Reading debates like this makes me sad. I realize that just like everything else, feminism also is a tool that different people can use for different purposes. Some people can use it to support empathy towards other human beings. Some people use it to deny empathy towards other human beings. Somehow the latter seem more prominent on the internet. There is something in the impersonal online communication that emphasises sociopathic traits in people. When in real life you see a suffering man, you usually don't see feminists running to him screaming "actually, I have it much worse!". But when you see a man writing about his suffering online, this is what often happens. Maybe it's because behaving like an asshole in real life is likely to bring you a punch in the face or at least a loss of status, while doing the same on internet generates page views and income, if you do it properly. Like polymathwannabe wrote, there is a meaningful definition of "privilege" (although I would prefer the word "advantage"), which is: "Maybe you are just a lucky person who doesn't have this problem, so you don't think about this problem, and you may even find it unbelievable, but for some other people this is an important factor in their lives." This is the core that makes sense. The part of the online discource that doesn't make sense is the frequent claim that this "privilege" is unidirectional: "If you separate people into two groups X and Y, exactly one of them will have problems that the other side doesn't see." There is an illogical jump from "group X has on average more problems than group Y" to "problems of the group X are a strict superset of problems of the group Y". This implicit assumption manifests in a debate when people from group Y are told to "check their privilege", but is assumed that people from group X have no provilege to check. (Unless we consider some other dimension, so e.g. people from X1 may have privilege over people from X2, but still never a privilege over

If I understood the story correctly, Scott Aaronson was attacked mostly for paying too little attention to the feminist (well, not only theirs) concept of "privilege". I will try to paraphrase the concept of "privilege" (if I understand it correctly) using the terms of statistics in a way that, I imagine, might lead someone to accept the concept. This way, hopefully, I will be able to clearer express myself. Suppose you can quantify suffering (let's use the word "suffering" even though in everyday language it is quite strong word, whereas I'll use it to describe even very small annoyances). And suppose you are trying to create a statistical model, that could predict total suffering of an individual without actually measuring his/her suffering without paying attention to a particular situation (just some kind of "total average suffering"), using explanatory variables that are easy to measure. Suppose you decide that you will use belonging to a specific social group of people as your explanatory variables. As you can see, nothing in these terms guarantees that this model will actually be good (i.e. if the error terms are symmetric, etc.), because, for example, it is not clear whether explanatory variables denoting whether a person belongs to a certain group are actually enough to make a model good, etc. If you try, for example, linear regression, you will obtain something like this: S = a + b_1*x_1 + ... b_n*x_n + e. In addition to that, you can have additional variables of the form x_i*x_j or x_i*(1-x_j) to model interaction between different variables. Here S is total suffering, a is an intercept term, x_i is an expanatory Boolean variable denoting whether a person belongs to an i-th social group (some groups are mutually exclusive, some aren't, for example, let's say that we assign 1 to blue eyed people and 0 to others), and if b_1 is negative, then b_1 could be said to measure "privilege" of people who belong to i-th group. If I understand correctly, people who