Comment by Thorentis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Thorentis | Hacker News Reader

(From Nathan's Twitter after this: https://mobile.twitter.com/NathanTankus/status/1278777095670...)

> I do have a credential- the intersection of my whiteness, maleness and cisness.

Wow, wasn't it just yesterday a post blew up about political correctness gone mad?

I suppose Nathan wanted to get in first and "apologise" for his whiteness, before his rise to fame (which has coincided with the rise of a... particular socio-political movement) punishes him for it.

Isn't it enough to just say "if you're good at something, you don't need a degree"?. But no. He took to Twitter to perpetuate the woke, self-denigrating culture of white Twitter to ensure that his success wasn't hampered by the mob. PC culture has reduced people to snivelling, grovelling shadows of themselves that can't think for themselves.

Forget blind-hiring practices! Should we be putting disclaimers on our resumes that points out if we're a white cis-male so that a company can appropriately punish us for the sin of being born a particular sex and race?

This kind of rant is just as boring as any other that would be considered "PC" just for the sake of it and it works by the same logic of first and foremost not being charitable to what was intended/tried to be communicated to then deliberately making up wrong interpretation to try to conjure up ridicule, so yeah, tell me how is it not the same shit on an inverted signal? Seems though that he actually has something else to add rather just acting out butthurt or laying down The New Law, plus he also writes with some humility something which I grew up thinking it's a good thing.

I'm not uncritical of "PC culture" or whatever you wanna call it, I call it left-moralism and I don't like it because it's also a lot of times entirely based on being uncharitable or purposefully misinterpreting others, which is no good for making sense of stuff, I do however care first about if there's truth on statements I may be reading/listening and second about if it brings me or others emotions in one way or another, and that I call: reading/listening.

My rant wasn't about his intentions. He almost certainly had good intentions. I'm sad that his good nature has been corrupted by the current PC trend, and that he is suffering from imposter syndrome where he is attributing his success to his "whiteness".

When you read that much into a text, how can you be sure you're not projecting your own conceptions and stereotypes on it? It's impossible. Nobody really has access to the cogs running inside ppls minds, you're just claiming you know his ulterior motives. Plus, I'd have to assume that not only you have this special knowledge but that it surpasses the authors own words directly saying otherwise(1), sorry, I can't trust that thought and I do not follow your conclusions. I just don't buy it.

I haven't talked about 'intentions' anywhere either, I criticized your reasoning and you restated your beliefs. More on what I meant by "uncharitableness" is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

(1):

"This isn't to bemoan or disclaim my success or my hard work. The point is there are plenty of people who have worked just as hard as me, and many harder than me, who aren't having the success I am. It takes my social credentials to take a glidepath to the most interesting and advanced subjects."

"I don't feel guilty for my success but I won't be satisfied until I see a Black trans person given the social license to do what I've done"

> "I don't feel guilty for my success but I won't be satisfied until I see a Black trans person given the social license to do what I've done"

"I can't enjoy eating until there are no hungry children in Africa". Good intentions, not a healthy way to live in my opinion.

I see what you mean. I mean, nobody should be expected to be always tuned in on this sort of stuff, much less so to, and this is something I specifically think is very wrong, to forget that whatever one may have learned, he was once ignorant of it that this is absolutely natural and normal and should be treated as such, inclusive to those that think they've gotten the absolute unquestionable knowledge.

So, any kind of moralism is just bullshit to me, and this just goes back to the "charity gap" I meant. Ppl going overboard with sermons, that is completely misguided, I don't think that was specifically the case here but I know what you're talking about.

To me this comes from insights I had from philosophy & stoicism, for the whole it's a much more complicated matter.

Or - get this - he genuinely believes that and isn't playing some three-dimensional career chess contrivance.

That's very likely. Nobody is immune from this trend. Despite his great accomplishments in a field in which you usually need a degree, he is now feeling guilty about how maybe he only achieved success because he was white. This is the 2020 version of imposter syndrome. Everybody feels imposter syndrome when they have unexpected success. This is the woke Twitter version of it.

Or he recognizes that part of his success came down to skin color alone. That a black person who took the exact same actions as him would’ve come out less successful.

The only data people use to back this up is "how many black economists are there?". It's as if people's knowledge of statistics completely goes out the window when it comes to this issue. Show me a black person without a degree, with an equal or greater knowledge of economics than Nathan, and with a website and newsletter following, who was denied entry to conferences because of their skin color.

You can't just pluck out one variable and compare them head to head. There are so many other variables that account for success: family support, educational background, financial position, work experience, etc. Boiling everything down to race is unhelpful and doesn't solve any problem.

> family support, educational background, financial position,

All of which are harder to come by or worse on average for black Americans, because of the US's history of race-based slavery and racial discrimination.

Not denying the history of slavery and discrimination, but [citation needed] for causal link to the modern day, and if there is a statistically significant difference in ascending the "social ladder" between poor, uneducated whites and poor, uneducated blacks.

https://www.epi.org/blog/housing-discrimination-underpins-th...

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2020/02/27/examining...

There's a couple articles there's plenty more out there, just Google "racial wealth gap". IMO it is also just common sense, wealth is passed down from generation to generation and black Americans have never been given the opportunity to build much wealth until very recently (but are still held back by the judicial system). There's been very little/no wealth to pass down. This is compunded by the fact that the education system in the US is tied to property value.

> statistically significant difference in ascending the "social ladder" between poor, uneducated whites and poor, uneducated blacks.

I honestly haven't done much reading on that. Here's a study I found quicky though: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353

I believe the best way to end racism is to address wealth inequality. This could help both poor black kids and poor white kids.

Slavery is to blame for lack of family support? That’s a new take.

I’m also curious how far this thing is meant to go, at what point do black Americans become fully independent and responsible for themselves again?

Black Americans have never been fully independent from racially-based socioeconomic discrimination in the United States. You've also conveniently ignored GP's additional condition: racial discrimination.

The Prison Industrial Complex and the War on Drugs systematically dismantled the nuclear black family across the United States - this is not a new take. Take it from Lee Atwater, Reagan strategist and co-architect of the Southern Strategy:

>Atwater: Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "N-----, n-----, n-----". By 1968 you can't say "n-----*"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this", is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N-----, n-----". So, any way you look at it, race is coming on the back-burner.

A black man around Nathan's age would have been born in the middle of the Clinton-era when the government was going "tough on crime." They would have been born in the wake of the Central Park Five case, for perspective, and grown up in the shadow of Superpredator Theory. This before even unpacking the financial and social disenfranchisement of the Jim Crow era and the systematic and brutal dissolution of black wealth ala the Tulsa Race Massacre.

I’m sorry maybe I’m missing the forest for the trees here, did you answer the question of when black Americans will be responsible for themselves? I am all for reparations to be clear, I think the impact of slavery has put them at a severe disadvantage (perhaps stifling their ability to ever climb out of socioeconomic situations) but to fully support the idea I need to know what the plan is. At what point is everyone’s potential considered equal? If the answer is “never” then obviously reparations is not a valid solution and could even be considered harmful (if we look at “potential” as “acceleration” then at some point increasing that value will cause the “velocity” to become so great that we end up right back where we started with some demographic far beyond the rest)

When race stops being a significant variable for success or failure.

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