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Comment by sabertoothed | Hacker News Reader

Yes. People are remarkably dumb and gullible.

It's mostly a fault of the education system, countries with better education such as Japan do not have it this many gullible people (per capita), USA and other countries do not teach even the most basic skepticism going as far as teaching completely ridiculous things such as creationism inside the schools themselves under the guise of "tolerance" and "teach both sides".

Back up, before you crap all over American schools, public schools don't teach creationism, and the attempt to do so resulted in court case ruling it unconstitutional.

Also, do you have any direct evidence in your claim that Japanese are more skeptical? The Aum Shinrikyo death cult got almost 10% of the vote in the mid-90's.

The amount of studies about skeptisim and gullibility around the world are near none, but there is some data about US highschoolers consider true and it shows dangerous trends such as 1 every 4 students believing astrology is real: https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-148278044/skepticism-in...

I would need to see comparisons with the rest of the world before that has any relevance to my point. Kids will believe lots of stupid things.

According to todayifoundout, US schools aren't nearly as bad as the meme likes to portray them [1].

[1] https://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/01/kids-get-su...

The thing is that we don't know how related the other areas of education are with skepticism; if I would have to guess I would say reading and science are the most related but that's just a guess, the best path forward would be to actually measure skepticism, stuff like how good are people at spotting fake news from the real ones and such.

I live in Japan and I'm shocked at how many people here believe in patently absurd nonsense. I wouldn't be surprised if someone mentions to me, for example, that they saw a ghost recently, or went to a fortune teller.

At least for the ghosts thing, belief in ghosts, demons and spirits has been deep-rooted in Japanese folklore throughout history[0]. Also there is different kinds of "believe", for example if some Japanese lady said a ghost got her pregnant I think nobody would believe her, my guess is that they believe to a point but not to the point to spark risky behavior from it (e.g. antivaxxers)

[0] http://www.asianart.com/articles/rubin/

You don't believe modern Japanese believe in absurdities from the past because it's part of folklore but it's not okay for Americans to believe in absurdities from the past because… the Japanese have a better education system? (Which I'd also count as an absurd belief because I only hear complaints about it.)

And are you really going to give lessons on the mythology of Japan to people who live in Japan? That's perhaps a tad presumptuous, especially considering it's like telling people living in Britain that witches are part of British folklore.

I mean, please.

You miss-represented all the points, AND skipped the one where I said they don't take such superstitions as seriously as their American counterparts.

An anecdote: A friend of a friend's son was very sick in the stomach. She went to see a fortune teller to ask what was wrong. The fortune teller took her money, did a reading, and told her she needed to take her son to a doctor.

I found that amusing. I have tons of these, most of them amuse me. Try living here and (among the many other notions you have of the place that are no doubt wrong) you'll see there's a huge amount of superstition, regardless of education level.

If you can't afford to come, https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/ is a good resource. It's amazing how much that sounds absurd is true.

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