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Comment by ChrisMarshallNY | Hacker News Reader

I would say most specifically in the US.

It's a cultural thing. Asian cultures vary dramatically between each other (don't mistake Koreans, Chinese, or Japanese for each other -it won't end well), but they have one thing in common: They have a real sense of every person is part of a collective. Maybe it's because most Asian societies are quite crowded.

The US, on the other hand, has a real sense of everyone is an individual, to the point of actually considering people that follow rules and norms to be "sheeple" (see "antimaskers").

Europeans seem to be in the middle.

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In the UK, and England specifically, another factor is ideology - vast amounts of money have been spent on outsourcing contact tracing even though the statistics suggest the result performance isn't very good. Meanwhile, local government run contact tracing has been really effective but seems to be starved of resources because they are public sector and therefore, apparently, must be bad at what they do.

Those comparisons are misleaidng and themselves the result of ideology - the local contact tracing and national contact tracing have different success rates in large part because they handle different kinds of contacts. Local contact tracing handles "complex" cases, which are generally things like workplace outbreaks where they have the help of employee records and attendance lists. National contact tracing handles all the other, less robustly recorded social contacts. I believe that in Canada, where all contact tracing is local, a lot of areas have recently abandoned tracing the kinds of contacts that are handled by the UK's national scheme altogether because they don't have the resources and it doesn't work well.

I found this informative. It is often the details that make the difference.

Contact tracing should not be the the responsibility of the individual, it should be the responsibility of the government (with cooperation of the individual of course). This is how Asian countries have succeeded at it. The US isn't even trying yet - I still don't think I can even get a rapid test where I live.

China is a full blown police state.

It isn't just cultural, it is also genetic.

The 5-HTR1A gene affects whether we more easily make relative versus absolute judgments. And this seems to be true for everything from the length of lines, to quality of life. The allele that is most common in East Asia makes relative judgements easier, in America it is absolute judgements that are easier.

Politically, having the relative form of the gene encourages more community thinking while the absolute encourages more individualism. This leaning holds within whatever society you're in. But when a culture is dominated by one form of the gene, it will naturally shift the entire society.

I learned this from pages 183-186 of https://www.amazon.com/Whos-Charge-Free-Science-Brain/dp/006... and I've wondered ever since how many of my opinions are reason (as it feels) versus genetics.

Scanning the Wikipedia page for 5-HTR1A, it looks like most of the studies were done in the first decade of the 21st century, when the candidate gene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidate_gene#Criticisms) approach was at its height, before it became known that many of these studies were statistically underpowered and thus likely detecting noise. So I'd be skeptical of any associations between 5-HTR1A and personality unless there's been recent follow-up.

Spot on

That would make sense given that the book I read was from 2012. Thanks for the correction!

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