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Comment by sombremesa | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know what the solution is for trying to promote better cross cultural understanding.

I think that's just it: trying to promote better cross cultural understanding. That's something I tried with the GP here, but I could probably write up an article to be linked to in such discussions.

> metrics like "How many meals per day do you get?" and "What kind of shelter do you have?"

I think this is a good thought, a focus on qualitative differences in lived experience using quantifiable metrics. With that approach you're less likely to offend rather than inform. Might be best to skip the "less than 1/2 of one percent of Americans were poor by standards in India" since it seems to suggest that American poverty isn't "real" poverty.

I would even go so far as to say that communicating the cultural context is far more important than underlining the economics, the former of which TFA is attempting to do.

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I'm a former military wife. Just trying to explain how military life is different to other Americans was insanely hard.

I lived in the same country. I used the same currency. I spoke the same language. Yet my life was not like that of civilians I knew and their underlying assumptions and mine that informed our decisions just did not match up to such a degree that I eventually stopped trying to explain my life choices even to people quite close to me who simply did not get the context and that their decision-making matrix and mine were largely unrelated.

I wish you luck in trying to figure out how to do this.

Thanks...I think I'm going to give up before I even start. The gap is far wider than I had ever imagined.

It's not possible to make people understand. You can try it understand others, and some others can try to understand you, but you can't make someone's open their mind if they don't want to.

To help people understand something they've never experienced, stay within their own frame of reference. That's all they've got to work with, because they don't know what they haven't experienced.

To explain poverty to a middle class Californian, frame it in culture terms that are familiar, but which still reach the same class of emotional experience you want them to understand.

e.g.

Have you ever gone shopping at The Gap for jeans with a bunch of pals, and they take forever to decide which 12 pairs of jeans they're going to get, but you only take like 20 minutes because you can only afford 4 pairs? You know how that feels?

They'll catch on.

Well written novels help...

That's interesting. Would you mind giving an example of one of these disjuncts? Some decision you made as a military wife that others did not understand?

I'm obviously not Doreen, but I was a military brat and military myself and can relate some of what I saw. First off, there's a sense of impermanence to everything. Your best friend is often someone you will only know for ~3 years of your life. You have to meet people and become friendly with them quickly or you will have no social contacts outside your family.

If you were a military spouse, you may have had a job, but rarely a career. You move at the whim of your spouse's job (every few years) to places you don't control. You generally don't get to pick your neighbors or even your friends - you just adapt to the situation that constantly changes.

Spouses of military members that go on unaccompanied tours have it even worse. They are at home alone, often for months at a time. My anecdotal observations of Navy spouses, for example, was that cheating was a standard practice - not because the marriage was necessarily bad, but because they were so lonely. This is based on limited exposure (I was Air Force, both as a brat and active duty), so may not be as universally true as I observed.

This can all sound horrible, but it really wasn't. Just different. Different enough that sometimes it is hard to explain.

The incentive structure in the military is completely different from normal American society. Imagine a parallel, "socialist" society that exists inside the U.S.A. That's the military in a nutshell.

It has its own government-run housing authority, its own government-run medical system, you don't always know where you will end up on your next tour, you may not be allowed to quit and leave the military when you would normally expect to under some circumstances, etc.

> a parallel, "socialist" society that exists inside the U.S.A. That's the military in a nutshell.

Perfect description, which I find hilarious. It's the best large-scale example of socialism that actually works. But the Right won't admit it and the Left thinks it's hell.

I think the best example is actually from my divorce. A friend basically called me "stupid" for "trusting" my ex to pay me my support payments while on the phone and I basically politely hung up on her.

She was probably just worried sick about me because the stats for civilian Americans is abysmal. I think it's something like one third of men don't pay at all and one third only make partial payments, which routinely leaves women and their children in a real pickle. It can take months or years to get legal remedy, garnish his wages and get back payments -- if you get them at all.

But it doesn't work that way in the military. If he had stiffed me, I would have written his commanding officer and his wages would have been garnished post haste, much more quickly than what you typically see in the civilian world.

My friend apparently thought I was some naive little ninny who just didn't understand the cold, cruel world because I had such a sheltered existence as a homemaker. And that wasn't it at all. The rules were just different for me and I was in no danger of being left out in the cold like she was likely imagining was about to happen to me given how common that is in the civilian version of America.

A similar trick is used by some landlords. No rent? Call the CO. Makes military tenants very reliable.

That street runs both ways. When asshole landlords were raising rent every three months on soldiers and their families, the general on the base threatened to build more housing and move everyone on base, gutting the local rental market.

The landlords quit their shit and cut a deal.

Sounds fair TBH.

India has lots of villages, slums and people in between having very poor material standards compared to Western countries. But people are also much more interconnected, rely on each other and find ways to get by. So to get that culture, you have to spend at least 6 months and really get to know what family values are, and how things tend to work out. It's very different than the lonely individualist countries. Many Indians actually move back home to be with family and friends!

So superficial analyses may just not be very recognizable to the population, because of very different value systems and nuances.

That's very true, but I think it's possible to a) have a fact-based approach without being superficial, and b) communicate cultural context without having to plumb the depths of the human condition.

Were it necessary to cover the subtle nuances of Eastern and Western culture, it would be hard to get anywhere with prose. I think it's sufficient to convey enough information to demonstrate that the value systems and lived experiences are fundamentally different.

The goal is not to "level the playing field" in terms of where people are coming from, but to foster more meaningful discussions by explicitly taking context into account.

But it takes the plumbing the depths of the human condition to realize that we're not actually a that different, and that the fundamentals are the SAME. Airy eloquent prose may not have the same effect on the data driven as hard metrics, but comparing $20,000 (US) a year to the equivalent of $1 US a day, without capturing, in prose, that person in the US below the poverty line may be going hungry more days a week, and is more exposed to the elements, and more likely to be harrassed by police/others and more likely to die, is superficial.

Prose is what's needed to communicate effectively. Tables and charts simply can't do that by themselves. Even they need a legend and labels to be useful.

Personally, that's the biggest lesson that I got from traveling in India. There's no question that people's living standard needs to be improved there, but I saw something that's lacking in a developed country (especially in the country I live): mutual help, or the "love your neighbor" mindset. I hope that tradition last long.

As someone who immigrated to the US from India, and was a 'stereotypical nerd' (being on HN duh) nosy neighbors seem nice on the outside but it can get old really quick. (Unless you're perfectly average for the community you live in). I much prefer making friends at work or other common interest places rather than neighbors or family who randomly happen to be next to you.

Tbh anyone nosy. Every time I visit my parents back home, I realize how exasperatingly nosy they are. They can't stick to minding their own business, and honestly it's something that they picked up with age - I guess to be a part of the general "community". And the amount of mental gymnastics they perform to analyze trivial mind-numbing stuff....

I guess it's something that's as ingrained in the Indian psyche as turmeric is in Indian cuisine.

Same with age here in Europe. I believe they call it family, ugh! ;)

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