It feels to me like I fell into programming, like it just happened that I graduated college with a skill that was highly in demand. But how did I end up here? Because of my race and gender people were more likely to see me as a potential engineer and take my efforts seriously. Because my parents could afford a computer in the 1980s there was one around for me to learn on. Because they could afford good schooling for me there were classes where I could practice this skill and study the theory behind it. It's hard to know the chain of causality that led to me getting into programming, but it's substantially less likely that I'd be here if I'd not had these advantages along the way.
If you think of privilege as something you have that makes you a bad person, if you know the word and know it applies to you but you try to hide and dismiss your privilege, to find axes along which you have less of it, that's only marginally more helpful than if you were to deny your privilege entirely and insist that all your accomplishments in life have been due to your efforts alone. Having privilege puts you in position where you have an outsized ability to effect change. The best response to privilege is to turn it to fixing the situation that led you to having these major advantages over others.
If I look at my situation, my race, class, and gender privilege have been helpful, but my nationality privilege is by far my biggest unearned advantage. Someone at the poverty line in the US earns more than 90% of people in the world, even after adjusting for money going farther in poorer countries. This is not to minimize the suffering of people in the US, along any dimension, but to illustrate the extent of the problem and the work required. With so much need, how could I possibly justify keeping my luck to myself?
So I earn to give. I can't reject my privilege, I can't give it back, the best I can do is use it to give back.
I also posted this on my blog.
I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply anything about your motivations (and I expected they were good), and I should have said that explicitly. I'm also sorry I hurt you. :(
I'll try to explain the way in which it read like an ad hominem attack (which is not to say that it was one, but an explanation of why it engendered some negative reactions). Jeff presented an argument. You responded, saying something which sounded close to "I understand why you've written this post, but you can do better." While this is supportive at a surface level, it also sounds like perhaps Jeff doesn't really understand why he wrote the post, and if he did understand, maybe he wouldn't agree with it. That was the chain which led me to say it looked like an ad hominem (I'm not sure whether the term exactly fits, but I don't know a better one).
Note that none of these negative things were implied by what you said -- it was all implicature. Because you wrote a reasonably long response which gave an alternative explanation for Jeff's post while not engaging with the object-level content, a salient explanation was that you disagreed with the argument and were trying to put it down. I think if you'd cancelled the implicature by adding a statement like "I agree with the argument" or "I'm sure this isn't the only reason you've written this" then you would have got rather less negative responses.
Sorry again for the confusion that comes in these online discussions.
Nice anti-apology, Owen. Since you are super-intelligent, you know the meaning of what people say even when they don't know themselves, right? You still maintain that Dale implicated Jeff did something wrong. If that were the case then whenever anyone says to his friend, “Don't let the haters you drag you to their level.” or “He ain't worth it.” he is in fact insulting his friend by implicating he has done something wrong. The response I see to this advice is usually “Thanks, man. You're a good friend.” Are all these people too stupid to know they are bein... (read more)