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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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