4 ms·

Damn that’s scary. A world where no one has anything in common. I’m in my 30s and my friends and I reference songs from our childhood all the time. Shows and ca

Damn that’s scary. A world where no one has anything in common. I’m in my 30s and my friends and I reference songs from our childhood all the time. Shows and candy and all sorts of things.

Jach 6y ago
Remember the 90s? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pa6SGYWADU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pa6SGYWADU E.D. Hirsch, Jr. wrote "Cultural Literacy" in 1987, with an update in 2002 as "The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy". It's a huge collection of thousands of words/phrases/concepts/devices/people/places/etc, across multiple categories, that most Americans will already know the majority of their meanings, or at least find them somewhat familiar. I personally like randomly looking at the proverbs and idioms and sometimes finding parallels in other languages. It'd be interesting to go through it at random with a 7th grader and see what they've picked up -- like who says "there's more than one way to skin a cat" these days, but also who grew up in the US and doesn't understand its meaning? The book contends that about 80% of the knowledge shared by the literate has not changed for over a hundred years. Meanwhile for the 20% that changes (or is brand new) Asimov once wrote a chapter (9 in http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/asimov-on-numbers.pdf http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/asimov-on-numbers...) on how so much once-common knowledge has been happily forgotten -- who needs to know about compound addition? For the professional context, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a219064.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a219064.pdf et al. claim you need to know 70k plus or minus 20k things in your field to be an effective expert. I think it's also why it can be easily rewarding to chat about work with colleagues, you both have a lot in common just on the basis of the shared profession. In short, I wouldn't worry about running out of shared knowledge, nor even shared preferences and tastes, for yourself or for the world.
CydeWeys 6y ago
If you don't have anything in common with others then you're both mutually doing a really bad job of sharing your favorites with each other. I love getting musical recommendations from friends, and most of my very favorite music ever comes by way of friends, rather than me having "discovered" it "independently" (whatever that even means).
- CincinnatiMan 6y ago
  Interesting point. What helped you become friends with those people in the first place? For myself it's usually a common background or shared interest in something, which for example enables us to jokingly rank the best video games, which we are all familiar with from our childhood.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    Honestly it's mostly about collocation, which studies have shown to be the most powerful factor in friendship formation. My best long-running friends that I'm still in regular contact with are all people that I met freshman/sophomore year of college because we lived on the same floor in the dorms. Now obviously most of the people on my floor I didn't make friends with, but I did make friends with the ones that I got along with. And yes there's some shared interests involved as part of that, but proximity was more important. I was in the CS major and I actually didn't make a lot of friends in the major at all; we didn't gel well for whatever reason and the classroom environment wasn't suitable for getting to know people. So my college friends ended up being a diversity of majors plus a lot of landscape architecture majors, because my most outgoing friend was in that major and he made a lot of friends in the major because of the nature of it (lots of time spent together in close quarters in the studio doing project work). So I wouldn't say I've explicitly made many if any friends over shared interests in music, but then once I had friends for whatever other reasons, we shared a lot of music with each other. Hardly any of them weren't "in" to music, and indeed some of them quite the opposite; they ended up in a band together (and I would occasionally incompetently noodle along with them on vocals/bass/guitar, but I wasn't remotely good enough to play out like they were).
humantorso 6y ago
Ha thats a sweeping statement mate.....No one has anything in common?
rsynnott 6y ago
In a way, that would just be a return to before the second industrial revolution, when popular music and consumer products were more more regionalised. "Everyone in the world, or even the country listens to the same thing and drinks the same cola" is a recent phenomenon, and arguably not that valuable a phenomenon. In practice, though, I'm sure there's quite a bit of sharing musical tastes between friend and interest groups; it wouldn't be literally everyone listening to different things. I would wonder does increasing consumer choice ultimately erode generational identity a bit, though. So much of the "what is a boomer/gen X/millenial" is founded in what popular culture everyone was consuming in a given decade.

Damn that’s scary. A world where no one has anything in common. I’m in my 30s and my friends and I reference songs from our childhood all the time. Shows and candy and all sorts of things.

Jach 6y ago

Remember the 90s? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pa6SGYWADU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pa6SGYWADU E.D. Hirsch, Jr. wrote "Cultural Literacy" in 1987, with an update in 2002 as "The New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy". It's a huge collection of thousands of words/phrases/concepts/devices/people/places/etc, across multiple categories, that most Americans will already know the majority of their meanings, or at least find them somewhat familiar. I personally like randomly looking at the proverbs and idioms and sometimes finding parallels in other languages. It'd be interesting to go through it at random with a 7th grader and see what they've picked up -- like who says "there's more than one way to skin a cat" these days, but also who grew up in the US and doesn't understand its meaning? The book contends that about 80% of the knowledge shared by the literate has not changed for over a hundred years. Meanwhile for the 20% that changes (or is brand new) Asimov once wrote a chapter (9 in http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/asimov-on-numbers.pdf http://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/asimov-on-numbers...) on how so much once-common knowledge has been happily forgotten -- who needs to know about compound addition? For the professional context, https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a219064.pdf https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a219064.pdf et al. claim you need to know 70k plus or minus 20k things in your field to be an effective expert. I think it's also why it can be easily rewarding to chat about work with colleagues, you both have a lot in common just on the basis of the shared profession. In short, I wouldn't worry about running out of shared knowledge, nor even shared preferences and tastes, for yourself or for the world.

CydeWeys 6y ago

If you don't have anything in common with others then you're both mutually doing a really bad job of sharing your favorites with each other. I love getting musical recommendations from friends, and most of my very favorite music ever comes by way of friends, rather than me having "discovered" it "independently" (whatever that even means).

CincinnatiMan 6y ago
Interesting point. What helped you become friends with those people in the first place? For myself it's usually a common background or shared interest in something, which for example enables us to jokingly rank the best video games, which we are all familiar with from our childhood.
- CydeWeys 6y ago
  Honestly it's mostly about collocation, which studies have shown to be the most powerful factor in friendship formation. My best long-running friends that I'm still in regular contact with are all people that I met freshman/sophomore year of college because we lived on the same floor in the dorms. Now obviously most of the people on my floor I didn't make friends with, but I did make friends with the ones that I got along with. And yes there's some shared interests involved as part of that, but proximity was more important. I was in the CS major and I actually didn't make a lot of friends in the major at all; we didn't gel well for whatever reason and the classroom environment wasn't suitable for getting to know people. So my college friends ended up being a diversity of majors plus a lot of landscape architecture majors, because my most outgoing friend was in that major and he made a lot of friends in the major because of the nature of it (lots of time spent together in close quarters in the studio doing project work). So I wouldn't say I've explicitly made many if any friends over shared interests in music, but then once I had friends for whatever other reasons, we shared a lot of music with each other. Hardly any of them weren't "in" to music, and indeed some of them quite the opposite; they ended up in a band together (and I would occasionally incompetently noodle along with them on vocals/bass/guitar, but I wasn't remotely good enough to play out like they were).

humantorso 6y ago

Ha thats a sweeping statement mate.....No one has anything in common?

rsynnott 6y ago

In a way, that would just be a return to before the second industrial revolution, when popular music and consumer products were more more regionalised. "Everyone in the world, or even the country listens to the same thing and drinks the same cola" is a recent phenomenon, and arguably not that valuable a phenomenon. In practice, though, I'm sure there's quite a bit of sharing musical tastes between friend and interest groups; it wouldn't be literally everyone listening to different things. I would wonder does increasing consumer choice ultimately erode generational identity a bit, though. So much of the "what is a boomer/gen X/millenial" is founded in what popular culture everyone was consuming in a given decade.