- The more you travel, the better you understand that there are differences between cultures and some cultures are better at specific things or worse at specific things.
Those specific things have such an outsized impact that it's obvious after living there for a bit that one culture is overall better or overall worse than another.
We're fine to compare company cultures and to insist that company cultures are decisive in company success. But when it comes to national cultures we pretend that they're all comparable and all equally good. They are not.
- I agree with you, however, to me, the local language has often been what I saw as an important factor in this. Not just he semantic structure of adjectives/nouns/verbs, but what the parts of different words mean that were obviously glued together into neologisms. The German "kindergarten"="child garden" comes immediately to mind. While I don't have any examples, I've talked to several Innu about this aspect of their words, and found it both beautiful and enlightening.
- Fascinating take. I’m American and have spent 4 months in Sweden, 2 months in Mexico, and weeks in a few other places.
A couple questions…
(1) How closely correlated is wealth to your cultural-quality opinion? (2) Sweden has generationally-better car culture than the US and it makes a difference. I believe that their sensibilities are worth learning from. Is that the kind of thing you’re thinking about?
I think it’s unfair to say that because place X has Y problem, it’s worse than place Z. But I do think that the world has a lot to teach our specific locality which can speed up improvement.
- If you take a bunch of Swedes and drop them into a foreign city, raising the city’s population by 15%, does life in that city get better or worse?
After say 5 ~ 15 years of adjustment, that is.
If you take a bunch of ___ and drop them into a Swedish city, raising its population by 15%, does life in that city get better or worse?
How many years until it gets better? Will even the 2nd or 3rd generation make it better?
- The book Factfulness is worth looking at. It points out that in Sweden, in about 1900, there were still open sewers. Lots of people emigrated from there (including my great-grandparents) because they believed America was a better choice.
It’s remarkable how much improvement can happen in a century.
- I had the opposite experience.
It is of course possible to make value judgments, there are in fact good things and bad things, but people and their cultures are far too complicated to categorize that way.
We can talk about "things that frequently happen" and whether those are good or bad, but even determining why they happen or how to encourage or discourage them has so far seemed beyond modern science.
- Do you believe the same about company cultures?
- Companies are much smaller and are made of people specifically chosen to be hired and then kept employed. So not really, no.
- What happens when naive young "Woodstock hippie" musicians tour other countries for the first time way back when digital communication was almost non-existent, and of course all parts of the world not nearly as familiar with each other as they are now?
They write a song about it :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9JrPLtVak0You know 1968 was a real fine year We've been around the world and now it's clear It's the same all over (same all over) Well it's the same all over (same all over) Well it's the same all over good people everywhere you goupvotes for everyone
- That's not a good measure. You have to live in a place for a while as a normal person (not a touring musician, even if a hippie) and be forced to do mundane things there before you can really gauge what you're up against.
Get a bank account, get yelled at by the garbage man, walk through the same park every Tuesday, etc
Usually it takes a minimum of 3 months or so. Sometimes 5 minutes is enough, sometimes it takes a couple years.
- >do mundane things there before you can really gauge what you're up against.
I do agree completely but all it takes is one good person who is capable of making even a passing stranger feel welcome and you've got the example for cross-cultural co-operation. Even within an overall society dominated by cultural antagonism.
>You have to live in a place for a while as a normal person
This would be semantic to the extreme, but what if the only place you could live as a normal person is the place you are indigenous from? Like it was nobody's fault but it had always been that way and there was not very much you could do about it [0].
Of course everybody is indigenous to somewhere, but what if that very culture was lost or very nearly completely lost during your own lifetime? And you could see it coming from a young age because when it happens that fast it's obvious in ways that very few would be able to perceive otherwise.
[0] Your only choices would narrow down to; not doing very much about it vs not doing anything about it :\
- > all it takes is one good person who is capable of making even a passing stranger feel welcome
No, that's not all it takes. After a bit of time in a place your brain can tell that's an outlier, and while it's a nice moment, it doesn't warrant updating your priors. For a tourist though, that's all it takes. The local people are "so kind" and "so welcoming" after that one outlier.
Most people with an open mind can tell that very good cultures are very good, even if their own native culture is vastly different.
You can tell when you're in Singapore, for example, that everything is unusually good (or put another way: that everything is way better than it is in the general region).
And you can tell when you're in... um, I won't say... that everything is unusually bad. And it doesn't matter if you're a Mongolian nomad or a SF Bay technocrat or from a former soviet country that no longer exists, you can still tell which places are objectively very good or very bad.
But not as a tourist.
- I'm curious which cultures you think are better than others, and why. I personally think most cultural differences can be explained by history and geography.
- I’m being intentionally vague to avoid blowback
- Fair enough, but without going into specifics, don't you think history and geography has a lot more to do with it than culture?
- To get specific, if SC had the same gun-safety culture as NY, we could save several hundred lives per year.
Now, the reason SC has our particular gun-safety culture has a lot to do with the civil war, which is history. It’s hard to disentangle what is culture vs what is history.
But the bottom line is that real people die of preventable gunshot wounds because we don’t have the political will to do anything about it.
Does that make SC worse than NY? In general I don’t know, but we certainly have a worse tolerance for violence, which is something I grieve as a South Carolinian.
- It can be history and geography or magic fairy dust that generated the culture as it is in the here and now. And that culture is bad: worse than a good culture next door.
- I would add that natural resources and/or control of resources can strongly shape cultural development (or lack thereof), and can often be intertwined with geography to a large extent.
Also, history may not even need to be very intertwined for a major one-time event to trigger a proportional pivot in culture going forward.
- I wish everyone understood that they don't know very much.
At times, especially when I lived in Portland, I would wish people understood that not everyone likes dogs.
- Schooling should require everyone to read "You Are Not So Smart".
- People aren't brains in jars connected to inconvenient bodies, humanity is inherently biological.
- Physics, it explains a lot about the natural world than people are willing to credit it, including aspects in neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
- Voting is required in Australia, and the participation rate is >90%.
There is a financial penalty for not voting.
- Avoid cursing others—negative energy doesn't disappear; it must go somewhere, and often, it comes back to you, affecting your mind and body.
- The best metric to optimize for is not money
- What is the best metric to optimize for?
- that the whole idea of a Nation is not consistent (to be polite)
That humans are solving problems since the very beginning with no priests or government.
Trust your peers, your neighbour: trust even anybody in the street (even at night) but do start to doubt any 'government'
- I remember in my politics classes how the professor said that the concept of a nation only existed for a couple hundred years. Crazy when you think about it.
- Trusting your neighbors is how governments start.
- A long list, but maybe I would start with thermodynamics.
- Now this is getting scientific, but it helps.
Plenty of people are just fine without wanting to do any equations or even take any temperature readings sometimes, and that's OK.
It can still be fully grasped that there "exists" a state of Thermodynamic Equilibrium, it's just usually not well achieved.
I would say when people wish for it, even with all their might, it usually fails to come true ;)
- Yes, just basic understanding of entropy existing. Things moving towards chaos. Getting order needs to expend energy. Getting back to order from chaos sometime being impossible. That there is not free lunches like perpetual machines.
- a 2-lane road with a center turn lane has the same capacity as 4 lanes
Wut?
- It’s not literally the exact same, but it’s closer than people think.
Many four-lane roads could be two-lane roads with a turn lane and not make any difference to traffic.
- understand digital advertisement incentives and modern marketing tactics and techniques
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40675527
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43187603
maybe this could help people to be more thoughtful on how they invest their attention
- That there are facts.
- There's a cost to everything
- I've seen this written in centuries-old stone for all to see, so somebody must have wanted "everyone" to understand forever:
FRVGALITY is the Mother of all VIRTVES
Then there's some more things like that from previous centuries too, which can really stand the test of time, plus from a scientific point of view.
These may not be as many facts as they are "philosophies", but here the FACT is, these are some of the very most proven approaches that ACTUALLY DID make America great to begin with. Not many things come close.
Temperance
Silence
Order
Resolution
Frugality
Industry
Sincerity
Justice
Moderation
Cleanliness
Tranquillity
Chastity
Humility
https://www.ushistory.org/franklin/autobiography/page38.htm
>By design, Mr. Franklin originally laid out the list of virtues in the order that we have them today.
Anything less or in contradiction can do nothing other than stifle or reverse any greatness that remains.“My intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judged it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time, and, when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another… and, as the previous acquisition of some might facilitate the acquisition of certain others.”No American president has ever been expected to be more advanced than the nation's top scientist was when it comes to building a great nation. And when you take a good look at what kind of shoes that takes to fill, the top advisors to the President better be able to demonstrate at least some accomplishment that would compare to 18th century progress.
If you're in a position of authority in government, or aspiring to that, and you can't bring yourself to build on the framework that people like Franklin laid down for you, you're just wasting space that would be better occupied by someone who is not so far out-of-the-league.
- There is always a cost
- I wish people understood that America hasn't been an industrial economy for almost half a century, so comparing us to China et. al is like comparing the growth of a toddler to a 67-year-old pensioner.
- TANSTAAFL
- Really? I find modern americans far too obsessed with who is paying for what.
- Given that resources are finite, they must be distributed according to some type of rule-based framework, ideally an outcome-driven one. What alternative do you have in mind?
- "Resources are finite" is a trite observation that so rarely helps us discuss actual real world issues.
As an easy example, food in america is not finite in any meaningful way. There is, in fact, quite a bit of it. Making sure students in government schools aren't going hungry really isn't an issue of finite resources, it's much more complicated than that.
- Largely agreed. It's no surprise that a government elected by a brainwashed populace will treat public education as a threat to be eliminated rather than as a goal to be achieved.
But how does that answer the question of how resources -- which are still finite no matter how much you insist otherwise, given that it takes money to distribute food -- should be allocated? If we leave it up to the government, or to the people who elected said government, it's irrational to expect a fair outcome.
- >TANSTAAFL
Well you can't expect 100-year-old memes to die any time soon ;)
Famous saying coined by those who prefer a dog-eat-dog rat race and whose life's work often consists of urging things to grow closer to making this more universal.
When you do the math about the USA, there's been nothing free ever since the end of WWII. Any "giveaways" were already paid for well in advance by the sacrifices that were made back then.
The government could be providing gourmet cuisine to schoolchildren across-the-board by now, there would be far fewer underprivileged anyway if the "war dividend" would have been invested halfway wisely instead of being squandered mindlessly, or maliciously as the case may be.
- would u mind expanding on the 2-lane road vs 4-lane thing?
