To the extent that privilege claims are about ignorance, I think they’re likely to have a point. To the extent that they’re a claim that some people are guaranteed to be wrong, they’re ad hominem.
One really common case is when person A says something to the effect of, “I don’t see why B people don’t do X instead of complaining about fooism” — but X is an action that is (relatively easily) available to person A, but is systematically unavailable to B people. (And sometimes because of fooism.)
Or, X has been tried repeatedly in the history of B people, and has failed; but A doesn’t know that history.
Or, X is just ridiculously expensive (in money/time/energy) and B people are poor/busy/tired, or otherwise ill-placed to implement it.
Or, X is an attempt to solve the wrong problem, but A doesn’t have the practical experience to distinguish the actual problem from the situation at hand — A may be pattern-matching a situation into the wrong category.
Some of this post could totally be rephrased as being about “non-depressed-person privilege”, but the author doesn’t write like that.
Then the correct response is to point out that X is hard/impractical/ineffective, supporting your point with evidence or plausible arguments.
Asserting to know better because of your incommunicable personal experience, quite possibly affected by confirmation bias and whatnot, is not a way of arguing, it is a way of refusing to engage in intellectual discussion.
I can imagine people frustrated from having to explain the same concept online for the hundredth time; always to someone else; often to people who genuinely don’t know, but sometimes to trolls. That’s the moment where people are likely to point to a FAQ. That’s why we have the Sequences here. Etc.
The problem is that the FAQ (or the Sequences) usually do contain the full explanation, and sometimes even a place where that specific explanation can be debated. But the sentence “check your privilege” does not. It is not replacing hundreds of explanations with one, but hundreds of explanations with zero.
(Sure, I could google what “privilege” means, but then I’d get dozens of explanations, sometimes mutually contradictory. And I don’t know which of the versions the person had in mind. Or it can say that privilege means X or Y or Z, and it may seem to me that neither applies to what I have said, and I don’t know which one of them was supposed to apply to me. -- As a loose analogy, it is better to link people to a specific article in the Sequences, than to Sequences as a whole.)
I guess the solution would be to write a good “Privilege FAQ”. One written by a rational person, which would explain ways how to use it but also how to not use it, encourage people to link to specific subsections of it, and perhaps contain a short commentary to the most frustratingly repeated specific misunderstandings.
(Problem is, creating a good FAQ is hard work, and it may not be the same fun as bullying random people online. -- This applies to internet debates in general, not just specifically about privilege.)
To the extent that privilege claims are about ignorance,
Of course it is quite possible that people from certain backgrounds may tend to be ignorant about certain facts, but then when they say something factually incorrect in a public discussion, the correct answer is to just correct their errors with evidence and plausible arguments. Saying “you are privileged” at best adds no information and sets a hostile tone, at worst, if you can’t support your point with communicable evidence or plausible arguments, is an ad hominem.
As I understand it, a problem the privilege model is designed to address is people who ignorant about important difficulties, and are unwilling to listen. “Privilege” raises the temperature enough to get some people to bend. Of course, psycho-chemistry being what it is, it gets other people to become more rigid, to melt down, or to explode.
To the extent that privilege claims are about ignorance, I think they’re likely to have a point. To the extent that they’re a claim that some people are guaranteed to be wrong, they’re ad hominem.
One really common case is when person A says something to the effect of, “I don’t see why B people don’t do X instead of complaining about fooism” — but X is an action that is (relatively easily) available to person A, but is systematically unavailable to B people. (And sometimes because of fooism.)
Or, X has been tried repeatedly in the history of B people, and has failed; but A doesn’t know that history.
Or, X is just ridiculously expensive (in money/time/energy) and B people are poor/busy/tired, or otherwise ill-placed to implement it.
Or, X is an attempt to solve the wrong problem, but A doesn’t have the practical experience to distinguish the actual problem from the situation at hand — A may be pattern-matching a situation into the wrong category.
Some of this post could totally be rephrased as being about “non-depressed-person privilege”, but the author doesn’t write like that.
Then the correct response is to point out that X is hard/impractical/ineffective, supporting your point with evidence or plausible arguments.
Asserting to know better because of your incommunicable personal experience, quite possibly affected by confirmation bias and whatnot, is not a way of arguing, it is a way of refusing to engage in intellectual discussion.
I can imagine people frustrated from having to explain the same concept online for the hundredth time; always to someone else; often to people who genuinely don’t know, but sometimes to trolls. That’s the moment where people are likely to point to a FAQ. That’s why we have the Sequences here. Etc.
The problem is that the FAQ (or the Sequences) usually do contain the full explanation, and sometimes even a place where that specific explanation can be debated. But the sentence “check your privilege” does not. It is not replacing hundreds of explanations with one, but hundreds of explanations with zero.
(Sure, I could google what “privilege” means, but then I’d get dozens of explanations, sometimes mutually contradictory. And I don’t know which of the versions the person had in mind. Or it can say that privilege means X or Y or Z, and it may seem to me that neither applies to what I have said, and I don’t know which one of them was supposed to apply to me. -- As a loose analogy, it is better to link people to a specific article in the Sequences, than to Sequences as a whole.)
I guess the solution would be to write a good “Privilege FAQ”. One written by a rational person, which would explain ways how to use it but also how to not use it, encourage people to link to specific subsections of it, and perhaps contain a short commentary to the most frustratingly repeated specific misunderstandings.
(Problem is, creating a good FAQ is hard work, and it may not be the same fun as bullying random people online. -- This applies to internet debates in general, not just specifically about privilege.)
Of course it is quite possible that people from certain backgrounds may tend to be ignorant about certain facts, but then when they say something factually incorrect in a public discussion, the correct answer is to just correct their errors with evidence and plausible arguments.
Saying “you are privileged” at best adds no information and sets a hostile tone, at worst, if you can’t support your point with communicable evidence or plausible arguments, is an ad hominem.
As I understand it, a problem the privilege model is designed to address is people who ignorant about important difficulties, and are unwilling to listen. “Privilege” raises the temperature enough to get some people to bend. Of course, psycho-chemistry being what it is, it gets other people to become more rigid, to melt down, or to explode.
In a way that has no reason to correlate with the truth of the issue under discussion.
None of the typical reactions to “privilege” are reliably related to the truth of the matter.
That’s another problem with overuse of the “priviledge” concept: the more people throw it around, the less punch it packs.
Agreed, that’s a great way of putting it.