> sarcasm is simply not a thing in Japan, and people aren't (I'm tempted to say can't be) sarcastic. It doesn't occur to them to be it.
Japanese culture absolutely has sarcasm, it simply manifests in an unfamiliar way. Homegoroshi (killing-compliment) and using a flagrantly inappropriate politeness register are some of the most common forms. Sarcasm, and more broadly humor, are highly contingent on culture and language but they're also cultural universals. They're just usually not that recognizable without familiarity with the culture and strong social skills.
I only mentioned forms. They're sarcasm because they're explicit mockery. I've read plenty of foreigners in Japan who comment on how it's weird they won't get praise from their boss in certain contexts where they expect it. This is a shadow of the killing-complement. Praise isn't issued because in that context a Japanese person would get the same sense that you would if your boss said "Good job!" in a baby voice.
> sarcasm as something quite unfunny (and also socially .. deficient?)
Probably because it's insulting someone to their face without just outright insulting them, often with the desire to cause offense (but varies in degree depending on your relationship with the person and the general situation). It's the same thing here and there, up to and including making everybody else in the room uncomfortable. It's simply manifested in a different shape.
>Sarcasm happens when the observed irony does not extend to the speaker.
This seems... dead wrong. In the examples in the article, both comic frames function as sarcasm, because everyone involved has no illusion that anyone is going to die if they don't see the film. The irony is entirely in the speaker's statement, which everyone knows to be false, including them. People treat 'ironic insults' as sarcasm, but this only works amongst good friends who have the shared context necessary to understand the falsity of the insult. But, then socially incompetent see this and attempt it, and fail to achieve the sarcastic humour. Which is probably why people conflate sarcasm with... failed sarcasm, frankly.
TBH I don't agree with the idea that sarcasm is exclusively the friendly variety. It also serves the role of being patronizing, scornful or even outright provocation.
Sarcasm is never friendly; it's necessarily at the expense of someone else. The simplest example is where someone makes a bold claim and someone else says 'sure, buddy...' to express contemptuous disbelief via the weakest possible form of assent. The claimant here wants to be believed, or at least agreed with.
Irony is imho much more complex and variegated, but a simple example would be any sort of self-deprecating humor, where someone is making fun of the mismatch between their aspirations and their capacity to achieve them. Irony isn't necessarily mean, whereas sarcasm is always a little bit mean even if it's mild.
>Jockingly? Is this meant to suggest that brutal honesty is an adjacent pasttime of jocks?
Well, I'm a jock, if I may say so myself, and I do ocassionally deploy brutal honesty.
Though I was talking about sarcasm and playful busting of balls in general, not necessarily through brutal honestly. Could be sarcastic and outlandish or fan, not necessarily honest.
To be clear, I don't disagree with you, and to say otherwise wasn't my point. I do think people get confused to the point where they for some reason start labeling all sarcasm as type A or B, and the entire value of the term gets lost.
The way I see it, the non-friendly type shares a lot in common with the concept of shibboleth. Which is to say, you can absolutely make sarcastic insults to the detriment of someone else for your own, or a friend's enjoyment, by relying on shared exclusive knowledge. (In essence, holding that shared context above the other person in contempt) However, you can also just be abrasive for your own enjoyment, and that's something entirely differently. (Sadism, for example, is not inherently sarcastic) People frequently confuse the two, but without ironic context - a knowledge of false belief - it is not ironic, and therefore not sarcasm.
> And culture is, by and large, random, arbitrary, and self-reinforcing.
The best definition of "culture" I've ever found is "how we do things 'round here". It's valid in both the large and in the small.
Of course, why and how we converge on those norms is mysterious, and the anthropologists, the psychologists, and etc. can have a go at explaining those parts. I can't.
At its core, I believe the phenomenon of culture is intertwined with the hard problem of consciousness, which is notoriously circular and self-referential and roughly speaking “how we do/feel things ’round here” is potentially not far from the best we can do.
Cultural baggage, for the lack of a better word, drives how we tend to approach reality (holistically or by dividing and classifying things, monistically or dualistically, materialistically or idealistically, and so on), and reality includes the very thing under discussion (consciousness, culture).
Shared cultural baggage is perhaps the thing that makes us believe another being is conscious (i.e., shares similar aspects of self-awareness). Shared culture manifests itself in an infinity of fine details of one’s behaviour; looking like a human but not behaving like a human can be a great horror movie trope, depending on how carefully shared culture is violated[0].
This carries over to animals, to a degree. A dog is social to an extent that many would consider it conscious. An octopus is legally recognised as sentient in some countries—thanks to it behaving in a way that is vaguely reminiscent of ourselves. Same reason we call ravens smart.
Most humans anywhere on the planet, though, share enough cultural baggage that we do not question whether others have what we consider consciousness; though I think some people are more sensitive to how much shared cultural baggage another human possesses, the small lack of which could lead to fear, cautiousness, and/or a feeling that they are in some ways subhuman (closer than a dog, but not as human as their peers in local community) relative to them, which eventually contributes to exclusion, racism, and so on (well demonstrated in both Japan and parts of the US).
[0] Arguably, “behaving sufficiently like a human while being not human at all”, which we have plenty of examples of now in the last year or two, is another such trope.
> culture is intertwined with the hard problem of consciousness
Majority of people are sleep-walking as machines driven by imitation, habit and external forces. We live in a dreamlike, mechanical state lacking the awareness of this itself. apropos: Gurdjieff
Very uncharitable and questionable on a few levels. Every human exists in context of society, no human exists standalone—the very definition of self, as in self-awareness, has the existence of other as a prerequisite. People you see are perfectly aware of themselves; it’s just that awareness of yourself does not mean you have to violate societal norms and show how individual you are all the time—at best, it requires a more acute awareness of norms (you have to know what to violate first, cf. all the various counter-cultures), making one more socially integrated and in some ways paradoxicay less individual; at worst (if you are properly disconnected) it makes one less of a human, not more.
> People you see are perfectly aware of themselves
Are they rote-students imitating or copying memes and as such are driven by inadequate-ideas or are they students who understand the subject from its first assumptions and as such are driven by adequate-ideas. In the quote above, the suggestion is that majority are rote-students.
There’s a lot of ground between “imitate” and “understand the subject from its first assumptions”. Arguably, the former is how all learning happens at first. We imitate to get a taste for it and start enjoying it (humans are mirrors), then we can dig deeper if we become sufficiently interested. You can hardly become truly interested in music if you are presented with all the music theory up front and don’t get to have fun playing the instrument; same with math.
Even if someone never becomes sufficiently interested to dig deeper into some academic subject and sticks to imitating, I wouldn’t say they are somehow worse and have no awareness. They may have other interests and joys in life, there’s many fulfilling things outside academia. Why would you expect everybody to be like you?
I think you're missing one element. It works. The culture in Germany in 1600 compared with the culture in Germany in 2026 is very, very different, even though the geography hasn't changed. That's because in the modern world nearly none of the culture of the old Germany works.
This is not unique to Germany, of course. We long ago gave up on the four humours theory. We long ago gave up on burning women who wear pants. We long ago gave up of many things that used to be European culture.
The culture of queuing in Japan works because you are looked down upon if you don't participate and because it is better than the random stuff we do in the West. However, it would probably disappear pretty soon if it wasn't also a good solution.
> > And culture is, by and large, random, arbitrary, and self-reinforcing.
Culture, by and large, isn't random nor arbitrary. Culture is obviously influenced by the past and the environment, but it's mostly artificially created by the elites. Once established it is self-reinforcing.
> Of course, why and how we converge on those norms is mysterious, and the anthropologists, the psychologists, and etc. can have a go at explaining those parts. I can't.
It's not mysterious. Monkey see, monkey do. We see the higher ups do it and we mimic. Or we are told this is how we do things and we obey. This applies to nations, corporations and families.
This is the kind of half-baked stuff the parent is talking about. You're vaguely guesturing at the same ideas as Bourdieu, but missing most of the nuance behind his conception of capital.
Yeah, please leave the cultural analysis to anthropologists, sociologists, etc. The engineering-focused materialist way of looking at stuff like this makes my head and heart hurt.
Why gatekeep like this? If you had developed an interesting account of some engineering topic and were told to leave it to the pros, you would find it deflating
Whether monastic materialism or idealism is correct would be an unfalsifiable claim within the framework of natural scientific method. (That method is designed to help us make predictions; interpreting experimental outcome for a statement of objective truth is a misapplication of scientific method.) An existing natural-scientific model can be referenced in a philosophical argument, but the argument remains a philosophical statement. A philosophical argument can still be debated on other merits—e.g., which alternative grants magical objective existence to more arbitrary entities, or such.
The human concept of materialism appears to have been produced by historical humans who were also conscious, which at least sets an order. To call this into question is to render logical debate incoherent.
Materialism is a theory, not a reality, but its adherents can't tell the difference.
> To call this into question is to render logical debate incoherent.
Unfortunately there are quite a few things of that nature. In no case does it justify blindly picking one of the options and then following up with bold claims based on an arbitrary assumption.
Be advised this is not something that can be understood through intellectualization. At some point you have to put down the books and seek out the experience.
I always enjoyed this aspect of being in Tokyo. Similar to rayiner's comment, I'd then get a huge shock on return to Europe.
But I was also struck by the flip side of this when reading Murakami's account of the sarin gas attacks (Underground). Everyone was so keen not to make a fuss that trains were sent on their way too soon, poisoning even more people.
Culture is huge nested networks of memes[1] which reinforce themselves and evolve via natural selection. Their substrate is our brains.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
Are those terms substantially different from the article's claims?
THe wikipedia definition of meme is "memes: ideas, behaviors, beliefs, and expressions." The author discusses frames and mental models as a topic [0]. "[A] framing is a choice of boundaries" and "A model is an analogy. It is a simplified simulation of something else." These seem to map to meme-concepts ideas and beliefs respectively and loosely. ("Frame" is probably a meta-meme or ontology that expands or contracts what memes can exist at all or what can be discerned at all.)
The reason why people form two lines to board the Marunouchi line in Ikebukuro is not because they prioritize seating, or going as soon as possible.
The true reason is that the line forks into two lines later on, with the final station being either Honancho or Ogikubo. The second line that form is just for the people whose destination would not be served by the incoming train.
Queueing culture is hilarious. Indians > Italians (ok, Italians are probably more entertaining), brits (I imagined them trying to bring queueing to indians and gave up... although india does have a semi-line culture in limited ways nowadays). As an american, grocery checkout queueing always angered me.
Certain workflows prefer non-queueing, for instance the throng empowers the bartender to load balance different groups, delay drinks to over consumers, etc etc. So other cultures can have those workflows in places we might not expect, that is not necessarily a matter of respect. In pub culture, queueing disrespects the bartender.
It depends. Many places in the UK have a tradition of "virtual queuing" at bars; they don't stand in a line because that would usually block the space, but everyone remembers who was before them. Usually the barkeep remembers as well, but sometimes they ask "who's next" and people defer to those ahead. But load balancing also happens.
You're conflating efficiency norms with respect norms. Never mind that the core reason for no queues in bars is space efficiency and historical norms, allowing the bartender to select regulars, better paying customers, etc. without being stressed for time.
But in any case, your edge-cas applies when someone exists to manage the queue. That's not the case for e.g. elevators, self-checkout lanes, DMV lines, or, I'd argue, that vast majority of queues encountered regularly.
> As an american, grocery checkout queueing always angered me.
It should, because practically everywhere in the US does it wrong. There should be a single entry queue that distributes to the multiple handlers. Instead, you wind up with multiple queues so that people get hung up behind someone causing slow handling.
The one that infuriates me are bank queues. Look, folks, both queuing theory and experience show that you CANNOT have a single handler without your queue time going to infinity. So, how many active tellers do I always see on the unusual times I have to go into the bank? Exactly one. Always. And a queue that's backed up 6 deep.
> There should be a single entry queue that distributes to the multiple handlers.
Sure, that's more fair. But it also means everyone has to walk over to the queue entry. And often requires dedicated floorspace. If there's not good queuing discipline, it leads to larger gaps between customers at the registers and poor throughput. If there's a queue minder (which there probably should be in order to distribute people into subqueues), that person can steer customers to benefit their favorite register people: this was common at Fry's; register operators got a commission, so and some queue mindets would collude steer expensive carts to preferred registers.
Multiple independent queues works fairly well and avoids extensive coordination. Even if people don't like it.
Instead, you wind up with multiple queues so that people get hung up behind someone causing slow handling.
Have you tried not caring about how fast the other queue is moving? IF you are in a hurry then most stores have 'quick registers' for people who are buying less than 10 or some similarly low number of items. And obviously if you get behind someone with a full cart you'll be waiting a bit longer, but you can only guess about the last person in the queue. But if I'm not in a hurry and have too many groceries to go through the express lane, I don't see the point in staring at other lines and being upset if one is moving faster than yours. Over time this is one of those things that just averages out.
> It should, because practically everywhere in the US does it wrong
Where do they do it differently? I've been in grocery stores across Western Europe, Asia and Latin America, and the only place I recall seeing the single entry queue was at a Trader Joe's in NYC
The Barnes & Noble Bookstore (at least the two or three I have been to in the past 10 years) has a single queue. Fry's Electronics did it that way. The self-pay corral at HEB (a huge Texas grocery chain) with about 14 check-out stations does it that way. The Academy Sporting Goods store near me does it that way. The Austin Bergstrom Airport security gates are that way.
I agree that many places have a queue for each registers, but the other way isn't entirely rare.
Large grocery stores actually seem to do this the least, but many types of stores default to this in much of the world. Clothing stores, book stores, stationary stores.
Many larger convenience stores do and those are close to being small grocery stores.
> The basic force behind all culture formation is imitation
We are also limited by the linguistic structures we inhabit. And many languages have multiple variants. There is the respectful, obedient "formal" variant used at the workplace and the informal "colloquial" used in other places.
The "strong" sapir-whorf hypothesis, that cognitive and behavioral categories are limited by linguistic ones, is thoroughly discredited. At most they may influence our perceptions, but they do not constrain them.
Linguistics is one of the fields where HN consensus goes directly against the scholarly mainstream of the discipline for what I mostly find to be ideological reasons. So hopefully this isn't that and you're just a bit out of date. But there's been a big reevaluation of this in the last twenty years and virtually no contemporary working linguists represent the strong relative view anymore. It simply did not consistently produce useful results and has been abandoned.
Yes, more so than everyone else who act like any animal.
I can’t help to think of the “human test” in Dune, when we use our minds to override our instinctive urges, it is human behavior.
>Of course, I know that there is nothing innate in the miraculous "Japanese Way" because expats living here quickly adapt to the same behaviors.
That just proves it's not genetic/innate (which nobody seriously doubted). But it is a unique developed trait of a culture. The expacts merely "adapted" to it. The Japanese culture on the other hand, developed it (and thus gave this specific thing to adapt to).
The human brain is one of the most powerful filtering devices that exists. If you train it not to see something, that something can effectively disappear for you. Families, cults, and even societies quite often work on this premise.
Culture is a ritualized enslavement of the sexual other into a contract upholding institution. This institution may progress and diversify in time, forming a meta family aka a high trust society given economic circumstances. Not all cultures can form these contractcults and if you cant you are screwed in a world of large powers and nuclear proliferation.
you know that voice in the back of your end that amps you up for your first day of a new job, or springs to life when you see someone doing something annoying like cutting in line, or fuels the anxiety in the back of your mind as you lay awake at night? that's just your inner voice, right?
well, really, a lot of people share inner voices. everyone has their own spin on it, and some people's inner voices are completely different than anyone else's (maybe schizophrenics? or prophets?), but generally there are shared components.
the collective aspects of these shared inner voices, if not culture, are at the very least what creates culture.
I wouldn't call those impulses an "inner voice". I'd call them learned behaviors beaten into people, and if anything we're thankfully finally seeing less of that.
If there's anything that immediately identifies someone as inexperienced and untrustworthy it's that impulsive behavior and over-reliance on "culture" instead of their own independent mind.
> For an Italian like me, this whole process is nothing short of a miracle. I grew up in a city where metro train boarding during rush hour feels like a prelude to the apocalypse
Going Japan reminds me of coming to the U.S. from Bangladesh. It’s so clean, so orderly, so disciplined. I’m in a grumpy mood for weeks when I get back to the U.S. Our major cities are such dumps in comparison to Tokyo or Kyoto.
All of our non-major cities are even bigger dumps then. I live in Nyc for 8 years. I didn’t sit around the whole time b-ing and moaning that the city had a trash problem. I got involved in my community and active in the political movements here. When you start making issues visible and get your neighbors vocalizing the issues themselves, a lot more gets done than being in a “grumpy mood” about it indefinitely.
The real dumps are the people who complain along the way but make no effort to improve their world. Aka American culture.
> I got involved in my community and active in the political movements here. When you start making issues visible and get your neighbors vocalizing the issues themselves
But you didn't actually succeed in cleaning up New York, right? So maybe the problem is a culture that prioritizes "making issues visible" and engaging the "community" in "political movements," instead of every parent teaching their child from a young age to pick up after themselves?
> All of our non-major cities are even bigger dumps then.
Most, but not all. I was shocked to my core when I visited Salt Lake City and Provo. The closest place to Japan in the whole U.S.
Maybe bad example but, Let's say you spill some food at a fast food place, shopping mall, airport. Do you make an effort to clean it up yourself or are you like "It's someone's job to clean this place therefore I can just leave it for them".
Maybe that's too harsh an example but I see locals cleaning the streets in Japan, not government hired street sweepers. I don't know the details if they just did it, or if they registered to volunteer to be responsible for that area, or if there is more to it. And I also don't know if they feel put-out, as in "why am I doing this" vs proud for making the area clean.
> provo and salt lake
Not sure in what dimension? Plenty of neighborhoods in larger LA, SF, SD, Seattle, are clean.
It's a mix of things. Japan's reputation for extreme cleanliness was partly engineered in preparation for the 1964 Olympics, in which organizers spent ~5% of the budget on beautification efforts. Arguably they started out from a higher personal baseline with bathing culture and there's also issues of population density, monoculture, and social sanctions. But there's also something of a gap between trope and reality; public urination is pretty common in Japan, especially at night, which shocks some people.
I think you’re correct that it’s a culture of “someone else will do it.” Also, you can go further and pick up trash that doesn’t belong to you in an effort to keep the space clean for everyone: https://youtu.be/5N2eM7Za9Ss. In some cultures, it’s taboo to touch other people’s trash. In many more, it’s considered beneath the social class of people to clean up like that.
What amazed me about Provo and SLC was how clean and orderly the busy public spaces are, not just the nicer neighborhoods. There’s clean and orderly rich neighborhoods in every place in the world. Palo Alto pays people to go around and power wash everything. What’s rarer is places where even the busy tourist areas and lower income neighborhoods are clean. What you’ll see often in Tokyo are places that are not nice—worn out buildings, or buildings with mildew on white surfaces because it’s still a hot and humid country—but where the streets are clean and well kept.
"Making issues visible" can be kinda dangerous in that groups that do that become dependent on those issues continuing. Also they frequently misdiagnose problems: for instance homelessness is seen as a problem of "poverty" and not "management of severe mental illness".
It's true technically that the median homeless person is not mentally ill, but the median homeless person is "between apartments" and the intractable cases, the people who are screaming on the street corners and breeding pitbulls that bite people on the Ithaca Commons are a public health problem.
SLC is a major city and a dump then by your observation-only position.
> instead of every parent teaching their child from a young age to pick up after themselves
What? Are you going to fine or arrest every parent that doesn’t teach their kids to pick up after themselves? How has expecting parents to do that worked out so far? Their culture is similar to how you suggest to operate: just complain about society instead.
That’s why they don’t teach their kids to pick up after themselves.
Okay. Well I think we’re done with this discussion here. I never said it was a done project but that things are changing. Enjoy your dumpy city you dont care about.
Will you provide context around how you got involved and got your neighbors to vocalize? I think there’s a lot of learned helplessness and cynicism that gets in the way of making things better. I know I personally suffer from this and lack the tools, motivation, and follow-through to make an impact.
I’ll just link you to my reply but getting involved with a group about your specific first-world problem shouldn’t be difficult. For everything else either start a group or join one.
I also protested during BLM and advocated for repealing 50-A amendment that gave criminal police protection from prosecution in NY. And we succeeded at that too!
> sarcasm is simply not a thing in Japan, and people aren't (I'm tempted to say can't be) sarcastic. It doesn't occur to them to be it.
Japanese culture absolutely has sarcasm, it simply manifests in an unfamiliar way. Homegoroshi (killing-compliment) and using a flagrantly inappropriate politeness register are some of the most common forms. Sarcasm, and more broadly humor, are highly contingent on culture and language but they're also cultural universals. They're just usually not that recognizable without familiarity with the culture and strong social skills.
That sounds more like irony than sarcasm
But maybe that's my English-media tainted view of sarcasm as something quite unfunny (and also socially .. deficient?)
Different take from mine here tho :)
https://www.thescop.com/archive/2011/09/irony-vs-sarcasm
>Sarcasm happens when the observed irony does not extend to the speaker.
> That sounds more like irony than sarcasm
I only mentioned forms. They're sarcasm because they're explicit mockery. I've read plenty of foreigners in Japan who comment on how it's weird they won't get praise from their boss in certain contexts where they expect it. This is a shadow of the killing-complement. Praise isn't issued because in that context a Japanese person would get the same sense that you would if your boss said "Good job!" in a baby voice.
> sarcasm as something quite unfunny (and also socially .. deficient?)
Probably because it's insulting someone to their face without just outright insulting them, often with the desire to cause offense (but varies in degree depending on your relationship with the person and the general situation). It's the same thing here and there, up to and including making everybody else in the room uncomfortable. It's simply manifested in a different shape.
>Sarcasm happens when the observed irony does not extend to the speaker.
This seems... dead wrong. In the examples in the article, both comic frames function as sarcasm, because everyone involved has no illusion that anyone is going to die if they don't see the film. The irony is entirely in the speaker's statement, which everyone knows to be false, including them. People treat 'ironic insults' as sarcasm, but this only works amongst good friends who have the shared context necessary to understand the falsity of the insult. But, then socially incompetent see this and attempt it, and fail to achieve the sarcastic humour. Which is probably why people conflate sarcasm with... failed sarcasm, frankly.
TBH I don't agree with the idea that sarcasm is exclusively the friendly variety. It also serves the role of being patronizing, scornful or even outright provocation.
Sarcasm is never friendly; it's necessarily at the expense of someone else. The simplest example is where someone makes a bold claim and someone else says 'sure, buddy...' to express contemptuous disbelief via the weakest possible form of assent. The claimant here wants to be believed, or at least agreed with.
Irony is imho much more complex and variegated, but a simple example would be any sort of self-deprecating humor, where someone is making fun of the mismatch between their aspirations and their capacity to achieve them. Irony isn't necessarily mean, whereas sarcasm is always a little bit mean even if it's mild.
>Sarcasm is never friendly; it's necessarily at the expense of someone else
That doesn't preclude it from being friendly. Part of the friend experience is jockingly busting each others balls ocassionally.
Jockingly? Is this meant to suggest that brutal honesty is an adjacent pasttime of jocks?
The man who is brutally honest enjoys the brutality as much as the honesty. Possibly more.
Another thing in the domain of "friendly" that this brings to mind is "fire".
I have oft experienced this metaphorical friendly fire but they never seem to be as therapeutic as well-targeted irony :)
>Jockingly? Is this meant to suggest that brutal honesty is an adjacent pasttime of jocks?
Well, I'm a jock, if I may say so myself, and I do ocassionally deploy brutal honesty.
Though I was talking about sarcasm and playful busting of balls in general, not necessarily through brutal honestly. Could be sarcastic and outlandish or fan, not necessarily honest.
To be clear, I don't disagree with you, and to say otherwise wasn't my point. I do think people get confused to the point where they for some reason start labeling all sarcasm as type A or B, and the entire value of the term gets lost.
The way I see it, the non-friendly type shares a lot in common with the concept of shibboleth. Which is to say, you can absolutely make sarcastic insults to the detriment of someone else for your own, or a friend's enjoyment, by relying on shared exclusive knowledge. (In essence, holding that shared context above the other person in contempt) However, you can also just be abrasive for your own enjoyment, and that's something entirely differently. (Sadism, for example, is not inherently sarcastic) People frequently confuse the two, but without ironic context - a knowledge of false belief - it is not ironic, and therefore not sarcasm.
> And culture is, by and large, random, arbitrary, and self-reinforcing.
The best definition of "culture" I've ever found is "how we do things 'round here". It's valid in both the large and in the small.
Of course, why and how we converge on those norms is mysterious, and the anthropologists, the psychologists, and etc. can have a go at explaining those parts. I can't.
At its core, I believe the phenomenon of culture is intertwined with the hard problem of consciousness, which is notoriously circular and self-referential and roughly speaking “how we do/feel things ’round here” is potentially not far from the best we can do.
Cultural baggage, for the lack of a better word, drives how we tend to approach reality (holistically or by dividing and classifying things, monistically or dualistically, materialistically or idealistically, and so on), and reality includes the very thing under discussion (consciousness, culture).
Shared cultural baggage is perhaps the thing that makes us believe another being is conscious (i.e., shares similar aspects of self-awareness). Shared culture manifests itself in an infinity of fine details of one’s behaviour; looking like a human but not behaving like a human can be a great horror movie trope, depending on how carefully shared culture is violated[0].
This carries over to animals, to a degree. A dog is social to an extent that many would consider it conscious. An octopus is legally recognised as sentient in some countries—thanks to it behaving in a way that is vaguely reminiscent of ourselves. Same reason we call ravens smart.
Most humans anywhere on the planet, though, share enough cultural baggage that we do not question whether others have what we consider consciousness; though I think some people are more sensitive to how much shared cultural baggage another human possesses, the small lack of which could lead to fear, cautiousness, and/or a feeling that they are in some ways subhuman (closer than a dog, but not as human as their peers in local community) relative to them, which eventually contributes to exclusion, racism, and so on (well demonstrated in both Japan and parts of the US).
[0] Arguably, “behaving sufficiently like a human while being not human at all”, which we have plenty of examples of now in the last year or two, is another such trope.
> culture is intertwined with the hard problem of consciousness
Majority of people are sleep-walking as machines driven by imitation, habit and external forces. We live in a dreamlike, mechanical state lacking the awareness of this itself. apropos: Gurdjieff
Very uncharitable and questionable on a few levels. Every human exists in context of society, no human exists standalone—the very definition of self, as in self-awareness, has the existence of other as a prerequisite. People you see are perfectly aware of themselves; it’s just that awareness of yourself does not mean you have to violate societal norms and show how individual you are all the time—at best, it requires a more acute awareness of norms (you have to know what to violate first, cf. all the various counter-cultures), making one more socially integrated and in some ways paradoxicay less individual; at worst (if you are properly disconnected) it makes one less of a human, not more.
> People you see are perfectly aware of themselves
Are they rote-students imitating or copying memes and as such are driven by inadequate-ideas or are they students who understand the subject from its first assumptions and as such are driven by adequate-ideas. In the quote above, the suggestion is that majority are rote-students.
There’s a lot of ground between “imitate” and “understand the subject from its first assumptions”. Arguably, the former is how all learning happens at first. We imitate to get a taste for it and start enjoying it (humans are mirrors), then we can dig deeper if we become sufficiently interested. You can hardly become truly interested in music if you are presented with all the music theory up front and don’t get to have fun playing the instrument; same with math.
Even if someone never becomes sufficiently interested to dig deeper into some academic subject and sticks to imitating, I wouldn’t say they are somehow worse and have no awareness. They may have other interests and joys in life, there’s many fulfilling things outside academia. Why would you expect everybody to be like you?
There's definitely a scale for curiosity and self-inquiry. Some people actually have very little going on there.
https://xkcd.com/610/
I think you're missing one element. It works. The culture in Germany in 1600 compared with the culture in Germany in 2026 is very, very different, even though the geography hasn't changed. That's because in the modern world nearly none of the culture of the old Germany works.
This is not unique to Germany, of course. We long ago gave up on the four humours theory. We long ago gave up on burning women who wear pants. We long ago gave up of many things that used to be European culture.
The culture of queuing in Japan works because you are looked down upon if you don't participate and because it is better than the random stuff we do in the West. However, it would probably disappear pretty soon if it wasn't also a good solution.
I'm partial to "culture is shared expectations".
Which can, of course, be random, self-reinforcing, etc.
> > And culture is, by and large, random, arbitrary, and self-reinforcing.
Culture, by and large, isn't random nor arbitrary. Culture is obviously influenced by the past and the environment, but it's mostly artificially created by the elites. Once established it is self-reinforcing.
> Of course, why and how we converge on those norms is mysterious, and the anthropologists, the psychologists, and etc. can have a go at explaining those parts. I can't.
It's not mysterious. Monkey see, monkey do. We see the higher ups do it and we mimic. Or we are told this is how we do things and we obey. This applies to nations, corporations and families.
This is the kind of half-baked stuff the parent is talking about. You're vaguely guesturing at the same ideas as Bourdieu, but missing most of the nuance behind his conception of capital.
Yeah, please leave the cultural analysis to anthropologists, sociologists, etc. The engineering-focused materialist way of looking at stuff like this makes my head and heart hurt.
Why gatekeep like this? If you had developed an interesting account of some engineering topic and were told to leave it to the pros, you would find it deflating
Is your opinion that there is something non-material about Humans?
Are you interchangeable with a few mounds containing the exact same amount of the same molecules as your body?
In the exact same configuration? Yes.
Humans are nearly defined by their access to the abstract. The abstract is definitionally non-material.
I dunno about that, latent spaces are looking pretty material these days. I've got several variants saved to my local disk.
Map meets territory.
Materialism is not fundamental; consciousness is. This assumes materialism as fundamental.
> Materialism is not fundamental; consciousness is
What is your epistemological basis for this claim? Any proof of this?
And just for extreme clarity note: at no point have I made a claim yet
Whether monastic materialism or idealism is correct would be an unfalsifiable claim within the framework of natural scientific method. (That method is designed to help us make predictions; interpreting experimental outcome for a statement of objective truth is a misapplication of scientific method.) An existing natural-scientific model can be referenced in a philosophical argument, but the argument remains a philosophical statement. A philosophical argument can still be debated on other merits—e.g., which alternative grants magical objective existence to more arbitrary entities, or such.
The human concept of materialism appears to have been produced by historical humans who were also conscious, which at least sets an order. To call this into question is to render logical debate incoherent.
Materialism is a theory, not a reality, but its adherents can't tell the difference.
> To call this into question is to render logical debate incoherent.
Unfortunately there are quite a few things of that nature. In no case does it justify blindly picking one of the options and then following up with bold claims based on an arbitrary assumption.
Where did I make the case that it does?
So your epistemology is historicism?
Did you recently discover the idea of epistemology or does your line of questioning have a purpose?
The OP suggested “The engineering-focused materialist way of looking at stuff like this makes my head and heart hurt.”
Therefore excluding “materialist way of looking at stuff” from the question of social theory
I have still yet to hear any elucidation with any type of philosophical rigor of why about the questions of humanity should exclude materialist lenses
Further, at no point was there a epistemological foundation laid for the claim that consciousness is the foundation apriori from materialism
Here's a starter pack of resources:
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-holographic-unive...
https://www.essentiafoundation.org/
https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/
Be advised this is not something that can be understood through intellectualization. At some point you have to put down the books and seek out the experience.
I read it as an expression of personal experience, not a declaration of anything.
"Be not arrogant because of your knowledge, but confer with the ignorant man as with the learned, for the limits of skill are not attainable."
Reducing sociology to physics is a category error?
It's missing the forest for the trees.
> never stand out or make a fuss
I always enjoyed this aspect of being in Tokyo. Similar to rayiner's comment, I'd then get a huge shock on return to Europe.
But I was also struck by the flip side of this when reading Murakami's account of the sarin gas attacks (Underground). Everyone was so keen not to make a fuss that trains were sent on their way too soon, poisoning even more people.
Culture is huge nested networks of memes[1] which reinforce themselves and evolve via natural selection. Their substrate is our brains. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
Are those terms substantially different from the article's claims?
THe wikipedia definition of meme is "memes: ideas, behaviors, beliefs, and expressions." The author discusses frames and mental models as a topic [0]. "[A] framing is a choice of boundaries" and "A model is an analogy. It is a simplified simulation of something else." These seem to map to meme-concepts ideas and beliefs respectively and loosely. ("Frame" is probably a meta-meme or ontology that expands or contracts what memes can exist at all or what can be discerned at all.)
0. https://aethermug.com/posts/a-framing-and-model-about-framin...
The reason why people form two lines to board the Marunouchi line in Ikebukuro is not because they prioritize seating, or going as soon as possible.
The true reason is that the line forks into two lines later on, with the final station being either Honancho or Ogikubo. The second line that form is just for the people whose destination would not be served by the incoming train.
Would be interested in a source for this claim, but it from the map it at least looks reasonable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marunouchi_Line#/media/File:To...
Queueing culture is hilarious. Indians > Italians (ok, Italians are probably more entertaining), brits (I imagined them trying to bring queueing to indians and gave up... although india does have a semi-line culture in limited ways nowadays). As an american, grocery checkout queueing always angered me.
Queuing culture is just baseline respect from my POV. Same with not littering, respecting shared (public) resources, etc.
Actually quite unbelievable to see it considered hilarious.
Certain workflows prefer non-queueing, for instance the throng empowers the bartender to load balance different groups, delay drinks to over consumers, etc etc. So other cultures can have those workflows in places we might not expect, that is not necessarily a matter of respect. In pub culture, queueing disrespects the bartender.
It depends. Many places in the UK have a tradition of "virtual queuing" at bars; they don't stand in a line because that would usually block the space, but everyone remembers who was before them. Usually the barkeep remembers as well, but sometimes they ask "who's next" and people defer to those ahead. But load balancing also happens.
You're conflating efficiency norms with respect norms. Never mind that the core reason for no queues in bars is space efficiency and historical norms, allowing the bartender to select regulars, better paying customers, etc. without being stressed for time.
But in any case, your edge-cas applies when someone exists to manage the queue. That's not the case for e.g. elevators, self-checkout lanes, DMV lines, or, I'd argue, that vast majority of queues encountered regularly.
> Queuing... not littering, respecting shared (public) resources
Well, Indians are the pits in all 3, so your definition computes.
Source: am Indian.
> As an american, grocery checkout queueing always angered me.
It should, because practically everywhere in the US does it wrong. There should be a single entry queue that distributes to the multiple handlers. Instead, you wind up with multiple queues so that people get hung up behind someone causing slow handling.
The one that infuriates me are bank queues. Look, folks, both queuing theory and experience show that you CANNOT have a single handler without your queue time going to infinity. So, how many active tellers do I always see on the unusual times I have to go into the bank? Exactly one. Always. And a queue that's backed up 6 deep.
> There should be a single entry queue that distributes to the multiple handlers.
Sure, that's more fair. But it also means everyone has to walk over to the queue entry. And often requires dedicated floorspace. If there's not good queuing discipline, it leads to larger gaps between customers at the registers and poor throughput. If there's a queue minder (which there probably should be in order to distribute people into subqueues), that person can steer customers to benefit their favorite register people: this was common at Fry's; register operators got a commission, so and some queue mindets would collude steer expensive carts to preferred registers.
Multiple independent queues works fairly well and avoids extensive coordination. Even if people don't like it.
Instead, you wind up with multiple queues so that people get hung up behind someone causing slow handling.
Have you tried not caring about how fast the other queue is moving? IF you are in a hurry then most stores have 'quick registers' for people who are buying less than 10 or some similarly low number of items. And obviously if you get behind someone with a full cart you'll be waiting a bit longer, but you can only guess about the last person in the queue. But if I'm not in a hurry and have too many groceries to go through the express lane, I don't see the point in staring at other lines and being upset if one is moving faster than yours. Over time this is one of those things that just averages out.
By the efficient market hypothesis, if a spot in another queue was quicker someone would have already taken it.
> It should, because practically everywhere in the US does it wrong
Where do they do it differently? I've been in grocery stores across Western Europe, Asia and Latin America, and the only place I recall seeing the single entry queue was at a Trader Joe's in NYC
The Barnes & Noble Bookstore (at least the two or three I have been to in the past 10 years) has a single queue. Fry's Electronics did it that way. The self-pay corral at HEB (a huge Texas grocery chain) with about 14 check-out stations does it that way. The Academy Sporting Goods store near me does it that way. The Austin Bergstrom Airport security gates are that way.
I agree that many places have a queue for each registers, but the other way isn't entirely rare.
Large grocery stores actually seem to do this the least, but many types of stores default to this in much of the world. Clothing stores, book stores, stationary stores.
Many larger convenience stores do and those are close to being small grocery stores.
I hear the Chinese don't even have a word for it >..<
> The basic force behind all culture formation is imitation
We are also limited by the linguistic structures we inhabit. And many languages have multiple variants. There is the respectful, obedient "formal" variant used at the workplace and the informal "colloquial" used in other places.
The "strong" sapir-whorf hypothesis, that cognitive and behavioral categories are limited by linguistic ones, is thoroughly discredited. At most they may influence our perceptions, but they do not constrain them.
Linguistics is one of the fields where HN consensus goes directly against the scholarly mainstream of the discipline for what I mostly find to be ideological reasons. So hopefully this isn't that and you're just a bit out of date. But there's been a big reevaluation of this in the last twenty years and virtually no contemporary working linguists represent the strong relative view anymore. It simply did not consistently produce useful results and has been abandoned.
> Are these people human?
Yes, more so than everyone else who act like any animal. I can’t help to think of the “human test” in Dune, when we use our minds to override our instinctive urges, it is human behavior.
>Of course, I know that there is nothing innate in the miraculous "Japanese Way" because expats living here quickly adapt to the same behaviors.
That just proves it's not genetic/innate (which nobody seriously doubted). But it is a unique developed trait of a culture. The expacts merely "adapted" to it. The Japanese culture on the other hand, developed it (and thus gave this specific thing to adapt to).
"[T]he Industry feeds off of biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean." - L. Bob Rife, Snow Crash
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_tunnel
The human brain is one of the most powerful filtering devices that exists. If you train it not to see something, that something can effectively disappear for you. Families, cults, and even societies quite often work on this premise.
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Culture is a ritualized enslavement of the sexual other into a contract upholding institution. This institution may progress and diversify in time, forming a meta family aka a high trust society given economic circumstances. Not all cultures can form these contractcults and if you cant you are screwed in a world of large powers and nuclear proliferation.
my far less eloquent take...
you know that voice in the back of your end that amps you up for your first day of a new job, or springs to life when you see someone doing something annoying like cutting in line, or fuels the anxiety in the back of your mind as you lay awake at night? that's just your inner voice, right?
well, really, a lot of people share inner voices. everyone has their own spin on it, and some people's inner voices are completely different than anyone else's (maybe schizophrenics? or prophets?), but generally there are shared components.
the collective aspects of these shared inner voices, if not culture, are at the very least what creates culture.
I wouldn't call those impulses an "inner voice". I'd call them learned behaviors beaten into people, and if anything we're thankfully finally seeing less of that.
If there's anything that immediately identifies someone as inexperienced and untrustworthy it's that impulsive behavior and over-reliance on "culture" instead of their own independent mind.
> For an Italian like me, this whole process is nothing short of a miracle. I grew up in a city where metro train boarding during rush hour feels like a prelude to the apocalypse
Going Japan reminds me of coming to the U.S. from Bangladesh. It’s so clean, so orderly, so disciplined. I’m in a grumpy mood for weeks when I get back to the U.S. Our major cities are such dumps in comparison to Tokyo or Kyoto.
All of our non-major cities are even bigger dumps then. I live in Nyc for 8 years. I didn’t sit around the whole time b-ing and moaning that the city had a trash problem. I got involved in my community and active in the political movements here. When you start making issues visible and get your neighbors vocalizing the issues themselves, a lot more gets done than being in a “grumpy mood” about it indefinitely.
The real dumps are the people who complain along the way but make no effort to improve their world. Aka American culture.
> I got involved in my community and active in the political movements here. When you start making issues visible and get your neighbors vocalizing the issues themselves
But you didn't actually succeed in cleaning up New York, right? So maybe the problem is a culture that prioritizes "making issues visible" and engaging the "community" in "political movements," instead of every parent teaching their child from a young age to pick up after themselves?
> All of our non-major cities are even bigger dumps then.
Most, but not all. I was shocked to my core when I visited Salt Lake City and Provo. The closest place to Japan in the whole U.S.
Is it a culture of "not my problem"?
Maybe bad example but, Let's say you spill some food at a fast food place, shopping mall, airport. Do you make an effort to clean it up yourself or are you like "It's someone's job to clean this place therefore I can just leave it for them".
Maybe that's too harsh an example but I see locals cleaning the streets in Japan, not government hired street sweepers. I don't know the details if they just did it, or if they registered to volunteer to be responsible for that area, or if there is more to it. And I also don't know if they feel put-out, as in "why am I doing this" vs proud for making the area clean.
> provo and salt lake
Not sure in what dimension? Plenty of neighborhoods in larger LA, SF, SD, Seattle, are clean.
It's a mix of things. Japan's reputation for extreme cleanliness was partly engineered in preparation for the 1964 Olympics, in which organizers spent ~5% of the budget on beautification efforts. Arguably they started out from a higher personal baseline with bathing culture and there's also issues of population density, monoculture, and social sanctions. But there's also something of a gap between trope and reality; public urination is pretty common in Japan, especially at night, which shocks some people.
I think you’re correct that it’s a culture of “someone else will do it.” Also, you can go further and pick up trash that doesn’t belong to you in an effort to keep the space clean for everyone: https://youtu.be/5N2eM7Za9Ss. In some cultures, it’s taboo to touch other people’s trash. In many more, it’s considered beneath the social class of people to clean up like that.
What amazed me about Provo and SLC was how clean and orderly the busy public spaces are, not just the nicer neighborhoods. There’s clean and orderly rich neighborhoods in every place in the world. Palo Alto pays people to go around and power wash everything. What’s rarer is places where even the busy tourist areas and lower income neighborhoods are clean. What you’ll see often in Tokyo are places that are not nice—worn out buildings, or buildings with mildew on white surfaces because it’s still a hot and humid country—but where the streets are clean and well kept.
In socal cleanliness depends on certain factors. Generally the clean areas are clean because someone is formally paid to maintain the property.
"Making issues visible" can be kinda dangerous in that groups that do that become dependent on those issues continuing. Also they frequently misdiagnose problems: for instance homelessness is seen as a problem of "poverty" and not "management of severe mental illness".
It's true technically that the median homeless person is not mentally ill, but the median homeless person is "between apartments" and the intractable cases, the people who are screaming on the street corners and breeding pitbulls that bite people on the Ithaca Commons are a public health problem.
Yes we are succeeding.
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2025/09/16/good-trade-off-rat-ha...
https://gothamist.com/news/the-hottest-clubs-in-nyc-these-da...
I would even count Congestion Pricing as cleaning up the city:
https://ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/traffic_and_transit/2025/12...
SLC is a major city and a dump then by your observation-only position.
> instead of every parent teaching their child from a young age to pick up after themselves
What? Are you going to fine or arrest every parent that doesn’t teach their kids to pick up after themselves? How has expecting parents to do that worked out so far? Their culture is similar to how you suggest to operate: just complain about society instead.
That’s why they don’t teach their kids to pick up after themselves.
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Okay. Well I think we’re done with this discussion here. I never said it was a done project but that things are changing. Enjoy your dumpy city you dont care about.
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Will you provide context around how you got involved and got your neighbors to vocalize? I think there’s a lot of learned helplessness and cynicism that gets in the way of making things better. I know I personally suffer from this and lack the tools, motivation, and follow-through to make an impact.
I’ll just link you to my reply but getting involved with a group about your specific first-world problem shouldn’t be difficult. For everything else either start a group or join one.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46991515
I also protested during BLM and advocated for repealing 50-A amendment that gave criminal police protection from prosecution in NY. And we succeeded at that too!
Unfortunately your linked comment got flagged, so it might be nice to repeat it here as you can still see it.
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This is clearly some racist dog whistling. Put on your diaper, crime exists only in US cities!!!
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Semiotics is in your near future
If you say so. I don't have to disagree.
Culture is performance art invented by people at the fringes.
“Culture” has layers: https://laureltomin.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02.... Art, food, clothing, etc., are the upper, superficial layers.
But what the article is talking about are the deep layers of culture. Rooted in how mothers and fathers socialize their children from an early age.