> the US has an extremely strong punitive blame culture Fwiw, here's a related outlier. I long ago had an anthropology professor who described his thesis on a

> the US has an extremely strong punitive blame culture Fwiw, here's a related outlier. I long ago had an anthropology professor who described his thesis on a small South American fishing community culture as, AFAIR very fuzzily ... Sh-t happens wasn't a concept. Anything goes wrong, it's some individual's intentional fault. So not long-ago pacific island "let's war on the neighboring island - this was so unusual, they must have done it to us". And not even Papau's ongoing "let's gossip together to decide who here is the witch causing these notable problems". It's "everything", all the time, intentionally, by family members and coworkers and neighbors. Some fish escaped the closing group net? Stop, figure out who intentionally let them go, and... I no longer recall the "and then what". But stub your toe? Rain harms your crop? Pay the local witch doctor to find out who put the whammy on you. And pay him to whammy them back. Resulting in interpersonal relationships that, pervasively, were toxically hostile. Singularly so in his experience. An antithesis to community warm fuzzies, charity, and blameless postmortems. Exploring broader context can be fun. In addition to saying, say, "extremely corrupt", there's "more corrupt than this other, less than that other, and similar in this way, different in that way". Nifty high-dimensional spaces. Are there Ashby-ish charts for subcultures? Is principle component clustering of culture surveys available? In customer design discussions, the differences between multiple proposals create a vocabulary for discussing the space. Sometimes having a "yay, we're better than that" touchstone can be useful. Like perhaps the USA lost something valuable when the USSR folded - it seemed a helpful set of "that proposal would make us too much more like them - that's not who we are" and "they're making us look bad" arguments faded out.