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moridinamael comments on LW systemic bias: US centrism - Less Wrong Discussion
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Might this be one of those instances where it is globally better for the annoyed party (non-US LWers) to self-modify to accept that everybody uses language from a inside a cultural framework, rather than to request that the majority self-modify to implement not-really-well-specified "universal" norms for English?
As an American engineer I personally think we should all use S.I., but it doesn't do any good to correct people who use English units, unless I take the full effort of convincing them that a consistent unit system is actually more powerful.
I think the problem is the definitely not the language. From the original post:
Expecting people to self-modify to "correct" these is wrong, although I don't think you were suggesting this.
(EDIT: read "wrong" as "unreasonable")
How exactly is it wrong?
If non-US users modify not to be annoyed by these, then:
Readers will keep having to look them up, which they'll still find annoying (unless the self-modification is really big).
Suggestions will keep being tailored to the US, leading to a lack of general solutions and custom solutions for other countries.
OTOH, I'm not sure what's wrong with self-modifying to not be annoyed when American users have GetDefaultCountry() return "USA".
Nothing, I was thinking about the issue in the wrong way and so I have ameliorated my response accordingly.
Hmmm... on reflection, "wrong" is too strong.
I was thinking that it was that people would have to self-modify to adopt US culture. But, actually thinking about what was being said (thanks, MixedNuts) and what I quoted indicates that it was just self-modifying to become familiar with the concepts.
I still think this is unreasonable, due to, for example, the amount of effort it would take to get decent coverage across all areas of the culture, i.e. it's much easier for US users to make a few annotations ("in the USA", or "governor of Massachusetts", to increase googleability at least).