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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33462 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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I recently heard an interesting explanation for why East Asians are more likely to wear masks than other ethnic groups that doesn't rely on broad claims about culture or personality (or maybe is just upstream of those factors): smaller noses. The claim is that because East Asian noses are typically not as large as those of other races and a lot of the discomfort of wearing a mask comes from pinching or restrictions around the nose, East Asians physically feel less discomfort when wearing masks and therefore are less likely to object to doing so. I'm not sure how much explanatory power this holds vs being a cute story, but it does strike me as being a bit more parsimonious than alternative explanations like "Mongoloids are naturally subservient because <insert evopsych narrative>" and it is something most people wouldn't think of immediately because they only have first-hand knowledge of one nose size (rhinoplasties notwithstanding) and implicitly assume that everyone else has roughly the same facial-topographical experience.

Can confirm. I have a massive eastern med nose. Hated masks with a passion even when I thought corona was very dangerous and the mask would protect me. Extremely uncomfortable and painful after a while

In Japan, it's simple: it's because everything is like that there. Normie Japanese people take a certain pride in being "normal," i.e. following all the spoken and unspoken rules. There's no real democratic tradition over here, no concept of "consent of the governed," and certainly no American-style anti-government/anti-establishment sentiment. If this sounds like I'm being uncharitable, consider that Japanese people IME mostly see this as a good thing. They seem to see the U.S. as violent, dangerous, unpredictable, and atomized, the same way an American might think of, say, a Brazilian slum.

Chinese people (in my now somewhet dated experience) tend to follow the letter of the law while unspeakably violating the spirit of the law whenever it suits them. So any significant mask wearing there is probably only done in places where people are getting filmed or watched. There are probably a significant number of Chinese people who mask up because they believe that corona will kill them, their mom, and their dog if they get it, similar to leftist hypochondriacs and tinfoil hatters in the U.S. I met many otherwise normal, sometimes well-educated Chinese folks who had normal beliefs about most things but insane paranoid beliefs about one or two things because the CCP/Global Western Conspiracy (depending on their political leaning) was covering up the truth.

The HBD explanation for Asians not minding masks as much already exists- Asian babies notoriously don’t struggle when a cloth is placed over their face, while White and black babies do. It’s fair to assume this generalizes.

Some important content here is that “notoriously” = one sketchy study from the sixties that’s not really feasible to replicate today. I think this is one of those claims that’s exactly the right combination of surprising enough to be interesting and intuitive enough that people just kind of go with it instead of checking. Genuinely not sure if it’s true myself; I’d be interested to hear anecdotal accounts from people who happen to have babies.

I haven’t heard this before. Do you have any link about this?

Dan Freedman's babies. There's also a video.

There was a poster who got banned for yelling about this over and over again in the last couple months. His conclusions were pretty unhinged, which made me more skeptical that his sources were high-quality. But you might have some luck if you can find them.

I think he was on about black babies not trying to remove a spot from their forehead in a mirror or something like that.

Unless there's strong evidence for Asians (in US, or otherwise outside of Asian countries that have been primed by SARS/MERS scare) really wearing masks more often than non-Asians in some unbiased sense that an Asian person is more likely ceteris paribus, I suspect it's some combination of confounders and selection effects that do not have direct relation to physical Asianness.

Some just-so narratives:

  • Asians tend to be in higher SES brackets, higher-IQ, wearing masks is a higher-class thing (is it?)

  • Asians mostly vote Democrat, Democrats police each other more severely for COVID compliance

  • Asians (especially higher-SES ones) are skinnier and healthier than other comparable Americans, so do not suffer from shortness of breath typical of overweight Americans, so masks are less of an obstruction for them;

  • Given the above, they also may walk on foot more often, so they get overrepresented among people wearing masks one may spontaneously observe in the street.

But all that said, I buy the basic racialist theory that Asians are just naturally more conformist/conflict-avoiding/rules-abiding/disinclined to get myopically hung up on symbolics and engage in protests to signal their sexual prowess (in the order of increasing charity to them vs. anti-maskers).

engage in protests to signal their sexual prowess

Wait, what? I might have missed something here.

There's no context, it's a contrived example of a suspicious HBD narrative about inherent racial tendency to react in a particular way to mask mandates, on par with «Asians are tolerant of having their breathing blocked».

In July of 2020, National Geographic published this poll that shows little or no observed difference in reporting of mask-wearing between the Hispanic and Other ethnic identifications in the United States. If the preference was substantially driven by anatomic characteristics, I would expect it to persist across countries and it does not appear to do so. In a more recent Kaiser poll that doesn't seem to include Asian people, black people love masking, whites don't, and Hispanic people are somewhere in the middle. Data in this paper suggests that gender has just as strong of a role as race in the United States.

If Asian-Americans aren't really all that into masking relative to other populations, this strongly implies to me that aspects of cultural acceptance of top-down social control in the East are more likely to drive masking behavior than physical anatomy. As a purely subjective addendum, I'll note that while masks are uncomfortable and fog my glasses, a solid 90% of why I hate them is because they're a pointless top-down imposition from people I hate, not because my glasses fog up.

I think the idea that East Asian societies are generally more comfortable with social control and/or community oriented action compared to Western individualism makes sense and is well founded. I don't know if we need to get into anatomy of noses.

Besides as others have commented, I doubt it makes a real difference.

Seems totally implausible to me. The only way this theory would work is if either the smaller noses also means masks mitigate eyeglass fogging or smaller noses means you have almost no ability to smell. The pinch on the nose is not why masks suck. They suck because you fog your glasses, if you have them, and because you are breathing recycled air that has an easily noticeable smell (unless, I suppose, you carry around a full toothbrushing and mouthwash routine in your car).

...you can smell your own bad breath ?

I don't necessarily notice the smell (though I note the stale-ness and steaminess) until I lift the mask and get a wollop of fresh, cool air. I'd say it's more that you can really block out the smells around yourself with a mask, in my experience.

If I wear a mask, definitely. I have a very sensitive nose, I can sometimes smell my sneezes.

Not to mention the added difficulty in communicating - being unable to see facial expressions or read lips makes for frustrating social interaction. Do East Asian languages have some feature that makes this less of a problem?

Notably the Japanese are reported to judge facial expressions much more on the eyes than other parts of the face, as compared to westerners. This is probably also why Japanese emoticons are eyes and nose laid out horizontally like so: O>O rather than full face like so: :-)

  • The only way this theory would work is if either the smaller noses also means masks mitigate eyeglass fogging

You'd assume the preponderance of glasses wearing amidst Southeast Asians would pretty quickly mitigate any nose comfort in terms of mask convenience, too.

Given that my own feelings of discomfort or lack thereof when wearing a facemask vary greatly from day to day based on any number of factors, I doubt there are any systematic differences strong enough to outweigh contextual ones. If East Asians had been wearing facemasks for thousands of years as part of their culture this argument would be much more convincing, but as far as I know they only began to in 1910 (on the advice of western doctors no less) to combat the Manchurian plague.

That seems a plausible factor. Is there any reason to think that it being due in large part to culture (which you mention) is wrong though? I suppose those are compatible, since individual preferences also shape culture.

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