Unfortunately this comment is an example of what I am talking about, the kind of behavior that frustrates me.
Pop culture, news, and books give an incredibly limited and skewed perspective of what a country is actually like. Worse yet, if you remove these things from their context and then give them to someone who has a different culture, you end up missing large chunks. American pop culture is also stripped of realism and specificity to make it more broadly accessible to Americans and even abroad.
To draw a comparison which might be more familiar to the HN crowd, consider what happens when you learn programming by reading a bunch of blog posts, articles, and books about programming, but you never actually write a single line of code. You’ll have a very distorted idea of what programming or software engineering is like.
I’ve had similar conversations with both groups of people. A novice programmer might have an arrogant attitude and explain to me why the code base is terrible, or might have the attitude of a learner and ask me questions about the design decisions. A European might have an arrogant attitude and explain to me what the problems are with American race relations, or they could be more humble and ask me questions about what living in America is like.
Pop culture, news, and books give an incredibly limited and skewed perspective of what a country is actually like. Worse yet, if you remove these things from their context and then give them to someone who has a different culture, you end up missing large chunks. American pop culture is also stripped of realism and specificity to make it more broadly accessible to Americans and even abroad.
To draw a comparison which might be more familiar to the HN crowd, consider what happens when you learn programming by reading a bunch of blog posts, articles, and books about programming, but you never actually write a single line of code. You’ll have a very distorted idea of what programming or software engineering is like.
I’ve had similar conversations with both groups of people. A novice programmer might have an arrogant attitude and explain to me why the code base is terrible, or might have the attitude of a learner and ask me questions about the design decisions. A European might have an arrogant attitude and explain to me what the problems are with American race relations, or they could be more humble and ask me questions about what living in America is like.