles about how the Rockefellers and Carnegies children are suffering impostor syndrome are we? You miss the point I'm trying to make. There is a very specific thing here that interests HN readers. Why is it an article about PAHS kids who commit suicide appearing, not an article about the Carnegies, not the starving children in Asian ghettos? HN readers must be, somehow, empathizing with this children. This is a fault of the programmer elite as a whole. We are extremely privileged. We are well educated, well compensated, extremely capable people. Instead of focusing our intellect, our will, and our drive upon eradicating world poverty, instead we try to help a small enclave of mentally troubled students in an affluent microcosm. We don't treat depression or mental illness as an institutional problem. We don't look at the social issues of parenting methods. No, instead we try specifically looking at kids in Palo Alto and why they are committing suicide. Why is this? I suspect it's because many of the readers here, themselves, went to Palo Alto schools, or come from elite backgrounds. They feel deeply for this particular space because they see themselves as part of it. And that's a sad waste of our talents. Many, many issues need our help. Mental illness awareness. Income inequality and its effects on humanity. Poverty, welfare. Parenting as a lasting influence on children. Not PAHS suicides. Engineers, stop wasting your cycles on your own, and spend it on helping the rest. Be more like SpaceX and less like Washio.
  - ramblingrain 11y ago
    Musk trollin' hard tonight, damn...
  - selimthegrim 11y ago
    Have you ever heard of this phenomenon in journalism called 'human interest stories'?
  - eli_gottlieb 11y ago
    >Instead of focusing our intellect, our will, and our drive upon eradicating world poverty I'd love to eradicate world poverty, and cure depression also. But you can't do that with gadgets, can you? And what will anyone pay you for in tech other than gadgets? You still have to keep yourself from slipping into poverty, using only the skillset you actually have (rather than flooding the nonprofit and government sectors with workers they can't even afford to hire right now), while also somehow eradicating poverty and curing depression. There's a reason HBO's Silicon Valley made "Making the world a better place" into an ironic slogan, and it's because all the techno-wizardry in the world, short of a few scifi dreams like replicators and AGI, can only do so much against what are fundamentally social problems, problems of small groups of humans refusing to share technology and its outputs. Fuck, the best I can think of right now is: would ultra-low-power computing maybe help ameliorate the power-consumption issues that exacerbate global warming? Or would they just make the world emit even more carbon?
eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>Wouldn't these engineers better spend their time trying to fix the problems faced by hundreds of thousands of underprivileged schoolchildren each day, rather than the localized plight of a few children in a ridiculously affluent community? Because people understand their own community's problems, so they at least manage to not fuck it up and make things worse when they try to address those problems. Like, if you can explain how the rich can and should help the poor in a non-paternalistic way, other than just straight-up fighting poverty and inequality, go ahead. Please. Because it's goddamn hard.

iolothebard 11y ago

So you lack empathy and can't understand that the stresses of their community while not equaling yours can easily rival it in stress and seriousness to a teenager. Kudos on making it out, it's sad though that you can't see it from a child's perspective. I guess you just need someone that's in a more harsh ghetto to make your story sound like it's irrelevant since their situation was worse. Try Latin American ghettos, SE Asia, most of Africa, etc.

throw_it_away 11y ago
>I guess you just need someone that's in a more harsh ghetto to make your story sound like it's irrelevant since their situation was worse. Try Latin American ghettos, SE Asia, most of Africa, etc. And we're not posting articles about how the Rockefellers and Carnegies children are suffering impostor syndrome are we? You miss the point I'm trying to make. There is a very specific thing here that interests HN readers. Why is it an article about PAHS kids who commit suicide appearing, not an article about the Carnegies, not the starving children in Asian ghettos? HN readers must be, somehow, empathizing with this children. This is a fault of the programmer elite as a whole. We are extremely privileged. We are well educated, well compensated, extremely capable people. Instead of focusing our intellect, our will, and our drive upon eradicating world poverty, instead we try to help a small enclave of mentally troubled students in an affluent microcosm. We don't treat depression or mental illness as an institutional problem. We don't look at the social issues of parenting methods. No, instead we try specifically looking at kids in Palo Alto and why they are committing suicide. Why is this? I suspect it's because many of the readers here, themselves, went to Palo Alto schools, or come from elite backgrounds. They feel deeply for this particular space because they see themselves as part of it. And that's a sad waste of our talents. Many, many issues need our help. Mental illness awareness. Income inequality and its effects on humanity. Poverty, welfare. Parenting as a lasting influence on children. Not PAHS suicides. Engineers, stop wasting your cycles on your own, and spend it on helping the rest. Be more like SpaceX and less like Washio.
- ramblingrain 11y ago
  Musk trollin' hard tonight, damn...
- selimthegrim 11y ago
  Have you ever heard of this phenomenon in journalism called 'human interest stories'?
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >Instead of focusing our intellect, our will, and our drive upon eradicating world poverty I'd love to eradicate world poverty, and cure depression also. But you can't do that with gadgets, can you? And what will anyone pay you for in tech other than gadgets? You still have to keep yourself from slipping into poverty, using only the skillset you actually have (rather than flooding the nonprofit and government sectors with workers they can't even afford to hire right now), while also somehow eradicating poverty and curing depression. There's a reason HBO's Silicon Valley made "Making the world a better place" into an ironic slogan, and it's because all the techno-wizardry in the world, short of a few scifi dreams like replicators and AGI, can only do so much against what are fundamentally social problems, problems of small groups of humans refusing to share technology and its outputs. Fuck, the best I can think of right now is: would ultra-low-power computing maybe help ameliorate the power-consumption issues that exacerbate global warming? Or would they just make the world emit even more carbon?

eli_gottlieb 11y ago

>Wouldn't these engineers better spend their time trying to fix the problems faced by hundreds of thousands of underprivileged schoolchildren each day, rather than the localized plight of a few children in a ridiculously affluent community? Because people understand their own community's problems, so they at least manage to not fuck it up and make things worse when they try to address those problems. Like, if you can explain how the rich can and should help the poor in a non-paternalistic way, other than just straight-up fighting poverty and inequality, go ahead. Please. Because it's goddamn hard.