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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

Justin Bieber, Ellen DeGeneres, Kim Kardashian, Barack Obama, and Mark Zuckerberg

The celebs in the test. I'm not sure I could say anything meaningful about Bieber other than he's a pop star from Canada. Similar for Kardashian - Instagram influencer with lots of cosmetic surgery and makeup. Is the test expecting me to know other details beyond the completely inane and superficial?

It would be even worse if they tested on athletes. I haven't watched any of the big US sports in decades. NFL, NBA, MLB - no clue. I guess I could answer a few questions about World Tour cyclists, but that's not likely to be on a test outside of Belgium or Italy.

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I agree with you, so I did some quick research and: Bieber is very well known by the general population, Kardashians moreso. A large majority (70%+) watch a moderate to significant amount of live sports on TV. Anecdotally, interacting with normal people at my job agrees with this.

We're the non-neurotypical people they're talking about.

30% of the population is plenty for making friends. If choosing not to watch a lot of TV makes someone non-neurotypical, that’s a pretty scary standard. 75% of the population in the US is overweight or obese. Are we defining people with healthy weight as non-neurotypical too now?

I keep up with the Cardassians, so I guess I'd flunk this test quite spectacularly.

Yes, I wonder how the responses would be to "Describe Gul Dukat to someone who doesn't know him"

but see, we got our own celebrities and a way to talk about them. doesn't that kind of confirm the idea? the problem is just that the content of the test is to limited.

every group has their own language and people not in that group have a different one.

>we got our own celebrities and a way to talk about them

Maybe, but Gul Dukat isn't a celebrity, he's a character. The study isn't asking people about <character from currently popular movie or TV show>, but about real, living celebrities. If they asked about the #1 character in Bridgerton, whoever that is, that I think would be comparable.

It also doesn't help that they're mainly asking about current celebrities. A 60-year-old doesn't give a shit about the Kardashians or Justin Bieber. Obama probably. But some celebrity who was big 30-40 years ago would be of much more interest to them.

> Maybe, but Gul Dukat isn't a celebrity, he's a character.

That line can get blurry; see for instance Hatsune Miku.

Unless you know them personally, there's almost no difference between a celebrity and a well-known fictional character. Either way, you're learning a crafted story about a person that doesn't really exist. Kim Kardashian the person is a real human, but Kim Kardashian the celebrity is just as real a person as Dukat, a Gul in Cardassian Union.

Traveling across the developing world, I have been astonished at how many women even in countries with limited English skills follow the Kardashians (and the young men follow Andrew Tate). Yes, on one hand celebrities are silly, but on the other hand they have a global societal impact that nerds like us might not appreciate.

There is one thing with Bieber i can remember which somehow resonates to HN:

in this movie "never say never" (?), its from 2011/2012 IIRC(?), you see a perfect example how social media marketing is working.

(at least, Vaynerchuck said this once that this appears in the movie!:)

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