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Comment by MSFT_Edging | Hacker News Reader

On the flip side, plenty of Rural and Suburban people are terrified by the city, which kids growing up in the city shrug off.

Rural folks might learn to respect a PTO or the varmint rifle by age 10, but city kids learn how to navigate the bus routes and subway. They learn how to walk on crowded streets, how to live among a lot of different people, including dangerous people(and how to avoid the conflict).

It's all quite interesting. Different kinds of toughness, different kinds of mental fortitude.

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I think that there's a major difference in the resulting mindsets that the two types of experiences form, though.

The first learn that nature is always present and doing its best to kill you / wreck your harvest, and that it is only through man's intelligence and social bonds that we thrive. I would argue a corollary of this is that one cannot tolerate malicious or grossly neglectful people around.

The second group learns that other people are a liability and that bad actors are just a fact of life to be tolerated and worked around.

Both approaches are clearly optimal for their respective environment. The former seems like a stronger foundation for building a civilization on, though.

This is becoming such a weird romanticisation of rural Americana!

Your civilisation is being destroyed because a largely rural constituency is able to clean a rifle in 60s but appears to have no critical thinking skills when it comes to a certain New Yorker.

Yes it’s good to learn how to be resilient in nature, but it’s also important to learn how to get along with and manage relationships with larger groups who are not always to be trusted.

The point missing from this discussion is that because of hysteria over stranger danger (not supported out by any real evaluation of or changes in risk) and because we allow cars to dominate our urban spaces, city kids are being denied opportunities for independence they previously had. That’s the real change that’s happened … and we’re replacing real urban experience with corporate attention economies.

City kids can get on the bus or urban rail in actual big cities. Even in places like urban philippines or mexico where there is [often] no public transport, collectivos take up this niche. Kids abound in these places even in places like Manila where traffic is way worse and way more homicidal, and they take the jeepnee to go to the next barangay.

It's really mainly in the suburbs where neighborhoods are choked off by bike unfriendly freeways and no for-hire transit.

> The first learn that nature is always present and doing its best to kill you

> The second group learns that other people are a liability

Sounds like nature is simply survival + entropy and sometimes that leads to mixed incentives. Rural folks also understand people are dangerous. Per capita violent crime and murder is higher in Rural areas.

That's why I find it interesting, they're different expressions of common survival needs.

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