As a bicultural Chinese Canadian with a fancy STEM background, this is a terminally flawed argument because it fundamentally allows capitalism to decide which cultural norm is socially valid. It is shortsighted, self-centered, and actually undermines itself because it is meta-conflict avoidant. Comply with capitalism or you're out. That's compliance with more steps; it talks about "embracing conflict" but its philosophy is essentially a broken one.
(and look: less than 4 minutes my comment is downvoted. Talk about serious debate when an East Asian actually has an informed opinion on this.)
What does this word salad even mean? The research mentioned in the article just says that Indians’ approach to conflict lines up better with the approach favored by Americans.
People with personal boundary issues see studies about how things currently are as prescriptive. They see a survey that says that most people put mustard on their hot dogs, then
1) get angry because they personally put catsup on their hot dogs,
2) argue with people about the math, but without actually pointing out any problems with the math other than it is being bigoted against people who like catsup and wants to "erase" people who put catsup on their hot dogs.
3) If they can manage to find somebody with the credentials that they deem important enough, and can leverage their complaint about the study to somehow guilt that person into wasting their time responding to their empty objection, they finally accept that the math works.
4) Now that they accept the math, they stop putting catsup on their own hot dogs, and only use mustard from now on. They ridicule and attack catsup users at every social opportunity, and brag about their contact with the credentialed person.
The word salad is just a necessary tool for expressing empty approval or disapproval, borrowed from 8th generation pseudo-Freudian European literary critics. It supplies a lot of words with no meaning, so you can use them to talk over people. It explicitly centers associative logic and magical thinking as its most innovative tool, and the interpretation of the actual world as if it were a literary fiction.
Be aware that many non-EAs have no model or context for interpreting East Asian culture or thought. Even amongst EAs, there's no firm mutual bond.
There's superficial recognition, of course, but it's difficult to even begin to have conversations when so much effort is spent in every interaction confirming, validating, or outright missing critical aspects of each other's ideologies. And it's usually more one way than the other.
On a different note, it started as a joke, but I've found it helpful to give out copies of "The Xenophobe's Guide" to people I'm going to be working closely with. They're not perfect, but they're short, hilarious and humanizing. The books, I mean.
> it fundamentally allows capitalism to decide which cultural norm is socially valid
That’s like complaining that the 100 yard dash decides whether more or less speed is good. ‘Capitalism’ (really, the free market) is just a voting and sorting system. Cultural norms which produce more value outcompete those which produce less. That’s part of why Protestant Europe (with fewer feast days) outcompeted Catholic Europe (with many more). That’s why blue laws in the U.S. have faded out. Does that mean that days off are bad? No, it just reflects that a day spent not working is a day spent not producing.
Chasing economic value is what has created the entire modern world: science, medicine, an economy in which farmers are less than 1% of the population.
I couldn't understand what the hell they were talking about so I put it into chatGPT as a last resort.
> This paragraph expresses a strong critique of a particular argument or philosophy — though it's not explicitly stated what that argument is — and frames that critique through the lens of someone with a bicultural identity and a background in STEM.
lol.
And yes, while LLMs shouldn't be used as a benchmark for general intelligence problems, I think that written communication (especially for a wider audience like on HN) should be simple enough that an AI can understand it.
(and look: less than 4 minutes my comment is downvoted. Talk about serious debate when an East Asian actually has an informed opinion on this.)