What fact do you wish everyone understood?
5 iambateman 61 8/3/2025, 4:20:30 PM
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?
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.
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.
They write a song about it :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N9JrPLtVak0upvotes for everyone
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.
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 :\
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.
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.
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.
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?
It’s remarkable how much improvement can happen in a century.
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.
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.
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.
At times, especially when I lived in Portland, I would wish people understood that not everyone likes dogs.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1592406599
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.
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.
There is a financial penalty for not voting.
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'
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.
The mass is hardly involved in this: and what they think, agree/disagree is not taken into account at all. Yes, they can be manipulated to agree and even go to battle to kill their neighbors. The manifest function could be "to set order and defend from the enemy", but latent reasons are others much less acceptable.
But yes, we classify what we have with the tools we know (or even think to know): there are a universe of possibilities which now we are not even able to investigate/test since we are ourselves the first censors of something different. I have EU background and know so well how conservatism wins: a general orientation advocating it is best to preserve everything as it is and opposing changes, in the Americas is a bit different (especially in the US).
What I see as a totally lost of opportunities is how we do not even accept tests, experiments.
I remember a pretty good book wrote by a US student who studied in Tuscany for a year: his shock was to see youngster (his age) to be even more conservative then their parents, not accepting any changes (in little and big things) on their peers: to speculate even further I think this is the main reason so many emigrated from Italy in the past, and so many are leaving nowadays the country (at around university time): what they find is a liberation in term of the number of possibilities to design their future (not just better salaries)
Reductive analysis will often find race or religion as a scapegoat for one thing or another, but there are many examples of thriving multicultural nation states, where the key to their success is a strong national identity beyond religion or race.
Why is this distinction important? Consider that immigration is a useful tool for statecraft and economies, but how useful it remains in the long term depends heavily on the integration of new members to the existing society; the onus is often put on the newcomers to assimilate, but integration is often lacking.
Considering the development of human societies up to this point, it’s evident that some ways of thinking are important to highlight and preserve for future generations, while others not so much. But that doesn’t have anything to do with race or religion, per se.
Early human settlements formed around the same idea: groups of people living together to produce a set of functions to contribute to a greater community, for safety and resource optimization. We can assume that these people possessed some degree of like-mindedness towards societal organization, which is why they went on to develop proto-cities etc. When viewed through the lens of a larger historical view, the importance of nation states is not merely about concentration of power or interests of the elites. I think there are more fundamental reasons why groups of humans formed a people, an identity, a culture etc. All of this is our way of stabbing in the darks of uncertainty, and dealing with why we’re here at all.
We could at least start copying from Switzerland: where they are proud to have people partecipate in decisions, directly (and not the opposite)
It does always seem to come up.
Distrusting your neighbors is how armies start.
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 ;)
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
Wut?
Many four-lane roads could be two-lane roads with a turn lane and not make any difference to traffic.
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.
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.
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.
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.