Rejecting the premise that the environment shapes who we are and the type of people we become sounds extremely ignorant of the realities of history.
No, I reject that you can tell anything meaningful about the environment by country. Or even state. Or even neighborhood!
Japan itself could fit into the US 25 times by area.
Are kids raised in SF the same as those raised in Alabama? Or NY vs Phoenix? It'd be insane to make any generalities about a country so large and diverse, IMO.
Heck, kids in Loudoun county grow up completely differently than kids in Baltimore county. What does that tell us about the US, if anything?
I'm guessing Japan is the same, but I'm not educated enough to speak to it.
Correct. I just picked those two because of stark differences of two well known areas close to each other. But it can go down to even neighborhood, or even street in said neighborhood.
Sorry if my rambling seems confusing. I'm not against the idea that environment affects children. I'm against broad brush stroke categorization about how different countries behave.
Or even one individual on different days. It should be all chaos and noise and yet it's not because these "general" numbers get translated to a realistic "it's more/less likely" not "it's guaranteed".
You're arguing against comparisons you don't like, or feel make you look worse than others. In other words you want to get to arbitrarily define the brush width presumably based on where you feel you sit in the comparison.
Ok - pick any conservative country (say India or Indonesia). Now tell me that the chances of an average Indonesian woman wearing a bikini to a beach (pretty normal in most Western countries) is same as an average French woman?
Or for a less gender-charged example, chances of an average Saudi eating Pork vs an average American.
Note that I didn't say "every", I said "average".
The strongest predictor for both the French and the Indonesian is almost certainly going to be the individuals physique and and the second is probably going to be the country and prevailing culture in which the beach is located (i.e. what everyone else is wearing).
This kind of illustrates the point you're trying to disagree with. You can't just look at some sort of demographic based average and shoot from the hip and expect to hit anything.
I take it that you have either never been to a beach or the one you have been to is only open to athletes and supermodels.
> the second is probably going to be the country and prevailing culture in which the beach is located (i.e. what everyone else is wearing)
So you haven't had the chance of seeing Indonesian woman wearing full headgear and clothes covering their body having fun at a beach far away from Indonesia? Not joking, they were having a genuinely good time - from direct experience.
The world is much bigger and has far greater variety of people, customs and norms than you can imagine.
Have you been to the beach in the last 10yr. All manner of 1-pc swimsuits are arguably the default style for women.
>So you haven't had the chance of seeing Indonesian woman wearing full headgear and clothes covering their body having fun at a beach far away from Indonesia? Not joking, they were having a genuinely good time - from direct experience.
My mistake, I mixed up Indonesia and the Phillipines in my mind. No surprise muslim women will not be wearing bikinis. But the Westerners will also be far more modest in a setting where that is the prevailing default so....
>The world is much bigger and has far greater variety of people, customs and norms than you can imagine.
If looking down one's nose like that is what it takes to be cultured I'm glad I'm not.
Sometimes I can't tell when people are pulling chains, so in the interest of charity ^
They say that there are differences between even children living on two different roads in the same town, and these differences matter more than differences between countries, and therefore we should not make any kind of arguments based on nationality at all.
I disagree though, I do think that there are significant statistical differences growing up between, say, Afghanistan or Sweden. That does not mean that you can make claims about specific children in either country, but you can make generalizations about the population as a whole.
It seems to be to be a common failing in the west to underestimate just how big differences are between themselves and other cultures. The two cultures I have lived in, despite being Britain and one of its former colonies (and therefore partially anglophone, similar political system, lots of other influences) are quite substation, and noticeable even in the (heavily westernised) circles I socialise in there. The differences would be even bigger if you compare to an East Asian culture like Japan.
Things that are regarded as fundamental concepts, or universal values are often not share (some values are pretty much human, some are not).
"Europe is diverse enough that you need to split it into quadrants to decide what countries are relatively similar"
The same is true for South Asia, but if you look at it from a western perspective you see the similarities.
There are plenty of similarities across Europe. Shared attitudes to sex, politics, religion..... things like freedom of worship and separation of church and state (laws restricting freedom of worship even in secular democracies like India, let alone the Middle East or China), attitudes to sex and sexuality (and ideas and definitions and identities linked to them - although this is changing because of Western influence, historically the idea of people having a fixed sexual orientation is a modern western one, for example)....
That's not true. To use the examples in the thread, a patient American kid will be much more patient than an impatient Japanese kid.
When considering the US as a whole then Loudoun county will get the appropriate weight in the resulting number. If you zoom out to see the map of the world and no longer see your street, it doesn't mean the map is wrong. It's perfect for the purpose of visualizing the world.
I'll bet you're fine with "the US people are richer than the Burundi" or "Dutch people are taller than US people". These also don't tell you anything about the short Dutch people or ultra-poor in the US. But you accept them because you don't feel slighted by them.
Or else you reject the premise because you zoomed in on a place which is not right on that average so the whole concept gets thrown out the window.
This. The standard deviation is too damn high to make predictions. You might as well toss a coin.
They took the very reasonable "you're not allowed to talk about black people liking watermelons" and applied it to every statement about every minority, disadvantaged or not, ethnically defined or not, whether offense was taken or not. Generalization was relabelled a microaggression, and avoiding them (or calling them out) became an urgent imperative, whether or not you're a member of the group in question. Whether or not you take offense personally, it became a Duty To Police this sort of speech.
This alienates one from the vast majority of humanity, which uses generalizations about people and things every day as a cognitive & social necessity. It makes it impossible to communicate or organize, because some sort of nitpicking about social equity, even purely semantic equity, is always prioritized over topical action in SJW-oriented leftist conversation. The rally for women's rights is cancelled because the committee spent all day deciding whether to use the term "women" or some alternative.
It also makes one less effective as a thinker, because there are statements that you can make about cultures and people's background that are statistically very likely, or which indicate a very real difference in the center of different bell curves.
Personally I blame autism for much of it but that's another can of worms.
No, more so it's at the root of crippling all online discussions.
I know in the US “liberal” is the “radical left” which is unfortunate as hell.
This recent "woke" trend originates from leftist impulses in a society where the fall or even moderation of neoliberal capitalism is 'harder to imagine than the end of the world'. A society where Reaganomics has been adopted wholesale by Third Way Democrats who still control the political discourse because that's what effectively fundraises from billionaires. Politicians who try to satiate their political base by promoting diversity initiatives that will make zero dent in the economy or institutions of state. "Social Justice" as explored on Tumblr by people still in university (isolated from economics) is largely orthogonal to that, and it wouldn't be possible for people exposed to more of the diversity of society and the exigencies of life to ruminate on the subject, absent economic concerns.
This is what leftists complain about with the pejorative "liberals", a distinction that half of the country appears to be completely unaware of because every pejorative means the same thing on Fox News.
This tendency to substitute diversity messaging for systemic material solutions appears to have zero appeal left to the American people. No, the American people do not want to send the gender noncomformists to the gas chamber, but if that's all you talk about, it does not add up to a political platform that people vote for. The "Black Lives Matter" protests demanded dramatically reshaping the way criminal justice works, not wearing kente cloth for an afternoon. The last Democratic presidential candidate scrupulously avoided social justice, but they didn't actually substitute any sort of populist left-wing economic ideas because the donors wouldn't allow that.
Well then it's kind of a strange coïncidence that there is a high correlation between population density and political leaning/voting:
* https://dailyyonder.com/distance-and-density-not-just-demogr...
And not just in the US:
* https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00104140231194...
* https://macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/338canada-the-urban-rura...
Even at 6 there is a major difference between boys and girls that I just don’t see anywhere else.
The thing is you won’t even realize that’s what’s happening, and you just feel that the way you think is right and proper the rest of your life.
It’s honestly pretty anazing because people can be incrediy dissatisfied with how their neighbors are parayzed by social constraints while being bound a hundred times more strongly influenced by their own expectations.