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You obviously have no idea what it's like to grow up poor. The fear, the guilt, the frustration, and the exhaustion that you learn almost as if through sheer osmosis from your parents.

The author is not arguing that you literally cannot compete if you're poor. But it's the very mindset from growing up in poverty that, through almost every interaction you have in childhood, leads you to _believe_ that you cannot compete, which prevents you from even trying. And even if you overcome that feeling (through constant hard work and willpower, such as our author's), say you do try to compete with the rich kids, then your lack of inborn confidence is so obviously apparent that you come off as inexperienced, or insincere. This is perfectly accurate in my own experience.

Mindset inequality is actually an incredible way to describe it.

IMO terms like "mindset" and especially "self-confidence" tends to understate the scope and pervasiveness of what's going on.

Even ignoring stuff like disease or nutrition, I'm willing to bet you could find population-level differences in all sorts of things like pre-conscious fight/flight response, stress hormone regulation, mental estimation of risk/impact, and all sorts of subtle weightings for social-standing and game-theory.

A whole suite of adaptations on the physiological, neurological, and social level, which may be very successful... for the environment the person grew up in.

And in the field of epigenetics, findings that chronic stress or severe stress events impacts your offspring in ways generally agreed upon to be negative (ability to socialize, cope with challenges, etc.) before they're even born, before they're even conceived...

> generally agreed upon to be negative

IMO it's worth being very careful in any genetic discussion (epi- or otherwise) before declaring an adaptation to be "negative", especially if it's probably the result of thousands or millions of years of "battle tested" evolutionary winnowing that we can't really see and appreciate. (For example, the side-bonus of sickle-cell anemia is resistance to malaria.)

At best we have to add a big load of qualifiers, e.g.: "For this group in this context during this infinitesimal slice of human history, it didn't seem to help."

I get the author's point, but the style of writing came across as a bit too "poor me" at times.

Supporting family is not something that just happens for those that worked their way up from poor households, the last recession also has created situations where people now who came from middle class backgrounds may be the provider for their family based on poor decisions by their parents.

The down voting without comment is always interesting..

You likely aren't qualified to make statements, beyond guesses, about what the person knows regarding growing up poor.

Thanks for stating the obvious: yes, it was merely a guess. But I am qualified by the measure that I personally grew up poor, like many others, and so can vouch reasonably in the author's favor regarding the reality of his statements.

Insofar as anyone would deny the concept of "mindset inequality" as it relates to one's intellect and poverty, I am perfectly comfortable making uneducated guesses about their upbringing.

Growing up without self-confidence isn't something that is only for poor people. It's a personality trait that people across all classes share.

What about growing up ugly? Ugly people also suffer from lack of self-confidence, that the "good looking popular kids" are better than them.

Everyone has their crosses to bear, whether it's race, wealth, weight, beauty, etc. It's not all poor people have no self-confidence, plenty of people from poor backgrounds with plenty of self confidence.

And yes, you really have no idea what I've been through in my life or what my background is.

Discrimination based on looks seems to be the last acceptable form of discrimination. Nobody seems to think that the fact that all 20 Academy Award acting nominees are well above the median in attractiveness constitutes any form of prejudice:

http://s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/onevive/staging/inter...

(and the same goes for most years)

"Yet this OP disproved this. So I don't get what the point is."

From the blog:

"David and I are living proof that if we can upgrade and improve the way we think, and overcome our mindset inequality, then maybe we can help others do the same"

Yes the blog clearly states that its not impossible, the OP is simply sharing how he overcame hurdles despite the challenges he faced being poor. It's meant to help others do the same and share insight.

That's like saying "The fastest human can run at 27mph. That means it can't be that hard and most people should be able to do it. They just aren't trying hard enough."

You're missing the point. Privilege/inequality isn't about something being possible/impossible, it's about something being systemically harder for a whole section of the population. That this exists in Silicon Valley is a fact.

Whether this is good or bad, something to be fixed or not, is a matter of opinion.

The title of the post is Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley. But the post proves that there isn't. So at best, the title is terrible.

Your claim doesn't make sense to me. The author does not prove there isn't privilege and inequality in SV. He only shares his story of how he overcame a decidedly unprivileged background. If the expected value of my bet in a game of craps is negative and I still win, that doesn't mean the odds weren't against me.

Nope. The poster proved that you CAN overcome the handicap. The fact that you can overcome some limitation doesn't mean that the limitation wasn't there to begin with.

It's an n of 1 experiential depiction of what the person went through, combined with the attempt at extracting the points in which that n of 1 had to overcome certain challenges. It also hypothesizes that there are similar challenges that immigrants and lower income folks go through. Commenters on the post resonate with it, so I think it definitely exists despite another segment of the same economic population also existing that may not share similar challenges. Whether these challenges are more prevalent on the lower income segment of the population or immigrants versus the general population is up to a broader study. The article sparks the conversation with his post though, so I think it's worth giving it the respect of sharing it with the public and the possibility (as validated by a few comments already) that it may in fact also be a shared experience by a percentage of lower income, immigrant populations.

Yes, exactly, I agree with you that it's anecdotal, but the article make broad claims as to what poor people are like.

That's fair. My suspicion is that portion of the blog post is a claim/hypothesis on the average persons within that economic segment ('poor people') who start a startup. Certainly that hypothesis could be wrong, and the post is meant to spark a conversation and describe the experiences of the author.

On another note, I suspect a portion of the motivation for the post was also in part sparked by the "Privilege and Inequality in Silicon Valley" in which does exist (see other folks comments); however, the post is more about the n of 1 experience, the challenges faced within building a startup, and the hypothesis that it may resonate with others facing that startup experience. I think what you're seeing in the comments is the resonating of the title in addition to the content of the piece. I personally believe these are two distinct issues: 1- building a successful startup coming from that background, 2- working in the SV/tech companies with ivy leaguers who tend to grow up in higher economic households / have experienced different lives therein making it harder to relate/fit in for those with diff backgrounds. It's certainly a deeper discussion. Wealthy people can have tremendous insecurities around sharing their wealthy therein can feel isolated. (ex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o46HH-TfNY )

One guy made it up the mountain by walking instead of taking the gondola. So it must be easy! Inequality solved!