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Comment by sdoering | Hacker News Reader

Wow. When I was a kid I was on holiday playing together with Russians, Brits, Belgians and other German kids.

While the Russian kids were playing by the rules (at least not significantly outside of that) especially the British kiddos did everything they could to win the medals we received in these games from the hotel.

So what does my anecdata tell us? Nothing. I have great experiences with Russian people while I was cheated by Brits. Should I deduce all Russians are great people? Or all Brits are cheaters? Probably would be a bad idea.

There clearly are different cultures. But talking about that as if this means people a a homogenized blob of that culture does not pay justice to the people who went to the streets in Russia to protest against the war for example. Or to the people that only know the propaganda side of this war on any side.

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> So what does my anecdata tell us? Nothing.

You are surely right there, but having played with a ton of kids from all nationalities as well (football, handball, whatever) this episode still stood out for me, because it was much more brutal than anything else I had experienced out of tournaments and "serious" games. The game in question here was not even a hotel tournament, it was just a "hey, wanna play a round"-kind of game.

However: as you rightly mentioned it is unwise to extrapolate from this one experience onto the character of a group of people (I added this in the post above). This was not my intention here, it was just a very memorable experience and I never quite understood why it escalated the way it did.

Should I judge all individuals by the country they come from? Within your own country, have you met people who are great and others who are not? Even within your own school or workplace?

Although governments that run countries would have you believe there is such a thing as a country - this is merely a fiction that is commonly believed. There are no countries, just beliefs. There are no collectives either - that too is a belief.

There really are individuals though.

Yes ofcourse we are all the same, people. But we people have been brought up in different cultures and been fed different naratives so we act differently depending on what we have been brought up to. We can learn to be one way or other to a certain degree.

Going on a different tangent, I watched an interesting video [1] from The Behavior Panel podcast attempting to discern tactics from Putin's social cues in parallel to the trustworthiness of his messaging and, whether the historical context he provided were reliable or not.

I think I can reasonably conclude from watching their perspective that he's masterful in deception.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCXGQzuaNic

Do you think you should worry about Putin's social cues, or the one's our governance leaders give? Which is more meaningful in your life?

Always seeking to understand human behavior, when people say things to justify their otherwise contradictory actions. A simpler example would be reading HN from your own voice and not properly conveyed by others as human emotions are most often sterilized in text form.

Oi. Let us enjoy some anecdotes.

We all know that pretty much all of us here have nothing to really add to the discussion, so we might as well have some fun.

> Should I judge all individuals by the country they come from?

Interesting question, but not one that my post circled about. As someone who grew up at the border between three nations/languages I can assure you that even within a 100 mile radius differing history and culture can change how a average person from that nation behaves. This is curious and one can spend a lot of time pondering about where these slight differences come from – and learn a lot about other cultures and maybe even your own on the way.

What one should – however – not do is extrapolating the character of individuals from their perceived nationality (something I never suggested would be a good idea).

> There are no countries, just beliefs.

Citation needed. I also believe that the idea of the nation is indeed a story we tell ourselves. But firstly stories we tell ourselves are incredibly powerful: They shape actual physical reality and individual actions, and secondly the difference in languages does shape our thinking and our actions and this also has been studied. Nation borders are often also language borders.

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