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Comment by alistairSH | Hacker News Reader

I'm sitting here chuckling because you felt the need to post this.

Your points are valid. And there probably are plenty of Americans who needed the correction. But still.

I think 2) in particular makes some bits of the story evident that, at least, weren’t so obvious to me. I’m not well informed about the geography of the Amazon. For example, if Manaus is reasonably built up, I guess the hotel situation was mostly Spirit cheaping out rather than a limit on the actual hotel capacity of the town.

I have a german last name, do you know how often people outside Brazil act weird when they learn I am Brazilian?

My grandparents came to Brazil right after WW1 way before the Nazis came to power. High ranking Nazis fled to south america because there were a lot of germans living there already. Nearly all german people who moved to south america did it way before WW2.

I just run into this stuff a lot living in Europe.

    > I have a german last name, do you know how often people outside Brazil act weird when they learn I am Brazilian?

I am surprised by this in the 2020s. Supermodel Gisele Bündchen is probably the world's most famous German-heritage Brazillian. She has been famous for at least 20 years.

I am not that familiar with her but had no idea she is Brazilian. I assumed she was German.

Honestly at this point it is usually the Europeans that need this (I have been asked if Chile has good tacos from a European). At least in my experience, most USians (in spanish Americans means everyone in the hemisphere) now know more about South America than the average European.

(Which is to be expected, proximity and all)

We aren't speaking Spanish. "American" means a citizen of the USA in English.

Or maybe, more correct for this thread, "Esta página é de nível internacional."

Esta página es de nivel internacional.

Why are Americans in particular expected to know details about every country on Earth?

Do you think Canadians know all these facts about Brazil? Do Indians? Or Swedes? It's only Americans that are smugly called ignorant for not knowing about the entire world.

Not details, but at least having a basic notion of where countries are located. Everyone should be expected to know, for example, that Mexico and Spain are two different countries that are located in different continents. Yet it’s always people from the same country referring to one by the name of the other.

https://blog.education.nationalgeographic.org/2015/10/22/why...

You're giving way too much credit to the rest of the world if you think most people know stuff like that.

Take the perspective of a non-US person. Regardless of country, almost universally, they will know more about the US than an American knows about their county. It kind of comes with being the most important and biggest cultural exporting country. So every foreign individual justifiably sees the asymmetry in knowledge. I think that that answers your question? Of course, I agree that it's kind of impossible for an American to have the level of knowledge required to make it symmetric, because the asymmetry of the setup.

I 100% agree, I want to see if the people who downvoted me can come up with some kind of bizarre reverse engineered reason for why they think it's important Americans know about every country on earth.

Because the US almost always scores behind its peer nations when its citizens are quizzed on generic geography.

I will offer a reasonable alternative explanation: For large, high population countries, it is one of the most geographically isolated.

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