I Asked 1000 Americans to Name a British City Other Than London | Hacker News Reader

I Asked 1000 Americans to Name a British City Other Than London

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15 pointsyaph102 comments

I don't know what the author's real motives were (Was it really to beat on the theme that 'Americans are ignorant?), but I personally think this is a good exercise to humble yourself - 'My country/city is not as important as I think it is'.

Frankly, Britain is not as important as it once was and hasn't been for half a century. And it's not particularly notable. You would have better luck with Germany, France, Greece, Russia or many countries in Asia which are much more interesting tourist destinations and have more name recognition.

I see this in science a lot. There are people in a field who are very famous and who get a little spoilt by that fame. But if you happen to mention their name to someone from a slightly different field, its 'Who?'

I think it is important to realize that.

> I don't know what the author's real motives were

You have reason to doubt "what I actually wanted to find out is how well known my own beloved city is"?

>I don't know what the author's real motives were (Was it really to beat on the theme that 'Americans are ignorant?), but I personally think this is a good exercise to humble yourself - 'My country/city is not as important as I think it is'.

Defensive much? For one it proves they are quite ignorant on geography. Britain might not be as important, but it's as well known a country as they come. They would fair even worse with other European cities -- "You're from Austria? I love Kangaroos!"

Heck, a few of the people I've asked for information didn't know large-ish cities 50-70 miles across a state line from them. Like living in Grand Island and having never heard of Wichita or Topeka.

Now, I can understand why that is: you can live all your life in Oklahoma or Oregon without ever caring about what happens in New Mexico or Idaho, much less about Britain or Japan. You just know what you have to know to get by in your own life -- and you might be very knowledgable in your field and even active in local politics etc. After all each state is the size of a large or small country in Europe itself.

What's troubling is that this lack of geographical knowledge means a total lack of interest and knowledge about world affairs -- that's how the only affairs that matter to the population are the ones that have been spoonfed to them by the media, and in the specific way they have been spoonfed to them.

In Europe, geographical skills are more or less taken for granted. And caring about world affairs is very much mainstream, including going out of your way to learn about them, not just what happens to be the discussion of the month on TV/intertubes.

Most Americans care a great deal about what happens in other countries, but Europe, the middle east, and the rest of Asia are a long way from the drug war on the border or economic tensions with countries in south and central America. It's easy to forget that the planet is very big, and we're very far away from your local concerns.

Brazil and Alberta are more urgent interests for me than the debt crisis in Greece. That doesn't mean I don't care about what's happening over there, but I have to prioritize. There are over 100 countries and at least as many things worth knowing in each.

I don't know what the author's real motives were

She did explain a motive right at the start of the article, that of seeing how well known Manchester was.

as a Brit I totally agree with the notability thing and it's a crying shame - the UK has always been such a key player on the world stage (not always in a positive light, mind you) until WWII. It seems pretty crazy that Germany has since recovered to become the most powerful economy in Europe while Britain has never really found its feet again, given Germany suffered arguably much more crushing losses.

Are you from the U.K. or Europe? I'm curious because you used "spoilt" in lieu of "spoiled".

Uh Oh. You outed me :) I've been around a bit, but in the critical period I was schooled under the British system. It took a bit of adjusting but I've finally got rid of all the 'u's in my spelling, and I fit in very well, thank you.

'Americans are ignorant'

You know he was dying for results that would support this. Why else would they ask such an inane question?

He is a she. There's a big picture of her, and she's called Stacey. Or did you not notice as the page doesn't have a pink background and it's about stats?

Personally, once the site stopped 500ing on me outright, I certainly didn't pick out her face in the sidebar full of social networking icons, random facebook faces, and navigation links until I went looking for it.

Then again, I didn't pick out the entire sidebar.

I had a hard time finding her name on the page even looking for it. It's not a signature, but tucked away nearer to the top between the blog title and more social networking noise, in light grey text on white background, in a completely separate column from the profile pic.

Perhaps if Facebook like buttons alone didn't out-number her name 4:1 (whether or not you count the comments) it'd be easier to notice these things...

I totally relate to your frustration here, but you are being petty in your reaction.

If you would like to change the way the language works, hostile personal attacks are more likely to turn people against your cause.

Please grow up. It's common for people to default to "he" as when they do not know the gender of the person in question. I didn't even notice the author until you mentioned anything. If anything, your last comment is quite a bit more inflammatory than accidentally referring to a random blogger as a "he".

It's a common for people to default to "he" as when they do not know the gender of the person in question.

It says "by Stacy" at the top of the article and there's a picture of her next to it. Being unsure of the authorship after reading it would seem lazy at best.

I just tend to tune out whatever is on the sidebar of a website as it tends to be ads or other things I probably don't care enough to read. As for the "by Stacy", well it is rather small and gray. Of course I have a feeling the poster of the comment that sparked this little flame-war didn't read the article.

defending a sexist assumption by claiming a lack of attention to detail and an unwillingness to read the whole pages feels sub-optimal.

Again, I don't really see using "he" as sexist. It's just the English language.

From Merriam-Webster:

1: prejudice or discrimination based on sex; especially : discrimination against women

2: behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex

I can understand an argument that the author of the comment said "he" because of some assumption that anyone doing stats must be a man. However I'm making the counterargument that using "he" is a standard default in English and that such usage is not sexist, but rather as a result of how the English language is used.

That's an astoundingly crap argument.

You are saying that using he as a default isn't sexist because it is a default.

However saying that a default position is a default position tells us very little indeed and nothing whatsoever about if that default position is sexist.

Perhaps we're coming at the situation from different viewpoints. You appear to be judging the situation based off of how "he" came to be a default while I'm coming at the situation from the viewpoint of intentions.

Honestly, I caught myself using "he" several times writing this response but went back and "refactored" my response. Does the fact that I use "he" automatically make me a sexist? No. That's just how everyone around me spoke English and thus how I learned to use it.

Honestly, I caught myself using "he" several times writing this response but went back and "refactored" my response.

But you didn't use the word she in any of your response, so how could have you have needed to refactor anything from he? You might make at least some effort to keep your story straight from one sentence to the next. Honestly.

Also, you have a sexist learned behaviour as part of your language, you know about this and can decide yourself if it is worth giving a shit about. Learning the behaviour doesn't make you sexist, but not giving a shit about it might.

> But you didn't use the word she in any of your response, so how could have you have needed to refactor anything from he? You might make at least some effort to keep your story straight from one sentence to the next. Honestly.

I refactored all usages of "he" to be completely neutral. There is no "he" or "she" being used, except when referencing the word itself. Perhaps you should think critically before insinuating someone else is a liar. Honestly.

> Also, you have a sexist learned behaviour as part of your language, you know about this and can decide yourself if it is worth giving a shit about. Learning the behaviour doesn't make you sexist, but not giving a shit about it might.

I guess I must be a sexist since I use the word "he" by default since my native tongue doesn't have a gender neutral singular pronoun. Sorry for being a lazy bastard and taking the "he" shortcut instead of the other linguistically cumbersome routes English offers to be gender neutral and thus not an irredeemable sexist.

If you see "he" everywhere, you assume being a man is the standard, and being a woman is somehow not applicable. This is a subtle affect that, if applied to everything, will change your perspective on the world.

And it's not that hard to just use "they" instead.

> If you see "he" everywhere, you assume being a man is the standard, and being a woman is somehow not applicable.

I don't quite follow. Are you saying that, by using "he" everywhere, I'm going to subconsciously exclude women?

> And it's not that hard to just use "they" instead

I cannot speak for anyone but myself but, being a native English speaker, using "they" to refer to a single person sounds wrong. I understand the tendency to use it given the lack of a gender-neutral singular pronoun but it doesn't change how grammatically incorrect it sounds to me.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/they

  often used with an indefinite third person singular antecedent <everyone knew where they stood — E. L. Doctorow> <nobody has to go to school if they don't want to — N. Y. Times>

If it's good enough for the NY Times, it's good enough for you and me

> If it's good enough for the NY Times, it's good enough for you and me

Speak for yourself.

I've just gotten through with about 16 years of English courses, with professors who are most certainly not in agreement with your opinion. Hell, I remember having a German professor correct a student for using "they" incorrectly.

Just because a large newspaper uses it doesn't make it any more correct. Many people say "irregardless" and I am sure I could find the usage of it in a major publication, but it doesn't make the word any less illogical.

using "they" to refer to a single person sounds wrong

Yeah, well the person you are replying to, they may disagree.

The use of "they" to refer to one person is incorrect. Maybe things have changed since I was in school, though I'm 20 so I doubt it, but it was never correct to use "they" instead of "he" or "she". The reason it sounds wrong is because it is wrong.

Fuck you cunt.

You might want to give the guideleines a read: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Stay classy, ponyboy.

He probably wanted to pad the stats.

When I saw the headline I tried to think of one and failed. Then I saw the list in the article and recognized most of the names, and could even say a few things about them. And with those as priming, could name a few more.

Brains are weird.

I guess our database reverse index is short thus prone to lose content while the data is still there. Once I give you the key, data flows out easily. It's annoying though.

Another memory graph glitch, a minute ago I couldn't remember the name of the file browser[1] .. for 20 seconds I kept thinking about Thor.. Thor.. then Fubar. This happened to me enough to know that these aren't unrelated answers. Answer was Thunar.[2]

[1] First time I boot this machine since a month, it has no desktop environment per se, I run some graphical programs through bash.

[2] Phonetic hints are the most common of this partial answers, at least in my brain, all of them shares a bit of the final answer.

Recognition memory [1] at work.

Sometimes we also use Cued Recall [2] to retrieve events or information from memory.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recognition_memory

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recall_%28memory%29#Cued_recal...

Now, ask 1000 Londoners to name a City in Illinois other than Chicago.

I'm British and I couldn't name any cities in Illinois other than Chicago and Springfield. (For some reason I know all the state capitals).

However, the UK is five times the size of Illinois.

~1.6x the size if you go by area rather than by population.

Lots of people in Chicago can't name a city in Illinois other than Chicago.

As a belgian european I often wonder if the United States seems as big to americans as Europe seems big to me.

I wonder if it feels different to be a citizen of a small country or a citizen of a continent-wide country such as the United States. Or maybe americans feel they are californians or new-yorkers before being american ?

Having lived in both, the U.S. feels larger and also more homogeneous. When I lived in Belgium I was 90 minutes from Amsterdam, London, Paris and Cologne. In Chicago I'm 90 minutes from Milwaukee (if I speed.)

There is a lot of state pride in the U.S. but not many people put their love of their state before the love of their country (except for perhaps Texas.)

I would say the culture here is fairly homogenous, so most people feel like Americans before they feel like a citizen of their home state.

Looking in from the outside, US culture is substantially less homogenous than Australian culture.

Cultural variety arises from isolation. The US was founded sufficiently long ago that there was time for each region to establish distinct cultural flavours, in no small part contributed by waves of immigration being unevenly spread throughout the country.

From my experience of meeting US citzens, even outside North America, it's fairly normal to get something like "Ohio", "Pensilvania" or "Wisconsin" when asking where they come from, as if I'd _of course_ know where those places are (I do).

Unless you're from Mississippi raises hand

Citizen of small country adjoining a very large country here. People of small countries tend to understand that other cultures exist, because when they travel a couple of hundred miles (or less) in any direction they're in another country. I suppose for people living in the central regions of a very large country, it's your country and your people in every direction for as far as you can imagine. Then you tend not to be concerned too much about other cultures. But of course, I'm speculating here.

As an American in a relatively small Midwestern city, I think that's pretty much it.

I'm interested in what happens elsewhere in the world, but it feels impossibly far away, and ultimately it doesn't affect me here (at least not directly). Whenever I've checked, a roundtrip ticket anywhere out of the country has cost about $2000 and it takes a full day to get there. Then you're jet lagged. So, short vacations are out of the question. But it also takes me a full year of work to earn just 2 weeks vacation time, assuming I don't use any for special occasions. I didn't even bother getting a passport until two years ago, and I still haven't used it.

So yeah, even if an American desperately wants to travel somewhere out of the country, it's expensive and vacation time is scarce. So most never will. And at that point, knowing a list of English cities is purely trivia.

It's less by state and more by region. A rough "region guide" would include Northeast, Mid-west, South (geographic Southeast), Southwest, California, Pacific Northwest, and the Great Plains. But this is a huge over-generalization and doesn't really include places like DC, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, or southern Florida, which have their own microcultures.

People from the Northeast definitely feel differently than people from California.

I also imagine it has something to do with how much American culture is exported in the world. As a Belgian, you probably won't be able to go your whole life just watching Belgian movies and TV and reading Belgian books. But it's quite possible and I'd imagine very common to do that as an American.

I don't know. A lifetime of Tintin comic books and "Septante et un" sounds pretty good.

To be fair, Canada and Mexico are also part of the continent :-) Although you did say continent-wide and the US does span the entire width...

We're definitely American first, but we do generally have a somewhat strong sense of state identity as well.

Well more honestly you'd have to ask them to name another city in the states than NYC.

I'm not sure that many people outside the US would have even been able to cite Chicago when asked for a city in Illinois

and then ask 1000 Americans to name a city in Cambridgeshire other than Cambridge. what's your point?

Cambridgeshire? In that case, we're changing it from "Illinois" to "Cook County, IL"!

Evanston, Cicero, Blue Island, Park Ridge, Stone Park, River Forest, Harwood Heights, Steger, Worth, Palos Park.

I can go all week.

I'm British and could name many American cities (some I could even place on a map), but I have absolutely no idea which cities are inside which states -- I never seem to come into contact with state boundaries in every day life or in the media...

If memorising state capitals worries you, might I recommend Australia as a beginner's challenge? We only have six. Seven, if you count the Northern Territory.

Illinois is not a country. You should be glad people outside the US even know the name of the states at all. Do you know any county in Britain?

Illinois has more people in it than Belgium or Greece and is larger than Bulgaria. If you compare the U.S. to the E.U., you'll see that many of our states are bigger than your states.

13 U.S. states are bigger than Britain by size.

And 28 provinces in China have more people than Illinois. Can you name one?

Yorkshire.

Or a city in the District of Columbia other than Washington.

They have those?? goes to check Google Maps

They used to -- e.g., Georgetown -- but they long ago merged into Washington.

McHenry.

You'd think that 'York' might be quite an obvious choice.

It doesn't say why Liverpool is the most common choice, but here's my theory, as an American: the Beatles. Most Americans have heard of Liverpool in relation to them.

Also, history.

Majority of UK emigration to the US was through Liverpool: http://www.european-emigration.com/uk/methods.html

Families would only need to know their family history to be vaguely aware of that city.

Australian comedian John Safran (and all-round crazy person) made a pretty good point about this concept that Americans are uniquely ignorant of geography:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Z27xVjXBbk

Well, compared to what Australians? They are similarly insular.

A better comparison would be with Europeans.

The things he mentions as extremely insightful stuff people wouldn't know, e.g Zaire, Congo, Republic of the Congo, the civil war there, etc are all quite common knowledge.

If there was a way to lay a wager on this, I would bet you a thousand Euros that less than 10% of a randomly-selected sample of Europeans would be able to correctly identify that 1. Zaire changed its name to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 2. where the DRC is, 3. that it is distinct from the RoC, 4. that there has been a civil war and 5. how many people have died in it.

Oh, I agree with that: less than 10% (with variatons from country to country). Still plenty though, and (I'd say) more than would know the same thing in the states.

As for knowing just simple facts about DRC, like where it is located and having a vague idea of it's past with Belgium etc, the percentage would be quite higher.

So ... people have mentioned "priming".

If you stopped me and asked me to name a list of almost anything I guess the results would depend what I'd been doing. Sometimes I'd be great and reel off a nice list of lizards or Belgian scientists or words used by genetic scientists in their papers or whatnot.

I also guess that most people would have similar results.

So, unless you turn this into a game[1] I'm not sure what the point is.

[1] (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2381/scattergories)

[1] (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/4862/outburst)

Given I follow English football Manchester was my first thought. I'd have laughed if Midsomer made the list.

As a Welsh man I'm fairly sure that Wales isn't a city :)

It's a city, but not in the UK. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wales_(disambiguation)

You should be proud - it's a bigger city than Scotland.

It's reasonable that most people are assuming this is yet another boring jab at the ignorance that's somehow unique to us.

I could do the same and ask people to name a city in Georgia other than Atlanta, Athens, or Savannah. A lot of people won't be able to do that. I don't think anyone in Bogart or Carl is going to lose sleep over it, and I don't think it would tell you anything about the people surveyed.

I found an interesting figure [1] for those of us who could name a few, but are not as well versed in the geography of Britain. It compares British cities to similar European cities by population. The scale is unnecessarily skewed, though.

[1] http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/resources/figure1_tcm77-259156.png

I realize most of the British city names I know are from soccer teams (except for Arsenal etc). The rest is quite accidental :

- music history (Beatles) - trips (Canterbury is a regular short visit for french schools)

The interviewees could also cheat. New York : USA, York : England.

It's interesting to see Birmingham in 8th place given that it's the 2nd largest city in the United Kingdom. It would be weird if you saw a similar list of American cities and Los Angeles came that far down.

A city like Phoenix (6), Jacksonville (12) or Columbus (15) would be a good analogue.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by...

Only Los Angeles can be seen in 70% of the movies playing in any cinema. And it's where those stars live.

What's the equivalent Birmingham has to make it famous? UB40? The Selfridges?

Even Ozzy Osbourne lives in Los Angeles nowadays (I pressume)

You can cheat at this if you watch a lot of TopGear like I do.

I've watched all eps of TG, but I don't recall them mentioning city names too often.

I've watched all eps of TG

You poor thing. Help is available if you only just ask.

Intriguingly in the full list he's lumped "brighton" with "briton/england" - Brighton is actually a place, albeit not a city.

Brighton is a city, technically it's "Brighton and Hove" but that's what everyone is referring to when they say Brighton (in roughly* the same way that Newcastle = Newcastle upon Tyne).

Though not exactly, Hove is* a place too.

"he" is a "she" you sexist idiot.

I think you need to carry yourself a bit more like an adult. Whoever posted that comment probably didn't bother to check the gender of the author, and as in many languages, the pronoun people tend to default to is the masculine "he". There isn't anything inherently sexist about that, it's just how the language is.

This screams of... did you not realize how unimportant you've become?

This game is equally well-played with all the places we like to bomb. Watch it.

How is it our fault that there is only one British city that matters?

(Says the guy who lives in Sacramento)

Paris :)

Not sure how Manchester could be beloved of anyone.

Manchester United is the #1 or #2 football/soccer "brand" or club with more international recognition (and football is the most popular sport in the world).

So to explain the results: The Beatles and soccer.

Manchester United is the #1 sports brand in the world.

#2 is the New York Yankees.

I watched "Life on Mars," does it still look like crap?

as a foreigner: The Smiths, Joy Division (and then New Order), the Stone Roses, the Happy Mondays.

The Buzzcocks, The Chameleons, James (before they went awful), Inspiral Carpets, The Fall, Crispy Ambulance, and millions* more.

Plus the city itself is upmarket gentrified in the centre parts now. Just avoid the students and you'll be alright.

* ok, maybe tens.

Well, you gotta love Mozzer. Is the rules.

Camelot

I'm not British(I'm American), but I'm going to start doing surveys like this to people in America. It looks to fun to see what we come up with.

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