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Comment by eddijkstra | Hacker News Reader

"people are more complex than cultural caricatures. You can’t just map behaviors onto someone because of where they’re from. Understanding generational differences, personality, and professional context matters just as much, if not more, than making broad cultural assumptions."

But the rest of this article literally does nothing but make broad cultural assumptions

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Many cultural assumptions are accurate on average, at the population level. It's nevertheless important to remember that they're mostly uninformative regarding individuals.

This is an article about population level statistics.

What's the alternative? I strongly doubt there are large population level differences in intelligence/whatever you want to call what is needed to succeed, which leaves culture and geography/population distribution. They are talking about south asians outperforming indexed against east asians so that eliminates geography/population distribution mostly. The only thing left is culture.

I hate this line of thinking. The truth is in the middle - you can and should do generalisations because patterns do exist in real life. Indians do behave meaningfully differently than other races. And it is okay to notice those differences.

There's a new trend to oppose any pattern finding in races. The retort is always "we are so diverse that no pattern exists at all". I don't agree at all.

So averages and social dynamics map exactly to individuals?

"Race" is so undefined it's just silly to argue about. We are tremendously more similar than different. We have a visual bias, so a difference in skin color will dominate all other similarities. Then we go and theorize about other differences when we start our division from this arbitrary difference. This is lazy thinking. And a lot of the time is used for hate mongering against some "other".

Of course cultures have different set of values, and this influences the aggregate decisions of the individuals, but taking the next step and forecasting and analyzing a single individual by projecting sociatal bias on them is dehumanizing, and as recent history taught us, is dangerous.

>So averages and social dynamics map exactly to individuals?

I don't think anyone claims that but patterns are significant enough that it is useful in mapping to individuals but within context.

When I'm interacting with an Indian, I can reasonably guess what their values are, what their personalities are and what they find important.

Same when I'm interacting with a woman.

Same when I'm interacting with an older person.

Of course, with context I'll learn more about the person, but I will not dismiss patterns that do exist and are largely true.

If you consciously dismiss these patterns you are just lying to yourself and robbing yourself out of meaningful starting points.

> but patterns are significant enough that it is useful in mapping to individuals but within context.

How would you do this in the US? Do you count Americans as a race? Or do you do patterns by state/region or city/rural? How can you tell?

I'll use all the information provided and form an opinion. It doesn't matter what category American as, as long as I understand the patterns an American exhibits.

there are obviously drawbacks, but generalisations and assumptions are literally how we naturally store knowledge. its the quality of the information that is the problem not the generalisation.

The correct word here is cultures, not races. South Asians of European ancestry (like one side of my family) are still culturally south Asian (albeit a particular subculture in our case). I know lots of people of non white ancestry who are culturally British (I mostly am myself).

I think culture is also a lot less dehumanising than race because it is complex and therefore less prone to grouping people in the same stereotyped way. Not all South Asian cultures are the same - there is a huge difference between, for example, an urban Sri Lankan (as I was born) and a rural Pakistani. Much as there are huge cultural differences within Europe (e.g. between Wales and Albania).

I do agree that stereotyping leads to dehumanisation, but I also think cultural differences are worth talking about. I also strongly agree that thinking in terms of race rather than culture is very damaging and encourages racism.

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