Hacker News Reader

> As a person who has lived half his life in a society where being "well rounded", conformity, and obedience to authority are considered a child's primary virtues, I must confess that I am quite partial to the American style, tradition be damned.

My observation is that the value placed on conformity is the US is astounding. Just take a look at the undergrad girls on any university campus. They all look so alike; it is almost as if they were wearing uniform, it's staggering. Also: the importance of "rules".

Teenagers and young adolescents are desperate to fit in everywhere though, I'm not sure I would take that as a sign of the society as a whole. I would want to see how this compares to university outside the US, as well.

I never noticed the overbearing desire to fit in when I was at uni in Britain and Germany.

There is this idea that conformity is valued highly in East Asian cultures, and I have never been there and consequenly can't tell if this is true. But in America there is this talk of freedom, individualism and stuff, and it just simply isn't so.

What part of the US are you talking about? This hasn't been my experience at all (DC metropolitan area).

I'm in Flatland Northeast, and other foreigners here have made the same observation.

Clothing choices is one of the least consequential places for there to be a lack of individualism, and I hardly think it's a good proxy for judging how a group values freedom and individualism in areas that matter. I know a lot of people (myself included) whose dress is influenced by prevailing trends, but whose ideas, values, priorities, etc are not (or are to a much lesser degree).

> There is this idea that conformity is valued highly in East Asian cultures, and I have never been there and consequenly can't tell if this is true.

Conformity is highly valued in all human cultures. It's what makes a culture a culture, what stabilizes and maintains it. The difference is more that Americans like to delude themselves with self-aggrandizing rhetoric, but don't have the experience and training to actually put it into practice.

Were you by any chance forced to wear a uniform in high school? I'm wondering if this practice makes people a little more rebellious clothing-wise in university. I'm not sure if it's more prevalent in other countries than the US.

Compared to most other parts of the world except Northern Europe, I would say that American campuses teem with diversity. I agree with you that there's not enough diversity, but there's still a lot of it.

Just take a look at the undergrads in a Chinese/Japanese/Korean university. It's as if they belonged to some sort of military organization.

The relative ethnic homogeneity in those societies is a factor here, I think. I might be harder for an outsider to appreciate the diversity of what superficially seems to be a very similar group of people.

As someone who has lived on both continents myself I find that Americans are more conformist and worried about stepping outside cultural norms than Europeans.

I assume you are not referring to Switzerland.

Interesting, I find that social norms in the US are more rigid and Europe seems to be more laid back. (Two examples that come to mind: nudity and the "base" system in dating.)

Sexual norms are not necessarily representative of a society's overall openness to change. My impression is that America (modulo some parts of the South) makes much more fuss celebrating innovation than most of the rest of the world does, and even if this is not a good reflector of the status quo, it certainly has a long-term impact on how people think.

I don't know where you're deriving social norms from conformity. If anything, with Europe being traditionally much more leftist than the U.S. there has been much more conformity of the individual to the state in Europe.

My anecdotal observation is that the reality in US/Can is opposite of the desire. While parents say they value thinking, independence, and rebelliousness, they actually teach a lot of anti-intellectualism and conformity.

Genuine "outside the norm" behaviour is frowned upon and "thinking outside the box" and "rebelliousness" often means denying scientific position on well studied problems.

What you see as expressions of freedom and liberty can just as well mean the polar opposite. Calling somebody "rebellious" means they do not fit in a given system (which is bad if you represent the system concerned), while calling somebody "adaptable" means they will fit in no matter how the system changes; they are, in other words, malleable. In that sense, being independent can also mean the opposite of being socially minded, i.e. being egotistic.

Rebellious, adaptable and individual in a commercial sense might mean somebody resisting the mainstream and innovating. On the other hand, from a systemic point of view, it can denote an egotistical and spineless person that doesn't fit in (which is bad).

Whether the strong focus on individuality, adaptability, rebellion and cognitive advancement is positive or negative will ultimately hinge on your overall image of the wider society creating these values.

I'm not sure about your extrapolation here. For example, labeling a child 'rebellious' isn't necessarily praise, it might just as easily express disappointment with conformist expectations. I have to say I never heard the phrase 'oppositional defiance disorder' until I came to the US. In Europe people would just regard such kids as stubborn, but not necessarily assume it was the result of a pathology.

Isn't it more likely that these descriptions are what the parents want to see in their children? As for 'rebellious', I see that as more of a humble-brag. "Oh, he's so rebellious, hehe". My takeaway from the data is these are the qualities that the parents in the respective countries hope their children possess, or perhaps that they've instilled in them...since in any meaningful sense most young children would be fairly similar across cultures, the differences the researchers perceived in the parents' answers must have been biases from the parents themselves.

You see "rebellious" as a brag because you think "rebellious" is a positive trait, not because the surveyed person thinks so.

Or I could say that you see at as not positive because you don't think it is. My point though was that, in my opinion, from my experience, people describe their children how they want to see them, or in their version of positive ways whatever those may be for each person (I'm thinking of young children here mostly). I mean can a 2 or 3 year old really be more "happy" or "rebellious" in any meaningful different degree from any other child of same age, in the aggregate? It's projection.. That's what I'm getting at.

Stereotypically, USA is more socially conservative than Western- and Northern-Europe.

Maybe this explains a strange situation. Europe is bigger than the US, is well educated, free and prosperous. You would think that more technological innovation would come from Europe, or at least it would be on par, but that is far from the case. There have been several articles on this lately but none seem to have an answer.

Genuinely curious, how do you measure innovation?

I had a quick google for some data and the best measure I could find was this[1], which places the US on a similar level to the European/Scandinavian countries with strong economies.

[1] http://www.globalinnovationindex.org/gii/main/fullreport/fil...

I really wish there was actual competition to the US but there is not. I can make an argument and cite findings that show that China is more free than Europe but it is still patently false. What is the EU equivalent of NASA, Apple, Google, SpaceX etc. Competition is good for all, pretending is not.

So it's just your gut feeling that the US is more innovative than the EU? Edit: That comes across as more snarky than it's meant.

In the same way it is my gut feeling the EU is more free than China.

Well sure, but you could back that up with data[1]. With the innovation index the data apparently disputes your gut feeling. So which do you trust?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices

I gave you my list of US innovators, lets see your list.

I don't have a list, and I'm not seeing this as a competition. If you want to see where the GII data comes from I'm sure it's on their website.

No, you gave a list consisting of: one huge government agency (there's ESA, and pretty much every EU nation has some king of space exploration agency), one giant hardware corporation which made tons of money doing incremental improvement on others' inventions, a giant software company milking a single innovation to build an effective monopoly, and a private space research company.

It's a vast difference between "technology innovator" and "a successful international corporation built on technology innovations", and Europe has a ton of the former. For every Tesla there's a Rimac Automobili, for every SpaceX there's a Hipersfera -- and that's just from a small country on the edge of EU. I'm sure others could come up with better results from elsewhere.

US has a 10x factor of industrial efficiency due it's size as as unified nation.

Your cell phone was basically invented in Finland. So was Linux. The English cracked Enigma.