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.)
> 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.
> > 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
this applies to digital products too. every app is a framing machine: it decides what's worth your attention and what gets filtered out. the feed algorithm is the most obvious reality tunnel, but even a todo list does it.
what's interesting is how few people notice the framing itself. you can spend years inside a particular app's reality tunnel and never question why those things are the ones you're paying attention to.
> 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.
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.
Your articles don’t show that NYC is actually clean now. They show a few people doing something. That doesn’t move the needle in a large city. You need substantially everyone to participate in cleaning and keeping things clean.
> SLC is a major city and a dump then by your observation-only position.
SLC is the 111th largest city in the country. Maybe you consider that a “major city,” but I was referring to the big ones like NYC, Philly, etc.
> Are you going to fine or arrest every parent that doesn’t teach their kids to pick up after themselves?
That might be more effective than your community organizing and political activism.
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!
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...
> 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.
https://xkcd.com/610/
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.
Is your opinion that there is something non-material about Humans?
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?
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.
Reducing sociology to physics is a category error?
It's missing the forest for the trees.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> Queuing... not littering, respecting shared (public) resources
Well, Indians are the pits in all 3, so your definition computes.
Source: am Indian.
I hear the Chinese don't even have a word for it >..<
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
this applies to digital products too. every app is a framing machine: it decides what's worth your attention and what gets filtered out. the feed algorithm is the most obvious reality tunnel, but even a todo list does it.
what's interesting is how few people notice the framing itself. you can spend years inside a particular app's reality tunnel and never question why those things are the ones you're paying attention to.
> 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.
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.
Your articles don’t show that NYC is actually clean now. They show a few people doing something. That doesn’t move the needle in a large city. You need substantially everyone to participate in cleaning and keeping things clean.
> SLC is a major city and a dump then by your observation-only position.
SLC is the 111th largest city in the country. Maybe you consider that a “major city,” but I was referring to the big ones like NYC, Philly, etc.
> Are you going to fine or arrest every parent that doesn’t teach their kids to pick up after themselves?
That might be more effective than your community organizing and political activism.
Okay. Well I think we’re done 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.
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!
"[T]he Industry feeds off of biomass, like a whale straining krill from the ocean." - L. Bob Rife, Snow Crash
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.