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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

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.

wredcoll 1y ago
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.
- unsupp0rted 1y ago
  Do you believe the same about company cultures?
  - wredcoll 1y ago
    Companies are much smaller and are made of people specifically chosen to be hired and then kept employed. So not really, no.
- fuzzfactor 1y ago
  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 :) You 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 go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9JrPLtVak0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9JrPLtVak0 upvotes for everyone
  - unsupp0rted 1y ago
    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.
    - fuzzfactor 1y ago
      >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 :\
      - unsupp0rted 1y ago
        > 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.
mmarian 1y ago
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.
- unsupp0rted 1y ago
  I’m being intentionally vague to avoid blowback
  - mmarian 1y ago
    Fair enough, but without going into specifics, don't you think history and geography has a lot more to do with it than culture?
    - unsupp0rted 1y ago
      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.
    - fuzzfactor 1y ago
      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.
    - iambateman 1y ago
      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.
iambateman 1y ago
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.
- unsupp0rted 1y ago
  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?
  - iambateman 1y ago
    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.
ompogUe 1y ago
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.
freetinker 1y ago
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.
- unsupp0rted 1y ago
  That's like saying air is neither "good" nor "bad". There is bad air quality for humans. There is bad culture quality for humans.
nis0s 1y ago
> 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.

wredcoll 1y ago

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.

unsupp0rted 1y ago
Do you believe the same about company cultures?
- wredcoll 1y ago
  Companies are much smaller and are made of people specifically chosen to be hired and then kept employed. So not really, no.
fuzzfactor 1y ago
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 :) You 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 go https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9JrPLtVak0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9JrPLtVak0 upvotes for everyone
- unsupp0rted 1y ago
  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.
  - fuzzfactor 1y ago
    >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 :\
    - unsupp0rted 1y ago
      > 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.

mmarian 1y ago

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.

unsupp0rted 1y ago
I’m being intentionally vague to avoid blowback
- mmarian 1y ago
  Fair enough, but without going into specifics, don't you think history and geography has a lot more to do with it than culture?
  - unsupp0rted 1y ago
    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.
  - fuzzfactor 1y ago
    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.
  - iambateman 1y ago
    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.

iambateman 1y ago

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.

unsupp0rted 1y ago
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?
- iambateman 1y ago
  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.

ompogUe 1y ago

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.

freetinker 1y ago

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.

unsupp0rted 1y ago
That's like saying air is neither "good" nor "bad". There is bad air quality for humans. There is bad culture quality for humans.

nis0s 1y ago

> 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.