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Comment by faitswulff | Hacker News Reader

> A big example of this in my life was doing my MBA (I was a hardcore developer/dev manager at the time.) While many classmates had specific goals like leaving a career behind or breaking into investment banking, my thought was more like "I got the time, my employer will pay tuition, maybe this will be challenging and fun."

I think your anecdote also illustrates how people with the privilege to play can reinforce their advantages. When you don't have an employer willing to pay for you to play, it can be difficult to make the same kind of "natural" career changes, as one example.

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Really tired of the privilege stuff. My family emigrated to the US as penniless refugees just ten years prior to me starting at this company. I went to NYC public schools and a state university. I got very lucky having parents with high expectations, some good teachers along the way, and a natural interest in computers and problem solving. I thank god every day for that mix of things and for our ability to come to the US. But "privilege" sounds like I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth that somehow allowed me to skate through life and have people pay for my shit. Frankly, it goes the other way. When I was in junior highschool, my "privileged" classmates were playing with Sega and Nintendo while I was trying to figure out how to get the TRS-80 that I found in the trash, to work. Ironically, that kind of "play" enabled me to get whatever I got down the road. Virtuous cycles are a thing but to call everything "privileges" misses our own agency.

I didn't read it that way. My take on privilege is "currently being in a fortunate state". Doesn't imply you didn't earn it.

I consider myself privileged. Similar story with parents except I was raised by my aunt and uncle who were penniless immigrants to the US. They had their own kids to worry about so I was low priority. Half my clothes came from flea market bins. No tutoring, extracurriculars, etc. I was jealous of kids who could 'afford' $1.25 school lunches.

I would even say that I was privileged at the time that I wasn't raised by abusive alcoholics and that at least my adoptive family valued education. And I never had to worry about starving.

This led to the virtuous cycle where I have a lot of free time today.

I live in Romania now and when people say I'm privileged I agree.

Gotcha - I agree with that, and the term I would use is "virtuous cycle" because at least to my ear, that motivates one to take action that creates such cycles (eg: I am going to save a dollar now because over months and years it puts me in a financially better position, I am going to watch a video about programming instead of a gamer stream because it builds up my skills base, etc.)

Privilege on the other hand reads like "something you have and I don't and therefore I can never catch up" - which in turn leads one to be passive and not believe that their actions can alter what kind of cycle they are in.

Maybe it's linguistic nuance that not everyone sees the same way (eg: you see it differently) but it seems to me that most discourse on "privilege" has to do with "how do we take it away from others / use it to justify our own relative lack of success" rather than "ok I get the concept, what opportunities to I have to build up such 'privilege' for myself and my family?"

That's a good point about the linguisitic connotations. faitswulff's comment reads so much better to me when you just replace the word 'privilege' with 'virtuous cycle' or 'snowball effect'.

Exactly, for any good thing that happens to anyone it's always easy to find some 'privilege' that enabled it. The fact that it's so easy to do so means it's not a very interesting exercise at all.

On a personal note, it’s hard to determine what measure of my success was my own doing, but looking back over my life I can see so many things that I had absolutely no control over that led to where I am today. What that inspires in me is gratitude and humility, and makes me much less judgmental when I hear others stories of their success and failure.

Yes, that's a good point. I can see that it would be worthwile to do privately, for that purpose.

You don't have to take it personally.

I do kind of wonder if education, under the right circumstances, is basically organized play.

Right? Like, "we're just playing with derivatives today, but maybe one day your ability to calculate rate of flow is going to come in really handy as a real life skill"

Yup. As I understand the history, Newton was aware of the co-development of calculus and physics, because he was the one doing it -- with no concern for real life skills. A lot of the math techniques used in science and engineering were first developed on an abstract basis by mathematicians with no concern for useful applications.

But the educational process has to serve two needs. It serves as a place for people to develop intellectually, but also to make themselves employable if they want to be. Those two tracks may be completely mixed together in each class, but the students who are in it for "play" are definitely there. I was one of those students. I came from a middle class family, but I gave relatively little thought to my future career during college.

Education might be. School certainly isn’t.

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