There's no substitute for living and working with the homeless in solidarity. If you want to learn real lessons about how they live their lives or about how they got into their situation, get off your chair and go work at a soup kitchen for a day. Trust me, they are just as eager to hear from you and also in need of a good friend.
Slightly related to HN: I liked the book "How to change your life in 7 steps" by John Bird. He is the founder of "The Big Issue", a newspaper the homeless sell in Britain. It is rather short, but talks about the issues of working with homeless people.
One snippet I found interesting is that many would invent fake drama stories about why they ended up being homeless ("my wife and children died"), to cover up their own failure.
There is a substitute, and that substitute is information. If you're claiming that you got new information from your "solidarity," you should be able to use that information to convince other people you're right. If the information you got convinces nobody but you, it's not data -- it's a bias.
This isn't about information. It's about experience. Just like you don't learn hacking by reading a book, you don't learn about homelessness until you put yourself in their shoes. Literally. The sad part is that the marginalized always become a statistic and that's in part why the problem persists.
This isn't about information. It's about experience.
You're taking the side of the guy who knows the CIA is controlling his thoughts, rather than the one who knows what schizophrenia is.
you don't learn about homelessness until you put yourself in their shoes. Literally.
You probably mean "Figuratively." "Literally" does not mean "Emphatically," it means "Literally."
You persist in claiming that you had a transformative experience, which changed your views without giving you any facts you can use to inform others. The usual term for having a belief that doesn't correspond with the facts is "bias." If my experience with homeless people convinced me that they need to be locked up, but the data implied that they were down on their luck and just needed shelter and a caring hand, you wouldn't be telling me that my personal experience trumps the data, just because I strongly believe in it.
Actually I do mean literally. Seriously, go immerse yourself in the culture that surrounds homelessness and actually try to be homeless for a day, or better, a week. Then write about what you learned.
What you'll find is that there is no "data." Yes some homeless people are criminals. Some have mental diseases. Some just couldn't pay their bills.
You can't quantify the problem because these people have no homes,jobs,medical records, or social security numbers. They have nothing. So again, it's not about having a "bias." It's about how you deal with the situation locally and you have to evaluate every homeless situation case by case.
"Literally," means "Not figuratively." So, if you say "I was in his shoes -- literally," you mean "I was not necessarily experiencing things from his perspective, but I was wearing his shoes."
You can't quantify the problem because these people have no homes,jobs,medical records, or social security numbers. They have nothing. So again, it's not about having a "bias.
"You can't have good information, so it's best to just try to make yourself feel good about your opinions, and then treat them as facts. Like, when I used to not own a scale, I decided I'd be happiest thinking I'd lost twenty pounds."
you have to evaluate every homeless situation case by case.
You have not talked about single cases. You have generalized, generalized, generalized. There are two basic ways to generalize: the way I do it (by looking at aggregate numbers that tell you something), or the way you do it (by thinking in terms of stories). Your way is dumb and counterproductive.
