Release Date: August 19, 2022

DISCLAIMER: Some hard and difficult topics. If you are easily offended, this may not be for you. There are sometimes some hard topics and hard truths, and if you are not ready for it, i suggest maybe to revisit at a later time when you do feel more prepared.

Privilege

Welcome to Eclipsed Views

Where we take difficult topics and try to identify what’s blocking your view. Try to unlearn and rewash and possibly rewire our brains since we don’t seem to be having much luck changing other people’s views. Full Topics List

Street Epistemology - Socratic Questioning

I got interested in doing these podcasts through Street Epistemology, which is a mode of Socratic questioning. You are asked questions to challenge your views, to see if the method you used to reach that conclusion is a reliable method to arrive at a conclusion.

• How did you come to that stance?

• Are those reasons legitimate enough to continue to hold that stance?

• Is this process a useful and efficient process to figuring out the truth

Conjecture

Conjecture - inference or opinion formed based on insufficient evidence.

How often do we form opinions based on insufficient evidence? How do you know when you have enough evidence to form an opinion?

Biases

Bias - a personal and sometimes unreasoned judgment

We are all citizens, colleagues, professionals, consumers, friends, family-members, teachers, learners, human beings first. How aware are you of your biases when forming opinions? Does a credential or life-experience make a person more or less credible? Can you keep the same level of open-mindedness after learning such a thing?

What’s Blocking YOUR view?

So we form an opinion. What would it take for you to change your opinion? If it has changed, what DID it take? Could it change again?

Topic - Privilege. How to be aware that you have it.

Our guests are Carolina Gonzalez and James Cordova. Friends of our since about 2005. Great and fun people.

Privilege - a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor.

1. On a scale of 1-100, How privileged are you? 0 being very little privilege(s), and 100 is having lots of privilege(s).

2. On a scale of 1-100, the effect of privilege on society, 0 being mostly negative and 100 being mostly positive.

3. What privileges are you aware you have?

4. How would you notice of another privilege you may have?

5. What purpose does privilege serve? Would you get rid of yours? Do you try to gain more?

In this episode we discuss privilege. Whenever I come across something that makes me think or question my stance on it, we add it to our list. This occurred earlier in 2022 or late 2021 with white privilege. It was a big topic of discussion. It almost had a very negative tone in media. Not to say certain privileges aren’t negative but I was being very influenced into thinking privilege is having a negative impact.

Gratitude

Upon having our discussion we realized privilege can also be many of the things you are grateful for. Things that we have come to take for granted. It slowly started making me realize that life owes us nothing. All the things we have that are beneficial to our lives, are privileges. They can be lost at anytime if we are not careful. There are somethings you can do to protect some of your privileges, but there are also some that are completely out of our control. Such as being tall or short. So it made me more grateful of even being stuck in traffic. You get to have this experience. Somebody else may be having a completely different and worse experience. Somebody may be having a better experience, but why would life owe me a better experience over someone else.

Expectation

We also came across the question, if we think of something as an expectation, are we more or less likely to think of it as a privilege? If we always have something, and then it is gone is when we usually realize the privileges you have.

Earned vs Unearned

Some privileges are earned, such as working hard, putting in time and effort to get a certain outcome. Some are not earned, as mentioned before, being short or tall. Both may come with its pros and cons, but we have little to no control over that. Should there be preferential treatment to a tall/short person over the other? What if it is for a task that would be easier for a taller or shorter person? But what if this trait has little to no effect on the task. The task is something that favors being good with numbers. Would it make sense to chose a tall or shorter person for this task? And maybe this is where we run in to problems, when we get that “peculiar benefit” for something that has little to no effect on the task at hand. Then people start to lose this benefit… without realizing it was a privilege. What outcomes does this start having on our society?

In any case give it a listen and see what you think and what conclusions you form. What would it take to change your view?