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komponisto comments on Open thread, 9-15 June 2014 - Less Wrong
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Comments (239)
Here is more of the context:
In the above, "the UAE" should replace "Dubai". If the UAE is so heterogeneous a country that greater specificity is required, then it should read "the UAE (particularly Dubai)", just as someone might write "the USA (particularly New York)".
The set {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, Dubai} is "wrong", for the same reason that {plane, train, boat, driver's-seat-of-car} is; they should be respectively "corrected" to {Yemen, Oman, Somalia, UAE} and {plane, train, boat, car}.
Mildly, but that disagreement is tangential. Even if the UAE has the most distinct political subdivisions of any country in the world, it is still a country, and its political subdivisions are still political subdivisions.
The distinction between a country and a non-country is pretty sharp as far as human societal constructs go. We have established institutions for adjudicating this question (such as the UN, international treaties, diplomatic relations, etc.), and the results they present on the specific case of Dubai vs. the UAE are pretty unambiguous.
I doubt it is, when adjusted for size (of both territory and population).
I must admit that your model of a typical country seems very strange to me. It seems to correspond not even to (my model of) a US state, but to a smaller subdivision like a county or municipality. (That's the level on which you find differing policies about alcohol, for instance.)
Again, I disagree; it's a useful set for practical purposes, in the same way as {lettuce, cucumber, tomato}.
Again, very much a US peculiarity. A quick look suggests India and UAE are the only other countries where alcohol is banned in some regions but not others, as opposed to over a dozen countries with national bans.
To be explicit about something I wasn't explicit about in my other reply:
There is an ambiguity here, but if what you are claiming to disagree with is the analogy to {plane, train, boat, driver's-seat-of-car} (as opposed to merely the "wrongness" of either), then you genuinely do not have a good understanding of, or are stubbornly refusing to acknowledge, the relevant political geography, and I would suspect you of having heard of Dubai before you had heard of the UAE (probably as a result of journalists' ignorance), and anchoring on this fact.
But I can't be sure to what extent we really have differing models of how the world works, as opposed to at least one of us going out of our way to signal something (willingness to disregard official politics in your case, familiarity with the Middle East in mine).
If your goal was to signal your familiarity with the Middle East, you've utterly failed since it appears you didn't know how the UAE was organized. You come across as one of those people who memorizes lists of countries and capitals and possibly shapes but has no idea how the map does (or does not) correspond to facts on the ground.