What fact do you wish everyone understood?
For me, I wish everyone knew that a 2-lane road with a center turn lane has the same carrying capacity as a 4-lane road. There’s a lot of 4-lane road that could be a lot safer with no tradeoff.
What fact would you like to share with everyone to make the world a better place?
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 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=N9JrPLtVak0upvotes 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 still think we're on the same page for the most part, I've long agreed with every word of your first comment.
Now there can also be a very big difference between living in a place versus being born & raised in that kind of place. The latter being far more depth of immersion than a tourist or long-term visitor, and is actually the kind of detail that makes the difference between whether one is indigenous to that environment or not.
Being born & raised in a "tourist town" surrounded by nothing but tourist towns is not all that common but may be extreme enough to give the kind of awareness that some indigenous "cultures" can present themselves to visitors in an almost completely imaginary way compared to "normal", and over the much longer term than others.
That's the same kind of feeling that I get in a place that's unusually good or unusually bad, but where they have lots more going on than tourism the dose is minuscule by comparison. Well I do recognize that a minor facade can be completely unintentional but just as difficult to see beyond.
Some people travel more than others too, or venture further from their origin, sometimes you need to play the role of a tourist, sometimes act the host. As well as you know how to do, in either case.
What about when other cultures come to visit you more than you visit them? A lot of the same familiarity can be built anyway.
When every visitor is from someplace different, they're not bringing much of their "culture" with them, rather they are relatively isolated and completely surrounded by whatever indigenous culture exists, for the better or worse, some things are just more inclusive or co-existable than others.
OTOH when there's a crowd from one single culture passing into a foreign area, an almost infinitely larger amount of culture comes along for the ride. If they stop to stay for very long this might be the first time when the indigenous host has to "contend" with a foreign culture beyond trivial accommodation.
This may be too challenging for some cultures to handle when you've got some lands where assimilation has been so successful that there's not a close second, and others not like that at all. And everything in between. The concept of better or worse can take on infinitely greater scale, maybe even reverse unexpectedly.
Then there's the part when you return to your origin, and your particular indigenous culture has been almost completely lost, all that remains are the scarce dwindling "outliers" but you yourself are not any more indigenous to any other place.
You could end up being an "ex-patriate in your own hometown".
From your further comments I think you might agree what it feels like, when the same place migrates from "unusually one way" to become "unusually the other", left to themselves the entropy is strongly from bad to worse rather than vice versa.
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.
This is a largely correct, but incomplete take imo. Cultures are neither “good” nor “bad”. Some are better than others at optimizing different outcomes. Of course, culture A might be objectively better or worse for you vs culture B - depending on what you value or prefer optimizing.
That's like saying air is neither "good" nor "bad". There is bad air quality for humans. There is bad culture quality for humans.
> But when it comes to national cultures we pretend that they're all comparable and all equally good. They are not.
I think it’s less about culture as people commonly think, i.e., dancing, music, food, clothes, stories, religion etc.
The cultural aspects which help or hinder societies are related to core beliefs (which religion may have some hand in forming, but not necessarily), philosophies and values passed across generations. Religion is the confounding factor of cultural impact, but notice there are countries with similar religions and histories, and dissimilar outcomes.
For this reason, I don’t blame the people who live in any one place because they were randomly born there without any choice. I blame the politicians and elites in their society who are responsible for shaping those parts of the culture which get distilled down to practical and actionable aspects on a day-to-day basis for other leaders, or people who are doing core work which impacts their economy.
Really, the development of such ideas and beliefs have all really been about how to deal with and navigate uncertainty. It also really doesn’t matter how conscientious your people are (they mostly are, almost everywhere) if the leaders are inept or incompetent or corrupt. But yes, there’s a baseline level of “corruption” in almost every country, what matters is where that baseline level is relative to other places.
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".
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1592406599
People aren't brains in jars connected to inconvenient bodies, humanity is inherently biological.
That’s the gist of phenomenal consciousness, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the human body or the human brain is particularly important for creating consciousness, or aspects of humanity that we like. Though, it seems they work well together. The human brain, in particular, is the best tool we have at hand currently for understanding the universe and how it works. I hope that we create a better brain than ours to figure out things we cannot, for any number of reasons.
I wish you understood what I wrote.
It would be more fruitful if you say what you think I am missing, shrug
To clarify what I meant: the human experience cannot exactly be created without a human body, but the exact form and matter of the body is immaterial for a higher-level conscious being. I am of the view that you cannot achieve an understanding of the world, or higher-level states of consciousness, without a body with which to experience physical phenomena, and maybe that’s only because we have incomplete models of physical phenomena.
Physics, it explains a lot about the natural world than people are willing to credit it, including aspects in neuroscience and cognitive psychology.
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?
Good question to take seriously.
But you got me?
If the simple answer is "things that money just can't buy" that would be a metric which ends up being equally gamed before you know it. Like anything else.
How would you avoid that while remaining simple?
Well people may not want to take money out of the equation, but sometimes it cancels itself whether it appears on both sides of the equals sign or not :\
Which probably reduces to "the best metric is not an accurate measurement".
This in itself is apparently realistic even though it has not been proven in all cases.
Now there could be further simplification to a corollary; "the best metric is not a measurement" :0
But only over the limited range where P <> NP.
Or it could get more complicated than it already is.
Voting is required in Australia, and the participation rate is >90%.
There is a financial penalty for not voting.
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'
Essentially, nations have solidified into what they are because different people have different cultures, while their initial formation was motivated by organizing productivity and easing commerce. Governments help implement useful tools for keeping a people or a nation alive, and highly individualistic societies may not like them to some degree, which is understandable. But the anarcho-capitalism philosophy always leads to city states, which eventually leads to nations.
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.
exactly: and the 'parliament' is about end of 1700 (French Revolution)
The 'Passport' just about 100 years (visas even less)
We are stuck on very old ideas that cannot fit on how we evolved: but these ideas carry institutions, and these ends up as all institutions in history: conserving themselves, to the extreme, even if totally useless.
Trusting your neighbors is how governments start.
you mean that 'trusting' itself was the issue? I would call it 'delegate' (and maybe trusting delegation), delegation is something I do bit like, too: and federalism is a way to handle complex systems.
We could at least start copying from Switzerland: where they are proud to have people partecipate in decisions, directly (and not the opposite)
>you mean that 'trusting' itself was the issue?
It does always seem to come up.
Distrusting your neighbors is how armies 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.
That there are facts.
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
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.
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.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?