Hacker News Reader

Comment by trompetenaccoun | Hacker News Reader

The idea that people in e.g. Asia don't tend to consider outside viewpoints as much as Americans is so absurd I'm not even sure what to say. If anything it's the opposite, but Westerners are too full of themselves to notice. It would require a genuine interest and to a degree immersion in foreign cultures. Prevailing Western ideology does not permit for that.

To give just one example, people in China know much more about the US and its culture than vice versa. If America were really a questioning culture, it would be reversed.

View on HN

> The idea that people in e.g. Asia don't tend to consider outside viewpoints as much as Americans is so absurd I'm not even sure what to say.

That is indeed an absurd idea. Fortunately, that's not what he wrote. He wrote that considering all points of view to have merit is a liberal Western value.

>> 'There's always another way of looking at things' is a basic assumption of a great many Americans... as a truly pervasive set of assumptions, it's pretty much a liberal Western, even American, tradition..."

At least, it was more true in 1986. Now the pendulum seems to be swinging away.

In what way can you consider a point of view without considering it to have merit? He’s not discussing relativism (everyone is right about everything), just social evaluation of epistemological credentials. Aka “merit”.

Re: the broader question of “are/were Americans the most scientifically minded culture”, I’d like to see some more rigorous evidence than “think of ancient Chinese emperors”. Or, for that matter, “equatorial cultures tend to promote violence”??

You can regard other POVs as a potential threat to your own hegemony, and thus feel the need to study them to understand how that threat may play out. Doing so does not inherently accord them any merit.

Brin wrote:

>> "You all believe that widely diverse points of view have merit, right?"

I wrote "consider" using it in the sense of "to believe" rather than "to evaluate". "Consider" was my word. Brin used "believe".

And, I do believe he was talking about cultural relativism. That specific phrase has unpleasant philosophical and moral booby traps, however, so the left-leaning intelligentsia and fellow travelers of the time ignored these traps by subscribing to the concept without actually using the term.

With all respect, it will forever endlessly bug me that comments like this seem to always be the top comment on Hacker News. This has virtually nothing to do with anything the author of this piece is trying to say. It's more off-topic than on-topic and derails the entire discussion to the point that people are now talking about anime and asking for onboards to learn about China.

Those are perfectly fine topics to discuss, but this guy was talking about the disrespect for expertise. It's a feature of American democracy that we believe all viewpoints to be worthy of getting airtime is what he was saying. This guy giving a lecture who is an expert on dolphins is telling you they almost certainly can't comprehend the kind of thoughts necessary to form sentences and reason linguistically, and the audience is agasp because they heard differently from whatever the equivalent of a random YouTube channel was in 1986, which they consider to be equally authoritative because, in American dogma, authority doesn't really exist. Whoever we agree to elevate for a few years at a time because they won a popularity contest is the authority.

Somebody in the audience also seems to misunderstand him and brings up that Chinese civilization has equally valid points of view compared to American, which I doubt this guy would say is wrong and has nothing to do with his point, and you somehow completely seized upon this one irrelevant detail that was basically interactive happenstance, has nothing to do with the point the author was really trying to make, and this is now the main discussion on Hacker News rather than discussing the content of the link that was submitted.

Brin isn’t making any point about knowledge- in fact acquiring unfiltered knowledge of the other is a risky move in the dogma of otherness, as you may find something you don’t like. Knowing something about the other that you don’t like is of course devastating to your social status. His central example of the dolphins clearly demonstrates this distinction- the dolphin scientists are not popular with the crowd.

I got sucked into Japanese animation because it seemed to be culturally richer, in shows like Urusei Yatsura and Nadia: Secret of Blue Water I found a mash-up of western culture (UY has the same epistemology as Marvel comics) as well as traditional Japanese, Chinese and Indian cultures.

Later I came to understanding Nadia's trick of continuous expansion was itself a trick similar to the Shepard Tone. And now I see every anime as being made by shredding up previous anime into parts and reassembling them. In The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya there is the term 閉鎖空間 which is translated as "Closed space" and if I was going to write a blog about anime now I would use that as the title because that is exactly what anime is. Haruhi is bored of the real world in all its richness so she makes up a dreary place which actually a lot smaller.

In anime and Japanese video games I see a number of different registers of morality. In games like Tales of Symphonia and Hyperdimension Neptunia it is common for principal adversaries to become members of the party and in mahou shojou anime like Sailor Moon and Precure it's not an unusual subplot for enemies to attempt infiltrating the social group of the heroines and wind up being domesticated by the little rituals of Japanese life. In the 2010s most Issekai have a swordsman who, when asked why he fights, says something about the need for the strong to fight to protect the weak while some bad guy says that the strong have the moral imperative to crush the weak. Nietzsche would call the first "slave morality" and the latter "master morality" -- it's not plausible that Castenada's Don Juan would have been as steeped in continental philosophy as he was because contemporary Asians sure are exposed to the ideas of the west.

Before understanding Japanese culture through anime, understand western culture through Cartoon Network.

Were I to wish* to learn american culture, Archer might be a productive entry point.

* this is a counterfactual: I was "soaking in it"

The Classic American animated show Spongebob Squarepants is particularly emblematic of western values, particularly on the themes of self-reliance, and the importance of fast food restaurants as the second (or third) space. In this paper, I will argue...

You joke, but Spongebob wouldn't be nearly as funny if Bikini Bottom weren't both highly absurd and highly recognizable to American audiences.

I'll just leave this here. Real clip from Kuwaiti TV:

https://www.memri.org/tv/kuwaiti-preacher-nabil-al-awadi-war...

Sure, why not?

American kids cartoons have a lot to say about American culture. Just to rattle off whatever was popular when I was a kid: The Simpsons, Spongebob Squarepants, Fairly Oddparents, Family Guy, South Park, Courage the Cowardly Dog.

The fact that everything not overtly meant to be comedy is imported from Japan is interesting in and of itself!

Try watching something like Peppa Pig in a foreign language—there is a lot of western culture in it.

> understand western culture through Cartoon Network

Sounds like a plan!

Any suggestions for entry points into chinese culture (beyond the 1961 大闹天宫)?

As an american, who had never met anyone from a Warsaw Pact* country until the very late 1980s, I was very amused to run across a bemulleted late soviet boy band video (1988?) prominently including a Dick Dale and the Deltones t-shirt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dezX61f3Ycg&t=87s

* I had played Tetris and with Rubik's Cube, so there was a small amount of cultural influence coming the other way

(On the theme of fantastic fiction)

It's remarkably hard to find good translations of classic Chinese works such as The Investiture of the Gods, though there is

https://www.amazon.com/Tales-Teahouse-Retold-Investiture-God...

China is having its best success with video games like Genshin Impact but I'd highly recommend the 2010 Three Kingdoms

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL33A390995E9A7F00

(you'd never see tough legendary warriors in western culture cry the way the heroes do in that show)

Also there is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_Zha_(2019_film)

which is pretty good despite being packed with the same kind of fart jokes you'd expect in a Dreamworks movie.

(thanks for the jade!)

TIL why I also got CGI results when I had earlier been searching for Jiang Ziya.

[In a Super Dimension Fortress crossover, the singer would get a chorus of おぼえていますか while the old man destroys the staircase?]

Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CToPsT1UF10

EDIT: for western weeping: porque no El Cid?

Pedantry:

  En silencio     intensamente llorando,
  volvía la cabeza,  los estaba mirando.

https://miocid.wlu.edu/folios/01r.html

Note that this was written 30 years ago based on observations of people in the literary community. At the time cultural relativism had become very big in academia, and would grow and peak in the general liberal population over the next decade. I think what he said was a fair assessment of that microcosm. They were very interested in learning about other cultures and were fairly unique in their wanting to hold all cultures equally, although non-charitably that was often obtained by adopting a filtered rose-colored view of other cultures. However, Brin was overestimating how much of what he saw was a reflection of general western or US population vs his particular microcosm at the time. And it didn't hold in the long run. Political and social dogmatism is quite high now across the political spectrum in the US. Looking back, the idea that this form of cultural relativism came about because we were a melting-pot culture doesn't hold up well given it was only popular for a decade or two out of our country's 250ish years of history.

Have you ever seen a show where the aliens come down and they go, "We know all about your culture! We've been watching your television shows since the 50s!" and then they act really bizarrely because they have no idea what real life is like?

See Galaxy Quest for the pinnacle of this trope.

People in almost any country know more about about the US (and China) then vice versa, because these are big powerful countries.

Do you mean some city folk or people in the hinterlands who’ve never seen any kind of foreigner ever in their lives?

I would think most are familiar with American television, or other cultural symbols like Coca Cola. Regardless of where they live.

Whether or not that equates to understanding American culture I can't say..

My daughter [in Argentina] knows more about Halloween than about the local Independence Day. Every kids show in Netflix has a special episode about Halloween.

This not an apt comparison. Else we could say American kids know more about Anime than about our Independence Day. Kids like kid things.

I doubt people in the Podunks of interior China have much awareness of what the US is about other than what their official propaganda tells them.

This sounds like an easily testable proposition... (for someone with better hanzi-fu than I?)

EDIT: ok, so I was just on douyin.com (seeded with what deepl told me were "farmer" and "opinion of american people") and there's a fair amount of official line delivered by news commentators, a fair amount of not-the-best-of-the-Old-Country phone footage that's been helpfully subtitled in chinese, and not infrequent tubes of chinese-on-the-street commenting about the US or interviews in the US, eg https://www.douyin.com/video/7253009716257836347

(the latter two categories are easy to spot because they've been subtitled in english as well as chinese, but I'm most curious about if the people standing in front of tractors while speaking their bit are ranting as their stateside counterparts often seem to be?)

Anyone with better language skills have a better site, or better query?

EDIT2: finally found the deep link: just click X to dismiss the QR code popup; no idea what that may be...

There are companies in germany that sell red plastic cups in case you wish to throw an "American" theme party.

That’s great; we also have “Oktoberfests” and drink from big mugs. What does that mean; we know German politics or at least royal traditions?

That means that, beyond all the movies, although germans have been watching Magnum, The Denver Clan, The Duke Brothers, etc. I doubt their american counterparts have been watching DSDS, Die Rosenheim-Cops, GZSZ, usw.

They're not buying red cups because they've heard about them, or have seen them on product tie-ins; they buy them because the american media they consume includes them, and red plastic drinking cups stand out as something peculiarly american.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com