Travel Is Not Education | Hacker News Reader

Travel Is Not Education

fi-le.net

41 pointsfi-le67 comments

The person reading Wikipedia and the person who visited the place are both beaten by the person who read Wikipedia and then visited the place. Reading about a place can point you to unique experiences that you would otherwise have missed.

A deeper point, I think, is about being the kind of person who would read about a place. I know a few people who get excited about going on holiday, and excitedly tell you about it when they get back, but they just end up talking about the places they went drinking and the people they met, possibly with some Instagram pictures that look exactly the same as everyone else's Instagram pictures of that place. There's a lot of people in the developed world who just go travelling because it's a thing that people with money do: they're not even interested in learning about a foreign culture.

In a world full of people who read Wikipedia first and, generalizing some, actively look for other people's opinions via online reviews and reading up about the history of a place before visiting, I feel that the more unique experience overall be to show up and actively experience the place on your own outside the opinions of others.

I've traveled a fair amount now, and I think there's value to showing up someplace and letting it show you what you should know and experience, rather than letting the internet intercede between you and the world around you. I would add a fourth category, the person who shows up and finds something cool enough by walking around that they feel compelled to then read Wikipedia about it. For me, it would beat out the other three you posit, but that's a matter of taste I think.

Or you visit and then read the Wikipeida article. I mean even better as a double-decker wikipedia sandwich, but good as long as you read it.

I spent my last 3 hours in Hungary reading about the 1957 revolution [1]. The whole city was out celebrating the anniversary with funny-looking flags. I felt like an ass for not knowing about it before, but I learned.

The author is right that you don't magically become cultured by traveling. But you also don't become a Shakespeare expert by reading all his plays. That doesn't mean you should read the Shakespeare Wikipedia article instead.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_Revolution_of_1956

The author completely misses what travel is for. Compare it to a museum. You can see almost all of the artworks on the museum's website, in high-definition, accompanied by backstories and references. It's much more suitable to learn about art. But it's not _impressive_. You need to experience the artwork to understand and internalize what you studied about it. Same with travel.

A good example is trying to explain to someone from a car based culture (like the US) why they might enjoy living in a European city that eschews the car in favour of walking, bush bikes and public transport. The typical reaction is to explain why it would be impossible in their country, or that Europe was a historical accident, or 100 other reasons, most of which will be wrong.

You can try and explain the tradeoffs being made, but it seems mere words and video can't paint the picture. They have to experience it for themselves before they can truly understand, and consequently make sensible a judgement about whether they might like the lifestyle, or not.

Many people do not invest that much into researching a location (or museum and it's art), before they visit them. Even afterwards they probably still won't invest much more. They just go there with a bare minimum of knowledge, often even less, and then call themself educated enough. Experience is not education, it has little value on itself for understanding something.

At risk of offend that genuinely reads like a post by someone who has never left their home country.

Wikipedia and streetview is in no shape or form comparable to experiencing something first hand.

Nor is the assumption that people do one or the other correct. Ideally you first do the online research to plan travel and then go.

I agree.

To be honest, this kind of justification (TFA) is often written by people who don't enjoy travelling. I have a family member like this, they claim they don't need to go abroad (or anywhere outside their city, really) because "everything is there in Google and Wikipedia".

I find it very sad.

Some time ago, about 25 years ago, I realized that travel had become a status symbol. Wearing gold bracelets and flashy clothes, driving a fancy car, and doing other showy things was no longer cool. Telling someone that you went to Budapest last month was now the thing. And those that didn't go to Budapest were very sad that they didn't. Maybe that's why you're also sad for those that didn't travel?

That's reading too much into my comment. No, it's not about bragging, wearing gold bracelets or driving expensive cars.

It's about not being a shut-in and understanding there's more to life than what you can see on your computer screen. Google and Wikipedia are just excuses for this kind of people, anyway.

I cannot go into details because I don't want to overshare.

I traveled a lot around the US when i was young and poor, staying in hostels and on friend's couches.

It rocked, and I'm sad for people who didn't get to have that kind of fun exploring new places.

i traveled here and there around the world and hated it.

now i mostly stay at home or close to home. to each his own.

What did you hate, the act of traveling or the rest of the world?

I'm not being facetious: I really enjoy being other places, but the physical act of traveling, preparing luggage, etc, feels stressful to me. I hate airplane travel, as many people do.

But being there, when I'm not carrying heavy luggage... I love it.

I find it sad if they never have the opportunity.

If they don't like to travel I put them in the same category as people who don't like fancy coffee, playing sports, wine, video games, or science. I like a lot of those things but not everyone needs to [although I really wish more people understood science]. All these things cost resources and so far resources aren't infinite.

I can't but feel that there's a second, complementary point here.

Will you learn something about the place you visit? Probably. But, sure, not always. It's possible that reading the web might be as effective.

However, there's also the other side. To travel is to become educated about you. This experience cannot be replicated by reading the web. There's nothing quite as instructive as being blown away by the foreignness of another place, the language, the customs - the sheer strangeness of it to you. How you react to it, or manage it, or negotiate it are lessons worth learning. That's the education.

It seems like these days most places in Earth have become simply different versions of each other. How people dress, what they eat, what they know, their interests, and other such things are very similar almost wherever you go. Maybe traveling to central Africa or North Korea, or other very remote areas, would be radically different, but most travelers go to places where cell phones work and a portion of the public speaks English. Now traveling to another country is how traveling to another city was 60 years ago.

Learning is effortful. People can travel and not learn anything, but people can not learn from many things they should learn from. Travel is something you can learn from no matter where you go, but you typically have to put in the effort.

That isn't really true though, unless your itinerary is focused on the centre of major cities and you're determined to stay in chain hotels, eat international food and get taxis everywhere (if your main experience of travelling overseas is business, it might look like this)

Sure, Premier League branded football shirts turn up in the unlikeliest of places and it turns out that actually people don't wear what the internet says is their national dress all that much - that's one of the first things you learn when you travel - but there's plenty that's different, even if you can only communicate with the English speakers.

It's difficult, and you detainly have to step foot outside the tourist trails for 5 minutes, which most tourists maybe don't. If you stick to the brunch places and the tourist trap museums, then yes. But the world is still incredibly diverse; if you travel you can experience this diversity, but you have to make an effort, including research and probably learning a bit of the language.

i am sorry but no... this is not even remotely close to true.

even for very central cities. LA is very different from Paris which is very different from Tokyo.

> To test this theory, try the following experiment. Ask someone who just spent 10 minutes on the Wikipedia article for Turkey for an interesting fact about the country, then ask someone who just came back from a 10 day vacation to Istanbul. Probably both will tell you something equally interesting, with the former being more generally relevant and the latter being more charming or topical. Of course this is wildly unfair—we should give the web surfer 10 days of reading time and ₺100,000 liras to spend as well, but they simply don't need it to win.

Was this written by some AI or LLM because what kind of logic is that? Someone who travels vs. who reads? Is that an even worthy experiment? No..

Interestingly enough, I've been to Turkey twice. I know the taste of the food, the gentleness of the people, their hospitality. I got a haircut both times - I lived their style. I had lunch with some of them. I sat and listened to them talk. I toured their houses and walked their streets.

I know a couple of interesting facts about Turkey, but I know things that I can't describe in a Wikipedia article, too.

10/10 would recommend a trip to Turkey

I think the article, even though the author protests it's not that, looks at knowledge and experience as merely an accumulation of things.

With this mindset, seeing a photo on the internet and seeing the real thing with your eyes, after a walk to the location, is "the same". You've seen the thing, you can mark it in your checklist. Google, Wikipedia, and the real physical experience are all the same, you've "gained" the same. Reading about a sports match in Wikipedia is the same as having experienced it live, petting a dog is the same as looking at a photo of a dog, etc.

The author protests this is not what they mean, but ultimately, it seems that's exactly what they mean.

I couldn't disagree more with this mindset.

I grew up in a tourism economy. I have traveled to half a dozen countries.

I side with the author. Viewing consumer travel for entertainment only makes you more learned if you care to observe and think critically, which most do not do as that detracts from the indulgent entertainment aspect of it and even then it's very limited.

The nit picks of the offended peanut gallery here are technically perfectly valid, you won't learn everything from wikipedia and street view either, but they don't invalidate the broader point that galavanting about as a tourist doesn't really teach you squat. It's a luxury. The .03% "education" component doesn't really change that.

I'll give you one example -- Bali, Indonesia.

If you visit Bali for a week or even a month, you likely won't notice that Bali is in a strange little island in a massive country. You'll likely fly in and out of Bali and never visit the rest of Indonesia. What is the relation between Bali and the rest of the country? No idea.

Even a question as simple as what do the locals eat is a difficult question as a tourist. Who do you ask? If you ask a few people, you might get the wrong impression, it at least one that doesn't represent the whole place.

Think about your own country. Your own neighborhood. If a tourist came up to you to ask about how things work in your area, can you give a comprehensive answer? I sure can't.

Life is far too short to learn from travel. I'm not saying don't travel but we should keep our expectations in check.

I may not give a comprehensive answer but i can give a much better answer about day to day life in my neighborhood than Wikipedia can

I can’t think of a country I’ve visited where my preconceptions gathered from the sources the author mentions haven’t been turned on their head.

> Things would indeed be different if rural Dagestanians who are about to be drafted would start booking trips, but it is so telling that the digital media access, not the flight ticket is where the Kremlin intervenes. If someone wanted you to not learn about a culture, would they rather take away your opportunity to travel, or to go on the internet?

They only need to take away the internet, because the opportunity to travel never existed in the first place. And it's not as if, upon returning from your cultural experiences out west, your banking app isn't searched at the border for treacherous transactions. Physical travel is just dramatically easier to precisely control and dramatically more expensive to access, compared to digital media where you have to use a heavy-handed approach to blocking.

This post is, at it's core, "my town is being wrecked by tourism". That's perhaps a reasonable feeling for the author to have, but I don't really agree with any of the broader claims they're trying to make.

Vaguely reminds me of Mary's Room ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument ). You can learn a lot from going somewhere and experiencing it that you just can't from Wikipedia. Obviously there is a lot you will learn from reading that you won't get from travel too, but that stuff isn't necessarily better.

I'm born and raised in the midwest of the USA. I've watched UK shows since the 80s when PBS would run Doctor Who, Keeping Up Appearances, and other UK shows. I've never read a history devoted to London or the UK but I know the basics. This summer I visited London for the first time and there were so many things I either had no idea about or knew in the abstract but experiencing it first hand was very different.

This is like reading somebody's linkedin vs working with them for a month.

BTW the value gained from travel is dropping with every new country. The single biggest lesson is just noticing everything you assumed is obvious and natural that is actually just accidental and specific to your country. Especially Americans would benefit from it.

Most people who travel just go to unfamiliar restaurants and unfamiliar shops. I imagine that a LOT of HN people do not fall into this trend, but for most people travel seems to be more about a feeling of novelty and adventure than it is really about specifically learning about the locale you're visiting.

It's very easy to construct strawman examples where the worst ways to travel are compared to some abstract "best" way of learning as if that proves anything.

Reading up on something is a great way to discover the "high order bits" but it's very hard, apart from being in person, to ever pick up the "low order bits". I recently had a friend visit Australia and notice that attitudes towards mild speeding were very different from the US, not something you ever could have found from hours of trawling on the internet. One of the hundreds of different observations he made on the trip.

Every travel opportunity for me has used these low order bits to propel huge amounts of reading to fill in the missing high order bits that mesh with it. On a recent trip to South Korea, I became obessessed with the South Korean presentation (or rather, the lacuna) of the country's history 1955-1987. I went to countless history museums around Seoul just so I could see what they wanted attendees to know about Korea between the day-by-day recap of the Korean War and the miracle of K-Pop and industrialization. It was interesting the degree of frankness each museum had but all of them made me delve much more into the scholarly writing to see what was pointedly omitted.

I get the author's point, but it's a bit "light". I enjoyed this article which truly helped me to see other perspective: "The Case Against Travel" which cites great philosophers and writers https://archive.is/OCBJf

I don't know if education and understanding are the same things, but I feel that I've always come away from places that I've travelled to with a better understanding of the place.

I'm sure that if you just do zero research about a place and just take a package tour you won't come away with any greater knowledge than they would by reading a Wikipedia article or watching a YouTube video.

But if you learn some things in advance, and then go to a place, and suddenly you have the experience of "Ooh, there's that thing I learned about!", followed by watching how locals interact with it, there has to be some deeper level of understanding that is reached there.

Having a hard time imagining an article i disagree with more honestly lol.

And i think the cause and effect is all backward for Guatemala: the CIA wanted to overthrow the country, so they invited sympathetic journalists on a staged journey. That's a very, very far cry from the experience of a typical tourist, and i think i could make a pretty compelling case that journalists who've never been to {Iraq, Venezuela, Guatemala, Palestine, et. al.} are far MORE likely to write completely out of line imperialist propaganda than the ones who have.

Total touch grass moment.

There's more to education than just trivia and there's more to travel than just learning about the place you're in.

The only way to learn about the human condition is by meeting other humans.

Meeting someone from a vastly different culture and finding similarities is far more education than simply eading about how they are different.

Experiencing the flow of life _now_ and feeling the influence of history can only enrich the book knowledge of a place.

Sounds like this person could use some travel to teach them about empathy and patience for others. Their books don't seem to be sufficient.

When I went to London, I went to the British Museum, the Wallace Collection, the Tate, the Tower of London, ...

You can also say "reading comic books is not education".

It is not even remotely close making a comparison between reading an article on Wikipedia and visiting a country for 10 days.

having just returned from a trip to asia and australia, i can confidently say that the basic premise of this article is mistaken. reeling off facts from wikipedia is not the same at all as traveling to a country. the tastes, interactions, trash on the sidewalk, mysterious odors, miasamatic airs, overheard conversations all add up to a thousand times what the two paragraph history of vietnam gives you. is this satire? is this written by a bed bound agoraphobic? dont be silly. education is more than reciting the after effects of chinese rule on a small nation, its more than knowing dates of revolutions and the current form of government. education is context and perspective, macro to micro, the where and why and how. if education is wikipedia then philosophy is dirty limericks and science is air fryers.

All true, but most "travel" is staying a week or so as a tourist in some location, and it is true that what is learned from this kind of travel is generally trivial and superficial (and thus often wrong). You probably can learn more deep truths about a country and culture from reading on the internet, unless you are really making an effort to properly integrate in some way, likely for a minimum of many months. But, then, this is usually not what is meant by "travel".

> most "travel" is staying a week or so

Most reading is probably crap, too.

> what is learned from this kind of travel is generally trivial and superficial (and thus often wrong)

Someone can learn the wrong history of a dish while still being educated by it. Broadly speaking, I’m sceptical of new experiences not yielding education outside the irredeemably incurious.

You do realise many of us read ”on the internet” (or preferably study literature, history, art and the language) of places we visit? These two in no way cancel each other out.

I have been on a work trips to places I really did not quite know the culture, history, or the language of, nor did I care enough to learn about them. These trips are always boring, even without the work stuff. Mass-turism is similar and most beautiful artistic achievements are just tedious extension of yet more of Disneyland forever.

I spoke a bit of Japanese when I travelled to Tokyo over 10 years ago, before the current tourist boom. I had known the history and culture for years from reading about it and studying martial arts since I was a child. I was an art student when I went to Rome, Firenze, Venice, Napoli. I could read a comic book in French when I first went to Paris, knowing of course the art historical perspective to it, but wanted to understand the culture, the feel, match it with my reading of the history.

So there’s travel and there’s travel. You can travel to your own back garden and find immense treasures, after a bit or research. Or you can go to other side of the planet and find nothing at all.

Nothing about my post said nor implied the two things were at odds or that there aren't people that do both. In fact, based on everything you are saying, I can't really find anything to disagree with at all.

> So there’s travel and there’s travel.

Indeed. If travel = tourism, then I agree most travel (as tourism) is superficial gives mostly trivial knowledge about a culture. If travel is "living / working abroad" or "an exchange", than, obviously it is not so trivial. And indeed, even a week as a tourist can be rich if you've read deeply on some specific aspect of the country, and that is the focus of your tourism.

I would still guess that over 90% of travel (at least among younger generations) is just shallow tourism, and people most vocal about the benefits of travel are generally just tourists pretending their shallow tourism is something more. This is the sentiment I think animates this kind of blog post / article.

EDIT: And also there is nothing wrong with liking fundamentally superficial and/or simple things. I enjoy trashy fast food and SPAM from time to time despite also happily spending many days and hours carefully preparing gourmet meals. But I don't ever pretend that enjoying SPAM is some elevated fine taste. Those who enjoy shallow tourism just have an annoying tendency to try to pretend that their "travel" somehow makes them better and/or sophisticated in some way, but, it simply does not, in the vast majority of cases.

i think it goes back to a deeper root premise about the human experience. maybe thats where i go a-kilter. it seems common these days for people to travel and then take instagram pictures and make posts about their experience going to michelin starred places. perhaps they are looking at their phones much of the time or documenting their travel for an audience that isnt themself. then, sure, you may as well read articles about it. youre missing the whole point anyway, and youre also missing life at home even if you arent traveling.

Instagram is of course full of those people, and in certain hyped or especially "instagrammable" places these people are common. But by and large these people seem like a tiny minority when traveling.

> reeling off facts from wikipedia is not the same at all as traveling to a country.

That's not the premise of the article, it's just an example. The premise is that knowledge depends on the source of information and it's quality, and travelling is usually a rather poor source on it's own.

> the tastes, interactions, trash on the sidewalk, mysterious odors, miasamatic airs, overheard conversations all add up to a thousand times what the two paragraph history of vietnam gives you.

So what history did you learn from the smells? What did you learn about the problems and philosophy of the people? This reads more like a delussion. Travelling a locations and talking to people is valuable, but this is mainly experience, not education. What you collect is the public picture of a place and their people, not the private parts they only talk about to people they really trust. Unless you live for some decades at a place, you will not be able to learn and understand the things you can gain from a well written article explaing something and it's history. Personal experience is a lousy educator, because its lacking on so many neccesary details.

It's like saying that just reading about s*x is better than actually doin it.

I wouldn’t suggest anyone take this piece serious; you would be doing yourself a disservice. A strange thing I’ve noticed about street view. Whenever I show up to a new place that I’ve viewed on street view I remark on how different it feels from what I expected. Maybe I recognize the konbini on the corner and know that it marks the left turn I need to make. But never have I felt like street view was even close to actually being there.

> Not that it would have been logistically feasible back then, but I do sometimes ask myself if Pearl Harbor could have been prevented if enough Japanese statesmen had gone to vacation in New York.

Well we kind of know what the answer is. Toward the end of WW2 when the US was drawing up the list of cities to bomb, Kyoto got removed from the list at the insistence of the Secretary of War. He understood the cultural importance of the city, likely because he had travelled there. I’m surprised the author hadn’t read about it on Wikipedia.

But back to my point. Sitting and staring into my magic 13-inch rectangle starts to make me feel like…nothing. A formless gel of facts and trivia. Travel makes me feel like a human being again. Travel may not be education but I do think that, when done well, it is wisdom.

travel makes me feel close to nothing (there are very rare exceptions, half negative) and gets me tired. nowadays i stay at home.

I'll bet you can't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling; seen that.

I've been to the Sistine Chapel, and yes it has a lovely ceiling, but it's also jammed full of other tourists who are also craning their necks and not looking where they're going.

While the Vatican has a lot more loot and bling to look at, I'd say looking at the pictures on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallery_of_the_Sistine_Chapel_... is the superior experience.

The same goes for the Mona Lisa, which is the least interesting painting in the Louvre. Either see it in a crowded room full of tourists, behind a glass case, or see every last brushstroke at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mona_Lisa (7k x 11k pixels in uniform lighting)

Personally I liked seeing the brickwork of St. Peter's dome more, but each to their own.

But maybe you will be able to soon! The ERC apparently allocated 11M € for a project to create "an olfactory equivalent of Google Street View" [1].

(yes, I know this wasn't the point)

[1]: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101118977

Sensuality is crucial to intelligence maybe?

Most people live in a fake world, especially when they are playing the part of tourists.

The original post laments having to interact with these people (in Cambridge, MA - oh no, Harvard and MIT sweatshirts, maybe as a "local" you should walk off the beaten path a bit).

Looking up webcams and Wiki pages as a substitute for going places is a bad conclusion - it's even more of a fake world. The author thinks we can somehow "really beautiful how rich of a cultural understanding can be cultivated without ever setting foot in the country". Really beautiful? Come on, that's ridiculous. I get that this is Hacker News but that's a terminally online viewpoint that's warped as can be.

New hype unblocked: Tourism is a bad thing

You may claim, but it is not true.

That would be an interesting point, if it was.

Having travelled the world I can say without a doubt that this person misses the point of travel.

It isn’t about winning a trivia night. It’s about connecting deeply on a level that a Wikipedia article just cannot offer.

Yeah. I mean, I think "connecting deeply" gets oversold too, but my experience of a place (whether it's "authentic" or the country's biggest tourist trap or even the next town over) really isn't best summarised by how many facts I can recollect about it.

I'm also amused by the suggestion that Japanese Bach fans understand German culture more deeply than Germans (does this mean Westerners with moderately large anime collections understand the many nuances of Japanese culture better than the Japanese?!). I mean, I don't actually think most travel does connect deeply with foreign culture, but few travellers are left with such a shallow first impression of other countries they legitimately believe they've obtained deeper insights into a country than the average person who lives there by attending a performance of some cultural artefact from that country's history.

Also, for many people, travel is fun. If you find travel not fun, or reading about a place more fun, then more power to you. Some people find sex and relationships messy and inconvenient too, and if they prefer collecting stories and pictures that's fine - just maybe inadvisable to blog about how much more they've learned from the internet...

One of my favorite things about a recent trip to Japan was just watching people go about their daily lives.

We stayed in a home and it was fascinating how differently the homes are designed and function.

There is no substitute for experiencing a place.

Agreed, I did a month long cultural homestay in northern Japan and got to deal with a bunch of mundane bits like laundry, grocery shopping, and trash day.

Indeed perhaps the most valuable lesson from travel is returning with the realization of just how poorly the generalizations and statistics describe the messy reality of a place. Everywhere has every sort of person

The trivia approach doesn't even work for most people - ask the wikipedia reader and the person who travelled to Turkey about it a year later and see who has actually retained some knowledge.

Connection is not education. It doesn't matter how deep your emotional connection is, it won't rise your education about it on itself. If you want, or need the education, you have to search for it, and you should do it from reliable sources, not just random locals telling who knows what.

The bigger problem here that many people are building opinions lacking education, and this often can lead to harmful descicions, especially in how the world is developing today.

you are not connecting deeply with anyone or anything in 10 days

We visited Florence over the summer. It was a total shitshow. I’ve never seen anything like it: hoards and hoards of people just looking at their phones / taking selfies / not engaging at all with the actual art or majesty around them. The queue for the Duomo was maybe 4 hours. Everyone in the queue was on their phone. We didn’t wait. The Uffizi was appalling - rammed busy, everyone running into a room to snap a pic of Venus or do some utterly bizarre selfie thing which required weird poses, those involved totally unaware at the disruption they were causing. No moments of engaging with the art, no reading the labels or soaking it up, just a completely bizarre “check the box, I was there” thing going on with - I presume - Insta or whatever the equivalent is. Outside the centre things were a little better but not much. We escaped to Bologna as soon as we could and that was a whole world apart.

My point: I’m not sure “travel” as I understand it (educational, beautiful, soaking up of local culture, taking time to stand and understand as much as possible) is the same as the “travel” that others understand it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com