Hacker News Reader

Comment by izzy776 | Hacker News Reader

Cultural differences is an easy sub for racism? Not suggesting bad faith but when it's hard to also take commentary on Asia with good faith here.

View on HN

I don't know, assuming all cultures should be functionally equivalent seems pretty imperialist to me.

I'm Polish and when I mentioned it I always get commentary about how smart or hard working Polish people are, and usually mention of some mathematician or programmer they knew at some point. And it makes me laugh because if you notice that Polish people are smart or hard working, why don't you give me a quick rundown of who you think is lazy and dumb? Ohhh, that's racist.

So I was talking with the family I mentioned about this issue last night, and he said they got training on it and called it power distance index. Japan and Korea are high index cultures. He mentioned that it's caused airline disasters. It still surprises him sometimes when he encounters it because it's so different from American and automotive engineering culture both.

So I looked, and yeah it's pretty well described:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_distance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_culture_on_aviation_...

So, my question to you is, given that the above is pretty widely recognized, why is it racist to merely describe an experience with this cultural difference?

That was basically my point. For some reason commenting on positive traits is totally acceptable. But God forbid someone comments on a negative statistical trait, you're a racist.

Acknowledging cultural differences is different from assuming that cultural differences are determined by genetics and not life experiences.

Saying that someone grew up in a culture that values a certain type of academic education and achievement is different than saying they have those characteristics because of their racial genetic heritage.

It's also one thing to be aware of cultural trends and differences when designing multicultural systems to function well. It's another to project cultural trends onto individual people since the variation between people in a culture easily dominates the variation in the averages between cultures.

Of course, nuance like this rarely makes it into common discourse, which often does end up just being racist.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com