Where's the scam in this story?

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This isn't meant to be moral. We are talking munchkin here.

Is there really a why to the direction of facing? Or is it just that both states are stable, but which one is chosen is due to uninteresting historical contingency?

So, simple is a type of equation?

Jokes aside, that's an excellent answer.

There's a clear difference between interacting with foreigners in your own country, and being a foreigner in another country, which is basically that when you're a foreigner, it's your beliefs/customs/mannerism that are being questioned. If everybody faces the back of the elevator, you're going to start pondering why in the U.S. you face the front of the elevator, whereas those facing the back wouldn't stop and think about why a foreigner might be facing the opposite direction.

Also, obviously, the immersion factor is there. Speaking to foreigners in your own country is not nearly as new/scary an environment as being in a completely foreign country.

Oh man how did I miss that?

Could be that age self-experiment you're doing ...

Extraordinary claims....

Flip-flops are excellent for that reason. I have really sweaty, weird-sized feet, so they're especially nice, and if, like me, you already have a reputation for being eccentric people won't mind when you show up to nicer events in a blazer, jeans and flip-flops.

Oh man how did I miss that? Well, that still leaves how important the 9 are.

Good to hear! Yeah, spend any significant time abroad and you'll start to replace the symbol with the substance, trust me :)

"Alright kids, can you say 'computation'? Repeat after me: COM-PYOU-TAY-SHON..."

You quickly learn to not rely on words. Communication, especially with my students, involves lots of drawing, lots of acting, lots of examples, hence what I wrote about having to rely on empirical examples of things. That in itself is a pretty valuable experience I think.

The sequences come close to a million words.

You could get quite a bit of the way there, yeah. Interestingly, it's possible to have the inverse experience: lots of foreigners living here make almost no effort to interact with locals, learn the language, or experience the culture in any significant way.

I doubt there's anything quite like full-on immersion in a culture you know nothing about, though.

'n Mens kan defnitief 'n bietjie van tweetaaligheid leer. Woorde wat dieselfde klink in een taal kan baie anders klink in 'n ander taal - byvoorbeeld, 'skoon seun' en 'skoonseun' klink nooit nie dieselfde nie in Engels. Woordorde kan ook baie verander.

(For those who are curious, I've rot13'd the English translation of the above paragraph below)

N crefba pna qrsvavgryl yrnea na ovg sebz ovyvathnyvfz. Jbeqf gung fbhaq gur fnzr va bar ynathntr pna fbhaq irel qvssrerag va nabgure ynathntr - sbe rknzcyr, 'pyrna fba' naq 'fba-va-ynj' qb abg fbhaq gur fnzr va Ratyvfu. Jbeq beqre znl nyfb punatr n ybg.

But some other major ideas in philosophy of mind are do matter here.

Just show them examples of small Turing machines until they catch on.

Cross-posting would be UNFORGIVEABLE.

No, I lie, I don't even know why that would be a problem.

So, you're suggesting there should be either zero, one, or a potentially infinite number of Matrix Lords, and never (say) exactly three?

Cool. I was going to write a post in which I suggested a mental exercise involving pretending that words don't have meaning, and expected that the exercise would be very easy to do for people living in a country foreign to them. But this is better than that post would've been because you actually did it!