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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27236 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I've been thinking about Indians today. In my current management position in tech, I deal with a lot of Indians. On one hand, Indians are some of my most trusted colleagues and friends who I rely on who have a CS degree from a legit US college like University of Colorado Boulder or Ohio State. These people are the best and I love working with them. These are people who went to school in the US and are legit. Not only that, but my favorite two teachers in college in math and CS were both Indians who taught CS.

On the other hand, the Indians we hire as support are absolute trash. You compare them to Philipno or Eastern European people we hire as support, and they are so bad. The funny thing is that the Indians that are in the US are our best people for support. Obviously, there is a massive selection bias, but what the hell is going on with this?

I actually have a real world example. I worked at a telecom company as a software engineer and most of the managers were former Army or Air Force people. The majority of the people in the US who were doing support are/were Indian. But these people were Indians in America and everyone liked them and they all eventually got promoted. But the overnight people in India were again absolute trash.

What is going on in India with their leadership? Why are Indians so bad in India but ones that come hear and get a taste of American corporate structure so good? I know this is probably a best fit for the questions thread, but this legitimately puzzles me.

And obviously Indian-Americans I don't include in this. They are just like all other Americans.

Why are Indians so bad in India but ones that come hear and get a taste of American corporate structure so good?

Selection effects + magic dirt. Indian workers in the US are going to tend to be of a higher caliber than their counterparts that didn't emigrate, but they are also plugged into American institutions rather than Indian ones. It's hard to understate the degree to which institutional quality can impact the performance of individual workers.

I had a very different experience working the India portion of tech company a few years back. Our company was considered an outlier though, and many other companies were often asking us "how do you get the India office to work so well for you".

From what I know, the secrets of success were actually very straightforward, but doing them is difficult.

The history:

The company started with a standard "outsourcing" by hiring a company in India to provide them with support workers. They quickly ran into quality issues. Anytime they found a good worker or support staff through this company, that worker would then go on to get a better job elsewhere. And the intermediary company often just made it difficult to keep using the same support staff.

The company decided this wasn't sustainable and didn't make sense. They opened up their own office in India, sent over a trusted Indian executive, and tasked that exec with building a functioning India office. A decade later those efforts seemed clearly successful. Their own stated reasons for success:

  1. A focus on hiring and retaining good talent. India has a large labor pool. Even if US immigration has a good filtering mechanism, its still going to leave plenty of conscientious and smart Indians back in India. Find those people, pay them well, and try to keep them.
  2. Mirrored offices. Meaning that the India office has a full company structure equalish to the main US office. Finance, HR, Legal, Support, Development, Sales, etc. There is something intangible about having access to the full support system of a corporate environment. Companies in the US have a specific structure often because that structure works and produces good results. It seems a little insane to think you can reproduce that success in another country by gutting the entire support structure.
  3. Inter office travel and connections. The executives in both America and India made it a point to have regular visits to the other office. Also managers and even low level workers could make the trip too. They created an infrastructure to support inter office travel, and it was low marginal cost to let low level employees use that same infrastructure. So I got to take a trip to the India office just 2 years into my career as a software developer. I had a driver, an apartment, a maid, a cook, and a phone all given to me. A 6 week trip, I was paid a per-diem, and given free meals, and given PTO for the travel hours. The real value from the company's perspective is that I stopped disliking my Indian coworkers as much. I understood more of the frictions they had interacting with the US office, and I found better ways to work around it.

They have a world-class support team at that company. American customers would call in and ask to speak to the India support team members sometimes. They had talented developers that managed to get visas through us and then go on to work at a FAANG company. They had quality engineers in India that were respected bloggers and thought leaders on quality engineering.

I feel like I'm selling an ad about the company. They talked this stuff up while I was there, but it was my first job and I just thought 'whatever, gotta talk yourself up, right?'. But no, it took me some more life experience to realize they were actually impressive and unique.

Its possible to have a good company in India, but I think there is going to be a real problem if you are just doing it as a random cost saving measure and not putting much thought into how it should be done.

I love to see a success story here. I'm always frustrated with the difficulties around getting great offshore help, because statistically there's no way there aren't great people available in India, even if they're very tough to find.

I wish my company had the ability to have a high-quality offshore presence, though now it's "too late" in that we've built our brand around being 100% US-based.

There's 1.4 billion people in India, which leaves a LOT of room for selection bias. The big thing is that barely-competent Indians in tech are much cheaper than barely-competent Americans in tech, so you end up dealing with the former more than the latter.

chat gpt 4 is cheaper and better than both.

And obviously Indian-Americans I don't include in this. They are just like all other Americans.

No, they're really not. If they were you wouldn't need what comes before the hyphen, you would just call them Americans. They are different, and are thus referred to differently, which you knew and understood. I also find this particularly offensive because I am ethnically American and you casually erase that as if it's the most normal thing in the world.

Please, just because you are either unable or unwilling to trace your ethnic origin or mix back a few hundred years when your (European) ancestors showed up doesn't mean that you get to call yourself just "American" and consider anyone else of a different skin color as being something entirely. The only relevant characteristic in a nation of immigrants and descendants of immigrants is whether they hold citizenship. Have it? Congratulations, you've just been transmuted into an American, here's your card letting you call yourself a member of the Greatest Nation in the world (unironic endorsement).

Ethnically American, not even indigenous, can't make this shit up if you tried.

just because you are either unable or unwilling to trace your ethnic origin or mix back a few hundred years when your (European) ancestors

I am both able and willing, and can find my great grandfather's grave in the old country, and know which town of a few hundred where my great-grandmother was born. But that great grandfather wasn't American, and neither was the great grandmother. The two of them were not American, and neither was their daughter, but her husband was, because his family had been in a half-dozen states over two centuries prior. He was of borderer stock, by the way. So don't confuse me staking out this position with apathy or ignorance.

and consider anyone else of a different skin color as being something entirely.

My white great grandfather wasn't American, and neither was his white wife. Nikola Jokic and Kirstaps Prozingas and Luka Doncic and Dirk Nowitzki are not American, despite their skin color, because they have their own ethnicities, their own homelands, their own people. They can be citizens, and maybe their children could be, depending on their mothers, but they are not and will not be American.

The only relevant characteristic in a nation of immigrants

Not immigrants: colonists. My family has been in this land since before the country existed. Where you say immigrant, I say foreigner, where I say founding stock, you say immigrant.

Have it? Congratulations, you've just been transmuted into an American

No. That's simply not true, as much as people like you want it to be true. I will not concede it and I will continue to contest it whenever the assumption tries to slip in. It especially rings hollow when your coethnics are applying the same logic to Britain, or Arab muslims applying to it France, neither of which have ever been a nation of immigrants. It reveals the motivation for such arguments to be anti-white animostiy, jealously and bitterness at the glories of the British and American and French empires, resentment at the success of the fairer races, and revenge for old grievances.

Ethnically American, not even indigenous, can't make this shit up if you tried.

You Know Nothing.

It seems to me that for an ethnicity to exist in practice, you need a critical mass of people to identify with it to the exclusion of other identities, and that is what "Americans"/Amerikaners/white Americans of colonial British heritage/[insert your preferred neologism here] lack. Ukrainians are fighting a war not to get lumped in with the Russian ethnicity and Palestinians have fiercely resisted decades of attempts to group them with Jordanians or Egyptians, but I doubt even a lizardman's constant of your founding stock American ethnicity conceive of it in the same terms you do or would lift a finger to assist any political mobilization on their behalf (unless it were disguised as garden variety civic nationalism, which is what liberals have been paranoid about for decades despite it almost never happening).

It did and does despite constant demoralization efforts that you seem to have fallen for.

Have you never heard of unhyphenated Americans (as opposed to nonspecific Americans of any background)?

I'm not sure who coined the phrase or brought the group to prominence, but I heard of it from here:

Here’s something else cool. We can’t track Borderers directly because there’s no “Borderer” or “Scots-Irish” option on the US census. But Albion’s Seed points out that the Borderers were uniquely likely to identify as just “American” and deliberately forgot their past ancestry as fast as they could. Meanwhile, when the census asks an ethnicity question about where your ancestors came from, every year some people will stubbornly ignore the point of the question and put down “America” (no, this does not track the distribution of Native American population). Here’s a map of so-called “unhyphenated Americans”, taken from this site:

I think that there is a vast gulf between the phrase "unhyphenated American" and the phrase "ethnic American".

I do not find the former objectionable, people are free not to care about their past. But the later term implies that there is a distinct American ethnic, i.e. that the US is an ethnostate, which seems both objectionable and wrong. If you only count people who only have ancestors which inhabited the British Colonies, then the "ethnic Americans" would probably have be a small minority for a century. And if you include people with ancestors who were immigrants to the US and mixed with others, then there is not much of an ethnic left.

I have certainly heard of "Americans". My annoyance is at the claim, by KMC, that such a claim is restricted to the subsection of the citizenry that are of European origin, and so phenotypically similar that it's not immediately obvious if they're pure 100% German, 30% Irish and 70% Italian, or anything in between.

I have no objection to people imagining some undifferentiated jumbled Caucasian American as the default when they hear "American", they're still barely a majority in the country after all.

There are people who have forgotten their ethnic origins, people who nobody wishes to interrogate about them, and people where it's not immediately obvious if they have any divergence from Default American™ as it existed in 1950. That doesn't mean that African-Americans, Indian-Americans and every other visibly obvious minority can't be called American, or that the typical white dude is somehow "more American". Just within whites, there are millions who identify as Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans.

"Ethnically American" is a retarded statement when applied to anyone who didn't have ancestors dwelling on the continent before Columbus showed up. Certainly as used by KMC, it carries a not even veiled implication that they're somehow more American than the rest of them.

"Ethnically American" is a retarded statement when applied to anyone who didn't have ancestors dwelling on the continent before Columbus showed up

I don't think so, though I would not personally limit "ethnically American" to borderers or even to European stock. One reason your claim doesn't hold up is that "Hispanic" is the most widely-recognized ethnicity in the Americas, and all it means is "descended from Spanish (and maybe Portugese) settlers of the New World." Most Hispanic people are additionally descended from aboriginal Americans, but many are distinguishable from Old World Europeans only by the accent of their Spanish.

Remember that "ethnicity" is a word that was added to the English language less than one hundred years ago, and was not even a dictionary entry until 1972. It was intended to replace "dated" (the source says "tainted") terms like race, nation, and minority. From the link:

Today, “ethnicity” tends to describe any group that is characterized by a distinct sense of difference owing to culture and descent.

People who say they are "ethnically American" today are broadly asserting that they experience a distinct sense of difference owing to culture and descent. You appear to essentially be using "ethnicity" as a synonym for the older concept of "race." Which you're free to do, but it kind of violates the whole point of the word's coining. Which you're additionally free to disagree with, if your focus is more rooted in DNA etc., but you should then be at least conscious of the controversy.

Certainly as used by KMC, it carries a not even veiled implication that they're somehow more American than the rest of them.

I suspect this is partly due to the overlapping meanings of "American." Even Scott Alexander has noticed that "American" tends to tag the "red tribe" in at least some contexts. Of course, it is also the abbreviated name of two continents, and one nation, so using as the name of an ethnicity that is predominantly of European descent is clearly going to be fraught. As usual, when seeking clarity it's probably best to taboo our words--but of course, asking a large group of people to stop using their preferred ethnic tag tends to go over like a lead balloon.

One reason your claim doesn't hold up is that "Hispanic" is the most widely-recognized ethnicity in the Americas, and all it means is "descended from Spanish (and maybe Portugese) settlers of the New World." Most Hispanic people are additionally descended from aboriginal Americans, but many are distinguishable from Old World Europeans only by the accent of their Spanish

I don't see how that contradicts my point, for the same reason that African-American is a convenient moniker because most of the ADOS have no idea which particular region within a whole continent their ancestors came from.

People who say they are "ethnically American" today are broadly asserting that they experience a distinct sense of difference owing to culture and descent. You appear to essentially be using "ethnicity" as a synonym for the older concept of "race." Which you're free to do, but it kind of violates the whole point of the word's coining. Which you're additionally free to disagree with, if your focus is more rooted in DNA etc., but you should then be at least conscious of the controversy.

I do not think that KMC has such ambiguous aims. If he or you can concede that in principle, an American of Indian origin can "feel ethnically American" as well as, I would have no objections to this weird approach.

As usual, when seeking clarity it's probably best to taboo our words--but of course, asking a large group of people to stop using their preferred ethnic tag tends to go over like a lead balloon.

He can call himself whatever he likes, it's the not particularly principled exclusion of other American citizens who look different that makes me annoyed.

I meant they are the same in regards to how they are as employees. They aren't doing the things Indians from India do that drive people crazy.

I see, understood.

I worked with a guy who whose parents were from Pakistan. Apparently they cooked turkey for Thanksgiving by skinning it and rubbing with typical spices. I thought that was weird (skin is fat is flavor!), but I appreciated the sentiment. He was a good coworker, and did his job well, but even though he's a citizen, we're not the same ethnicity, equating his and mine.

You are Indian-American (feather)?

Those are referred to as American Indian, not Indian American.

Yes I know, but thought doing it this way around would be funnier.

I am American.

I don't believe you. Post your family tree yea on for 10 generations, squire.

"Just what I thought. An Irish immigrant ancestor 130 years ago. You aren't even a real American. Hell, you're barely white."

Opsec says no, but maybe when I get home I'll see what I'm comfortable posting.

If you actually do that shit I will be BTFO for real. I will never recover from this thing that hasn't happened but might.

I counted ten generations in my family, starting from the patriarch who came to the colonies from Scotland in the 18th century. Nine generations born on this continent, from coast to coast and in many states between. Although I'm cheating just slightly, since I am personally in generation 9, not 10.

I'm going to crawl out on a limb and assume you mean white dude.

Have you ever heard the saying "You pay peanuts, you get monkeys"?

It's not just Indians, it's anywhere that foreign companies hire overseas support staff because they're dirt-cheap (compared to hiring on staff in their home country). Because the metric here is "how cheap can we go?" and not "what quality of staff are we hiring?", like all tenders it goes to whoever promises to charge the least.

And you can charge the least by cutting corners, not least in "well if we hired qualified people they'd expect commensurate salaries, so fudge that".

Call centres have massive turn-over because it's high paced, high stress, shitty pay and conditions, and mushroom management. Now plonk that 'customer service/support centre' down in another country where the main attraction for foreign business is "it's dirt-cheap", and have your employees where English may be their third, fourth or more language, plus they're being hired on how cheap and how disposable they are.

What do you expect the results to be?

Also they are working unsociable hours due to time zones, which means they are probably tired and cranky.

Managing a team across time zones is hell. And managing Indians from San Francisco is doing it on hard mode, because it is a full 12 hour shift.

I've been thinking about Indians today.

I guess someone has to.

What is going on in India with their leadership? Why are Indians so bad in India but ones that come hear and get a taste of American corporate structure so good? I know this is probably a best fit for the questions thread, but this legitimately puzzles me.

Filtering. Filtering. Almost there.. No, you've still got coffee grounds left over. Keep at it champ.

The average Indian who arrives in the US is not representative of a random sampling of the native population. I'd know, I am one (Indian that is, I haven't been in the States since the NY skyline was a tad bit different).

The number of would be immigrants is far larger than the number that get through. You're filtering for IQ, conscientiousness and a million other things, leaving aside differences in drive that can motivate someone to cross a couple oceans and establish themselves far from home. That's before even getting into sociocultural aspects.

Leadership is certainly a part of it, at least if you're imagining just taking the same group of people and transplanting them under new management. Indian managers, in India, suck ass. They're mostly stick and little carrot, when they're not sodomizing you with it. Our societal norms and governmental system, while not outright dysfunctional, are still glaringly suboptimal in many regards. Being an entrepreneur is god knows how many times easier in the States, and so is relying on talent and work ethic to pay dividends.

The worst part of India, as most Indians who've escaped would tell you, is all the other Indians. The systemic failings are so coup-complete that the best recourse for a talented Indian is to take his talent elsewhere.

This strict system of skimming off the top is how a country that has, the last time I checked reliable figures, an average IQ in the upper 70s or low 80s, manages to contribute the single most successful ethnic group in terms of average income in the US.

There are plenty of other HBD-related factors, IQ here is not distributed as it would be in a homogenous population. I have good reason to believe that the upper caste/Brahmins are smarter on average, and I'm not one myself, just a cut above what would count as so underprivileged that I'd get AA in India. Millennia of strict endogamy and self-selecting for intellectual pursuits does funny things, just look at the Jews (though they were forced into their role more than willing adopters). And these upper caste people are disproportionately likely to be immigrants to the US. Sadly the matter isn't remotely as well researched as HBD in the US, not that I'm not convinced by available evidence.

Presumably this also answers @sickamore 's question, so I'm not going to duplicate it.

The difficulty I have always had with this theory, as I say below, is that it doesn’t explain why the high IQ minority in India - which, after all, would be larger than the population of most first-world nations - doesn’t at least create a developed-tier society for itself.

We have many examples of countries where you have a large population at one level and a minority that performs much better. And whether it’s in compounds or in open cities, they typically live in much more advanced, first-world level communities than the rest of the population.

I watched this recent video about a city that Guatemala’s rich built for themselves. It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it looks like a nice European city. Sure, the majority of the country lives in third world conditions, but that didn’t stop the largely European elite from building this. Rich Brazilians too, don’t accept living in squalor, nor do the wealthier South Africans. Chinese in Malaysia and Indonesia likewise build clean, functioning, safe and high quality neighborhoods. Even the British themselves did this in India, and the neighborhoods they built are still some of the most desirable in the country, with gardens and parks and tree lined streets.

But the Brahmins, as you say, just give up, or don’t seem to care. And I’ve had this conversation with many Indians, and they all agree (often they bring up the topic; I’m not inviting my own cancellation) that India’s beyond hope and there’s little use even trying to clean it up, it just is what it is, as if both the space program and garbage piling up in a street where traffic is intermittently blocked by a wandering cow are immutable realities of Indian life.

I struggle to understand why all these smart people are content with this, and I think it’s because emigration is an option. If you’re a smart Indian and want to live in a clean and developed country, it’s much easier to move to one (as you are doing) than to carve out a space like that in India. But that’s also pretty sad for India. This is the land of the Vedas, the cradle of civilization. It should look like it.

Latin America, South African elites, Russia, east Asia, etc. are all partially hajnalized in a way India isn’t. Carving out a nice, clean community where the unwashed masses come in to clean houses and then leave once their job is done is much, much easier when you can say no to your extended family at least sometimes. I don’t think Kinshasa and pre-war Gaza had these nice gated communities either.

The extended family of most UMC Indians are also UMC Indians, or at least middle class and respectable.

India certainly has perfectly acceptable gated communities, it's not Africa where your cousins and their goats have to be hosted in your spare bedroom.

hajnalized

What does this mean?

It's a reference to the Hajnal line. HBDChick and Jayman talk about it more than most in the hbdosphere. From the summary:

so, to sum up — INSIDE (or to the west of) the hajnal line we find:

– late marriage and 10-20% of adults never marrying

– small families, either nuclear or stem

– higher average iqs than outside the line

– the highest concentrations of human accomplishment in europe

– more democracy

– greater civic-mindedness or orientation towards the commonweal

– generally low perceived corruption

– high individualism

– and low homicide rates in the 19th century

Those would be the characteristics @hydroacetylene probably meant by haljanized.

I prompted ChatGPT 3.5 with:

Here is a reddit comment I came across:

"Latin America, South African elites, Russia, east Asia, etc. are all partially hajnalized in a way India isn’t. Carving out a nice, clean community where the unwashed masses come in to clean houses and then leave once their job is done is much, much easier when you can say no to your extended family at least sometimes. I don’t think Kinshasa and pre-war Gaza had these nice gated communities either."

What does "hajnalized" mean in this context?

And ChatGPT responded with:

In the context of the Reddit comment you provided, the term "hajnalized" appears to be used in a way that refers to the concept of the "Hajnal line." The Hajnal line is a hypothetical boundary that has been proposed by scholars to describe a historical and cultural divide in Europe. It is named after the historian John Hajnal, who first identified this pattern.

The Hajnal line is often associated with certain social and demographic characteristics, including:

  • A higher prevalence of nuclear families: The idea is that areas to the west of the Hajnal line historically had a higher tendency toward nuclear families, where married couples and their children lived separately from their extended families.

  • A later age at marriage: People in areas west of the Hajnal line tended to marry later in life compared to those in areas to the east.

  • A higher age at first birth: Women in areas west of the Hajnal line typically had their first child at a later age than those in eastern areas.

  • Lower rates of cousin marriage: Marrying cousins was less common in regions west of the Hajnal line.

The comment you provided seems to be using the term "hajnalized" to describe regions or populations that have adopted or exhibit some of these social characteristics associated with the Hajnal line. It suggests that Latin America, South African elites, Russia, East Asia, and other places mentioned in the comment have certain social structures that resemble those to the west of the Hajnal line in Europe, in contrast to India, Kinshasa, and pre-war Gaza, which are implied to have different social structures and dynamics. The term is being used to draw a cultural and social comparison between different regions.

Or in other words: IQ isn't enough. You also need WEIRD psychology to replicate American + Western European prosperity.

Sometimes I feel the need to toss most Motte comments into ChatGPT, for all the niche jargon used that everyone seems to follow except me. I am still coming to terms with assabiyah.

I honestly want to see a bunch of these.

I hate to say this.. but culture. Desi culture is just uniquely fond of rent-seeking and bureaucracy to an extent that even their brightest can't muster enough collective escape velocity. The intellectual foundation of the Desi elite isn't all that different from the Desi peasant, the Desi elite is just smarter and more leftist.

India is poorer than Guatamala, Brazil, South Africa, Malaysia, or Indonesia. Rich Indians in India of course DO live a lot better than poor Indians.

Mumbai has a 50% higher GDP capita than Guatemala City, though ($14k vs $22k). All large developing countries have extreme inequality between rurals and urbanites. The surprising thing isn’t that rural Indians are dirt poor (the same thing is true of rural Chinese and yet tier 1 cities in China are often quite clean and pleasant), it’s that Indians in the much higher HDI major cities don’t live better.

doesn’t at least create a developed-tier society for itself.

One possible reason would be leaving to a foreign nation lets the high IQ minority escape or greatly reduce the any clan ties that would sap their capital before it can accumulate enough to generate meaningful returns. If a bright ambitious person starts a business near their extended family and makes an extra $1,000 one month but then familial claims want $950 or worse $1050 of that $1,000, they're not going to accumulate any real capital. If they emigrate and plough that most or all of that $1,000 into their business and repeat for a decade they'll accumulate a vast surplus.

I don't really see clan/familial ties playing that big of a role here.

As I must stress, India is not Africa. You aren't expected to share all your wealth with your extended family even if it's considered laudable to at least contribute to those who are struggling.

My immediate family is significantly wealthier than at least my dad's side, and while he has made sizeable contributions (dowries, which if nominally illegal are often extracted through gifts or wedding fees, college tuition, bankrolling their businesses), at no point has he been expected to meaningfully devalue our quality of life or jeopardize his own business.*

The typical Indian with cash to spare hands out maybe 5-10% to their relations, not "$950 or worse $1050 of that $1,000". That would be considered laughable, at most people, or at least your family, would disapprove if the rich uncle didn't consider helping his impoverished nephew and niece through school, and maybe college (the fees are nowhere near as bad as in the US).

Is this a minor drag on accumulation of capital? Sure. Is it so bad that it motivates our best and brightest to flee so that they aren't milked dry? Hell no.

*And I don't resent it. It's his money, and if it wasn't for the assistance of his horde of siblings and cousins, who often faced financial privation so that they could scrounge up enough money to put a promising student through med school (a full-ride scholarship is still expensive when you have about zero money since your farm was stolen and your village genocided), to the extent some of them compromised their own higher education, then he would never have become a doctor. It's the least he could do that, when their bet on him paid off, he goes to the trouble of making sure their kids can enter whatever college or field they like.

Overall, Indians have an attitude towards entrepreneurship and redistribution of wealth that would be unremarkable in comparison to China, if not the West.

Valuable context, thanks. The attitude you describe wouldn’t be unknown in the west even if it isn’t exactly mainstream, at least once you adjust a few cultural details(eg there’s no dowries here).

You're welcome! Some people here are prone to make less than well informed proclamations about the proclivities of a nation of 1.3 billion people, including some particular ones that are hilarious to someone who knows better.

One of the reasons that Indians assimilate so easily in the West is because the fundamentals of our culture or general mindset isn't that different. It causes me severe pain when someone thinks the relevant comparison is something like Africa. Our dysfunctions are significantly different.

Of course, I don't ascribe malice, just ignorance, and that's a far more forgivable sin. I'm sure I've made sweeping claims that people better informed would disagree with.

What do you see as the main causes of India’s dysfunctions?

HBD, corruption, subversion of meritocracy and egalitarianism through affirmative action, religion, factionalism that encourages populist pandering.

Basically, the electorate is too dumb and uneducated to hold the government accountable, and while that's vaguely true everywhere, it's more true here.

This is the land of the Vedas, the cradle of civilization.

This is a bit of a stretch to say, isn't it? Also, other cradles of human civilization don't look better either.

Until the British bring democracy, railways and cricket to India, China is consistently more civilized. The only period where historical GDP per head estimates are higher for India is when China is recovering from being ravaged by Genghis Khan. The only areas where India has world-leading achievements are pure mathematics and classical music.

There are three civilizations - Persia, Rome and China. (Western Civilization is Rome under new management, which is why its hegemonic state is governed by a Senate which sits on Capitol Hill in a building decorated in the Corinthian order). From macro-demographic trends, we can tell that India is dramatically better off when governed by Persians (the Mughals), Romans (the Raj), or Romanized Indians (post-independence democratic India).

I don't think the cradle of Chinese civilization looks bad, although I agree that the Yangtze and Pearl River deltas now look better.

Persians (the Mughals),

Eh, the Mughals were descendents of the Mongols with a bit of Turkic influence added in (Babur, the first Mughal emperor was descended from both Ghengis Khan and Tamerlane, the latter of which was descended from both the Mongols and the Turks), I would say they are closer to China than Persia.

They used persian as their court language but that's not the same as being genetically persian.

I watched this recent video about a city that Guatemala’s rich built for themselves. It’s clean, it’s beautiful, it looks like a nice European city. Sure, the majority of the country lives in third world conditions, but that didn’t stop the largely European elite from building this.

Thanks for this link. This is very informative in terms of city planning, Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design and application of advanced security master planning. I'm sure things are sugar coated and that there is a need for paying security and police to maintain that environment as an open city within a country like Guatemala, but it's an inspiring example of what can be done with public space. The security consultants would have had a heart attack.

Yeah, they don’t go into huge detail in the video but I suspect that a combination of narrow, winding streets, heavy pedestrianization and only a few access roads because it’s on top of a hill mean that it’s hard for criminals to get in and out easily.

I don't know much about criminology, so I have little idea how narrow, winding streets aid urban crime prevention.

They help prevent the kind of smash-and-grab organized crime raids commonplace in wealthier parts of very unequal Latin American countries.

Ok. Point taken. I'd think that ambushing unsuspecting people is easier on a narrow, winding street than on a wide, non-winding one, but thankfully that's not something I have experience with.

There are often other subtle considerations such as deliberate lack of public transport to the area that can make things like remote suburbs attractive to certain residents.

This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things is in an arms race with elites for the battle over public spaces.

The difficulty I have always had with this theory, as I say below, is that it doesn’t explain why the high IQ minority in India - which, after all, would be larger than the population of most first-world nations - doesn’t at least create a developed-tier society for itself.

There are plenty of gated communities and upscale neighborhoods. They might not be as pretty as their European counterparts, but they're safe, clean and quiet. And some cities are certainly far nicer to live in, Varanasi is notorious even to Indians as being a hive of scum and villainy.

But the Brahmins, as you say, just give up, or don’t seem to care. And I’ve had this conversation with many Indians, and they all agree (often they bring up the topic; I’m not inviting my own cancellation) that India’s beyond hope and there’s little use even trying to clean it up, it just is what it is, as if both the space program and garbage piling up in a street where traffic is intermittently blocked by a wandering cow are immutable realities of Indian life.

We've been used to that kind of bullshit, pun intended, well before the floodgates on emigration opened up. It might act as a relief valve for the perfect combination of talented and discontent, but there are millions of us who could make it in the West yet are mostly content to remain, even if they grumble about conditions. I know plenty of doctors more talented than me who decide to remain. It's the default decision.

Humans can adjust to a great deal indeed. It's not that they don't care at all about cleanliness, it's that they don't care enough for that to be their raison d'être. Hell, that's true enough for me, I certainly appreciate Western cities, but them being cleaner is not in my top 5 reasons for emigrating. The other concerns are far more prosaic.

The coordination problem is insurmountable, it's a country of 1.3 billion people, I assure you that some have tried.

When it comes to projects like cleaning up the Ganges, the government doesn't bother because the electorate doesn't care. Not enough to swing an election, which is all that matters. The Ganga is sacred and pure even when the coliform count makes the rectum of the last patient I saw with faecal impaction seem like a sterile field.

There are plenty of gated communities and upscale neighborhoods.

What are the best examples?

Uh.. I don't want to doxx my precise geographical neighborhood by naming only the ones I've been in.

I'm sure a quick Google search for "high end gated communities" in a bunch of random cities would suffice. I am at least certain of the fact that they exist, even if I can't point out which ones are the "best".

Also that living in a rich community in a poor country gives you access to cheap servants without needing to learn Spanish or Tagalog and commit a felony.

"Ugly rich" Brits are happy to admit that this is the best aspect of living an expat lifestyle, and I assume it works even better if you are a upper-caste local.

Sure, but that doesn’t stop the Brazilian or South African elite from building gated communities that are difficult to get to- servants just have to take motorbikes in or whatever.

Agreed - I was answering the question about "Why do Indian elites stay in a literal shithole rather than moving to a country which has discovered the lost art of street-sweeping?"

In no other people is there the same extraordinary gap between the achievements of the diaspora and the abject squalor of the homeland.

And that, really, is the Indian Question. Are they an intellectual elite of fifty or a hundred million capable of Denmark-tier (or at least Israel-tier, let’s say) civilization were they not sadly chained to a billion 80 IQ commoners?

The problem with this narrative is that one would expect that at least, like white South Africans, the smarter Brahmins would have created some semblance of high civilization if only for themselves.

And yet as I have noted, even in wealthy parts of Delhi and Mumbai garbage piles in the streets, random cows and other animals stand around, and the exteriors of the homes of the rich often appear crumbling or at least unkept (even if the interiors are pristine). Even many temples, which one would assume would be highest priority for maintenance and cleanliness (as they are in every other religion) and which would presumably be the responsibility of the priestly caste are dirty or otherwise poorly kept, often despite a large contingent of priests and other staff.

The Indians can go to space for nationalist symbolism, but they cannot clean the Ganges, despite it being of central spiritual importance to their faith and the fact that they have had a Hindu nationalist government in power for a decade. I read this article about Varanasi which quotes a Brahmin priest, whose day job is a professor of engineering, who still drinks from the water each day despite knowing how contaminated it is by fecal matter, corpses and so on. A show of faith, certainly, but why must it even happen? Obviously this is a country that has enough engineers to clean the river. (They try, but it appears halfheartedly.)

What gives? Even when China was a poor communist shithole, places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan were rapidly developing, it wasn’t like you had to look hard in 1975 for evidence of Chinese achievement. But the Indian nations in the world - including diaspora nations in the Caribbean and the Pacific like Guyana and Fiji - all seem to suffer from similar issues.

I'm going to go out on a limb and blame colonialism, Yes, really.

There's much the same problem in Ireland. I've often grumbled that we have no sense of the built heritage; we're scrabbling around trying to create tourist spots based on very dodgy grounds (ancient east coast etc.) while we've permitted, or in many cases destroyed, the kind of heritage that would be attractive. Germany and other European countries have pretty little towns (or even cities) where the Old Traditional Buildings are the main attraction, hell even England manages to have the idea of the idyllic villages (where the murder rate is sky-high) as tourist bait.

We don't. We let our towns and cities collapse, and any new building was and is poor copies of Brutalist or modern architecture. 'Development' meant, in the 60s and 70s, knocking down the old buildings and selling on the sites for massive profits.

Part of it definitely is that the attitude was "we lived in thatched cottages when we were peasants without a pot to piss in, but we've moved on from that" since such housing was not seen as quaint 'cottagecore' but stark reminders of poverty and deprivation. In Dublin, the elegant Georgian terraces had become inner-city slums.

But part of it definitely also was because the British being in charge, and being the ones responsible for everything, down to the local landlords, took away initiative from the locals. You had no power to do anything for yourself, so you became used to not doing anything. Somebody else would make those decisions, decide what should and shouldn't be done, what should and shouldn't be repaired and in what manner.

(There's also the folk stories about not being too visibly striving and improving, as that would just jack up your rent; e.g. stories such as the tenant who saved up for years to afford to buy a fine new coat, and one day the agent/landlord himself sheltered in the cottage from a storm; the tenant proudly lent his new coat to the visitor, and the next day it was sent back with a note saying that if he could afford to dress that well he could afford to pay higher rent. The higher rent eventually meant eviction as no, he could not afford it).

Then we got independence, but the same old mindset prevailed: if the gate falls down, just tie it back on with bailing twine to the fencepost. Don't repair crumbing walls and ditches. Knock down, instead of preserving and repairing, the old architecture. Sure, it'll do. It's somebody else's business to worry about that.

I wonder if there is something of the same mindset in Indians post-the Brits? 'Not my job, not my place; someone else will make the decision' and 'oh well it's good enough'.

Being ruled by a culturally distinct elite is not an unusual condition for human societies. It is very much the norm. European colonization simply meant that the culturally distinct elite came from a bit further away. Before the British, India was largely ruled by Islamic-Persian-Mongolic-Turkic elites. You will be hard-pressed to find many corners of the world where this is not the case. At most, the foreign elite just goes native and adapts to local customs after a while.

If you are looking for an explanation of why many modern independent nationalist "democratic" states are such failures, then you should perhaps realize that their current condition is a highly unusual development in history.

There's probably something to that, but it explains too much.

We let our towns and cities collapse, and any new building was and is poor copies of Brutalist or modern architecture. 'Development' meant, in the 60s and 70s, knocking down the old buildings and selling on the sites for massive profits.

Part of it definitely is that the attitude was "we lived in thatched cottages when we were peasants without a pot to piss in, but we've moved on from that" since such housing was not seen as quaint 'cottagecore' but stark reminders of poverty and deprivation. In Dublin, the elegant Georgian terraces had become inner-city slums.

But part of it definitely also was because the British being in charge, and being the ones responsible for everything, down to the local landlords, took away initiative from the locals. You had no power to do anything for yourself, so you became used to not doing anything. Somebody else would make those decisions, decide what should and shouldn't be done, what should and shouldn't be repaired and in what manner.

All of this is true in Britain too, just replace "the British" with "the government". To the extent that beautiful areas remain, it's because rich second-hand homeowners and large landholders were able to stave off the 60s/70s socialists and vandal developers.

I suppose you can rescue it with @2rafa's theory that the British colonised ourselves first. There is something to that. But in general I think it's more unusual to have nice, clean well-maintained spaces than the reverse. You (we) need a theory of upkeep, not a theory of decline.

Do you or @2rafa have a link to the self-colonization post?

I don’t. I do recall suggesting that one of the reasons I think British elites are relatively nonplussed about mass immigration is that they don’t really consider themselves the same people as the native working class and don’t care if they’re replaced by other peoples they’ve ruled over before, but I’m not sure if that’s what they’re referring to.

Sorry, perhaps it was a take from somewhere else. It lines up with

British elites are relatively nonplussed about mass immigration is that they don’t really consider themselves the same people as the native working class and don’t care if they’re replaced by other peoples they’ve ruled over before

so maybe that's why I attributed it to you. The idea is that the ruling method which British elites use at home resembles that which was used in the empire - quelling a restive native population by dividing it (often ethnically) and elevating sympathetic puppets with little real support to speak for each of the tribes. The tribes can then be kept busy fighting among themselves while the rulers make inconsistent promises and play arbiter.

Hong Kong and the US were also British colonies.

The US was a settler-colony while Ireland was more a case of classic imperialism. I think FarNearEverywhere should have mentioned "being (an unwilling) part of an empire" as opposed to "colonialism", as it gets at the core idea better.

Northern Ireland was closer to a settler-colony and has similar issues.

In fact NI has fallen behind the Republic.

https://www.thefitzwilliam.com/p/is-northern-ireland-a-failed-state

In Ireland in general a lot of the best architecture, ie the great houses, was deliberately burned by the IRA.

I do remember going to Ireland as part of a school trip and being pretty confused why Dublin's only Landmark seemed to be the Guinness Brewery.

I don't believe this at all. We were never colonized in Sweden and the exact same thing happened.

Also the British in India (notably unlike Ireland) governed through local elites - they had to given that the Indian Civil Service only employed less than 8000 expats - so the idea that local elites lost their initiative due to the effects of British rule seems implausible.

Yeah. I've always found the movie Lagaan insane where they're holding up the existing monarchial despot as being oppressed by having a layer of British taxation on top of his feudalism. Like I understand in the movie the British are enforcing a brutal tax, but it's not like India having droughts and feudal taxation being harsh are some unique invention of the Anglo.

local elites lost their initiative due to the effects of British rule seems implausible.

Local elites were kept on a short leash; if you got any uppity notions about "hey this is our country and I should be governing on my own behalf, not as the puppet satrap of an overseas empire", you got swatted and the British government stepped in to take over and run the entire enterprise directly, instead of letting a trading company do it.

Yes but in a lot of the satraps the previous running of affairs prior to the British was also some flavor of being a Satrap to the Mughals, Maratha or whoever the hell else. And if you were a peasant it didn't make a huge lick of difference who exactly held the reins of power on account of said reins being about 14 social classes above where you were.

I've got a few friends of very upper-caste Indian extraction, and the complaints about the Raj always rang somewhat hollow to me as the vibe was always very 'For a century there we were only the 2nd highest rung of the ladder, and lived lives of luxury that were somewhat obliged to Anglos' ilk whilst trying to uplift the grievances of commoners as being somehow related to their great grandfather who was the vice-chief minister of Commerce for Bombay and dined mightily off his servants.

That's true of all management all the time. If a mid-level line manager gets uppity motions about 'this is my factory and I should be governing on my own behalf, not as a puppet of the CEO', he or she is going to get smacked down. Despite this, different companies/orgs allow very different levels of initiative at lower levels.

And that, really, is the Indian Question. Are they an intellectual elite of fifty or a hundred million capable of Denmark-tier (or at least Israel-tier, let’s say) civilization were they not sadly chained to a billion 80 IQ commoners?

Yes. Assuming they managed to lose the maladaptive cultural baggage they developed. Which they do, at least in the West. Or they wouldn't be model minorities and the single richest ethnic group when it comes to average income in quite a few nations.

And yet as I have noted, even in wealthy parts of Delhi and Mumbai garbage piles in the streets, random cows and other animals stand around, and the exteriors of the homes of the rich often appear crumbling or at least unkept (even if the interiors are pristine).

As I've previously explained to you, rich Indians do not particularly care about that. It's only when they're socialized in a place where that's expected that they put in the effort.

Being richer than 97.23% of our 100k gods, like Ambani, will buy you a sick skyscraper. It won't clean the streets outside. So you become rapidly inured to it and focus on the interior, which is both free from the Hoi Polloi, and also what your peers care about.

Most temples let anyone in who wants to enter. That puts a firm cap on how clean they can be when the average person isn't.

What gives? Even when China was a poor communist shithole, places like Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan were rapidly developing, it wasn’t like you had to look hard in 1975 for evidence of Chinese achievement. But the Indian nations in the world - including diaspora nations in the Caribbean and the Pacific like Guyana and Fiji - all seem to suffer from similar issues.

They have 10-20 IQ points on us. That counts for a lot. It takes a certain baseline level of intelligence for prosociality to really start paying dividends, leaving aside the other benefits of human capital.

Besides, the Indians in places like Guyana and Fiji are descendants of indentured laborers abandoned there by the Brits. They're not the same sampling as the average emigre to the US. I am under the impression they still spank the native populace, South Africa would be a pertinent example.

Being richer than 97.23% of our 100k gods, like Ambani, will buy you a sick skyscraper. It won't clean the streets outside.

But it will clean the streets outside, friend. Google says Ambani is worth 97 billion dollars. Street cleaning is no arcane secret, many nations have essentially perfected it. The machines are readily sold by all the usual manufacturers. Salaries for manual laborers are very low. Training the local population is only a matter of hiring traffic and street wardens for a few years until the people get used to it. Google suggests the average Mumbai taxi driver makes about $3000 a year, and I suppose we can assume that street cleaners are unlikely to be paid much more. If the city objects, India is a corrupt enough place that the country’s richest man can bribe them. A guy worth $97bn can clean the streets outside his skyscraper, he can hire 10,000 men to do it by hand if he wants to (that would amount to what, a paltry $50m a year?), it’s absurd to discuss this banal issue solved in every developed country and even many poorer countries for much less money as some impossibility!

Downtown Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, even Jakarta (!) are so much cleaner than the wealthier parts of Mumbai or New Delhi. So is Windhoek. So are parts of Accra and Addis, even. What holds India back? It’s not some kind of upstanding socialist government insisting that the rich can’t do this; as the Adani reports showed, the government is clearly in the pocket of the billionaires, who are largely high IQ and high caste. The only explanation is lack of will, not among the peasants but among the rich.

And why should they bother, when they can travel abroad to their mansions in London or their penthouse in Singapore? But again, the rich Malaysians have those too, and they still work to make Kuala Lumpur a better place to live. I’m often criticized for my own elitism, but I don’t blame all of society’s problems on the poor in whose nation I share.

I had much the same argument with my sister about cleaning up San Francisco and she simply refused to concede that any San Francisco elites actually care about stepping over human waste on their way to the office. Perhaps it's the same in India.

In San Francisco at least one can point to some kind of ‘war’ among the elite, with intense power struggles over the lax treatment of the homeless and some tech lords taking strong, opposing political stances, Alex Soros getting involved, the drama around the DA recall and school board stuff, national politicians using it as a key indicator, huge dissent within Silicon Valley etc. Yes, it’s still a dump, but also (a) the nice parts like Pac Heights where rich people live are mostly still ‘relatively’ clean and (b) it’s a major topic of conversation. In Mumbai there is no great public obstacle to cleaning the streets, people don’t worship garbage the way the left worships homeless vagrants in major progressive cities in the US. In India generally there is some religious sensitivity around curbing the rights of cows specifically, but they’re not the main issue and there are solutions acceptable to religious conservatives.

Deep insecurity. The best Indian doesn't want to improve India because he doesn't consider himself Indian, in a much deeper part of the lizard brain than Indians staring at any and all white people they see can convey. The most surefire way to get a desi supermodel's parents to force her to marry you is to have a British, Canadian, or US passport.

I asked almost this exact question to a (native) friend while living in Mumbai. We were driving past this dudes skyscraper and I asked him how people feel about the fact that this super rich guy has a skyscraper to live in but it’s surrounded by absolute filth and poverty. Isn’t he at least embarrassed?

He said it’s because of the Hindu belief in Karma and reincarnation. Basically: those people living outside of the skyscraper fucked up in a past life and this is their punishment. The rich did well and this is their reward.

Personally I would assume that cleaning the streets would be a karma earning thing to do. If I was rich and wanted to secure a good life next go around, cleaning the streets and helping the poor would be high on my list of priorities, but this could just be me assuming me own, Catholic, culture as the default. A little googling backs this up; among religions Christians are more charitable than Hindus (or Muslims): https://www.jstor.org/stable/41940751#:~:text=the%20relationship%20between%20religion%20and%20philanthropic%20behavior.,%2C%20Hinduism%2C%20and%20Buddhism).

He said it’s because of the Hindu belief in Karma and reincarnation. Basically: those people living outside of the skyscraper fucked up in a past life and this is their punishment. The rich did well and this is their reward.

Lol. Lmao. Maybe that's what your friend personally believes, but that's nowhere near representative of the actual reasons.

Rich people are usually tolerated by the poor pretty much everywhere (not that they have the power to change it).

Most Indians are firm believers in meritocracy, regardless of particular quibbles about corruption, nepotism and so on.

This explanation is just as daft as claiming that the reason why a struggling but pious redneck in the States doesn't burn down someone's McMansion is because he expects them to be equalized in Heaven.

Lol. Lmao. Maybe that's what your friend personally believes, but that's nowhere near representative of the actual reasons.

Yeah I'm not a Hindu and admittedly know nothing about the culture. Some googling does seem to suggest that Hindus aren't particularly charitable, though.

At first I thought it was that the rich don't use the public realm because of the oppressive climate, which makes being inside an air conditioned mall preferable to a walk outside. But again there are many countries with equatorial / tropical / hot-and-humid climates that don't have India's issues, so that can't be it. Even for entirely selfish reasons, wouldn't it be nice to occasionally be able to walk outside? Wouldn't it be nice to have a good view from your palace skyscraper instead of looking down at squalor? These considerations don't appear to be of great import.

Sure, Ambani can pull that off, if he made it a priority. That leaves about 99.999% of us. Certainly the few hundred million middle class who wish it were otherwise.

The only explanation is lack of will, not among the peasants but among the rich.

And why should they bother, when they can travel abroad to their mansions in London or their penthouse in Singapore? But again, the rich Malaysians have those too, and they still work to make Kuala Lumpur a better place to live. I’m often criticized for my own elitism, but I don’t blame all of society’s problems on the poor in whose nation

I am in agreement there's a lack of will. I disagree that emigration is the most suitable explanation for it. Like I said, this has been a problem well before UMC Indians could, with only a little bit of effort, flee to the West, if not the US.

Sure, Ambani can pull that off, if he made it a priority. That leaves about 99.999% of us. Certainly the few hundred million middle class who wish it were otherwise

There's clearly either a revealed preference here or some kind of skill issue. India is around 41% urbanised. Take away the rural classes and a "few hundred million" people represents like 30-50% of the urban population, which would be even higher in non-slum areas. If those people and a smattering of billionaires can't or won't clean up their cities then I'm not sure what would get them to. There doesn't appear to be that spirit of municipal capitalism that was prominent in, say, the late 19th century in England. Mumbai must have greater resource than 1870s Birmingham, and look at Chamberlain! And if not grand paternalistic mayors, then at least naked self interest to carve out a space for those few hundred million you mention.

I am claiming it's revealed preference, to the extent that applies when considering coordination problems.

I'm pretty sure I have an accurate idea of how dirty 1870s London is, let alone from the horse shit, and believe me most of the country is nowhere near that bad.

By the time most people become billionaires or at least multimillionaires, they're used to taking the overall grime for granted, and besides they're going from enclave to enclave in Audis with the windows rolled up, it's not like they have to walk.

What was the population density in 1800s coal country?

The more people around you, the higher chance one or more is going to engage in some commons-trampling. Maybe not even on purpose, given that sanitation and transport are not trivial problems.

Well England's population density was around 160/km² in 1870, 22m in total. Maharashtra has a population density of 365/km². Mumbai now must be 3 or 4x denser than the West Midlands of the time if the state as a whole is that dense. I don't think density is the key at all (look at the Ganges valley, UP and Bihar combined is ~USA worth of people!).

To be clear, I’m saying higher density makes things harder. Especially as automation, even steam power, cuts demand for labor.

That’s my answer to @2rafa and others who are asking why the Brahmins haven’t built a shining city on a hill: there are already people there! And on the next hill, and the next. A billionaire can surely buy some of them out, but how many? How long before you get one of those desperate holdouts like in China?

Or to put it another way—Central Park sits at the heart of one of the most expensive cities on the planet. Some of the leading US firms look out over its greenery. It’s also open to the public. The latter completely dominates public perception, because one big apple spoils the bunch. If all the wealth and power of New York can’t overcome the noise floor, why should India have a solution?

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My impression is that people are discovering just how bad the real productivity of the median Indian consultant is so they're moving away from using them. Hire the real elite, sure, but even the above average are mostly not worth the effort, at any price.

The people you are interacting with in America are an extremely filtered sample, even by the standards of Indian émigrés.

cuz US is on magic dirt, obviously.

if only those Indians in India could come stand on US soil, they’d become more competent in a flash!

/s obviously

off the top of my head: 1: are they paid ok by local standards? 2: do they have examples of promotion in their roles/teams/orgs, or are they all looking for the next gig on the side? 3: whats the management situation over there? affects everything listed here obviosly 4: hiring bar is low? 5: bad training?

Indian translation companies are typically so horrible as clients for freelance translators that in translator's groups in Linkedin etc. just saying "Indian company" is generally enough for everyone to know what you're getting (ultra-low rates, no payments, bad communication etc.). On the other hand, Indian project managers for European companies I've dealt with have generally tended to be reasonably pleasant.

I don't know about the Indians, but I've been working a lot with Poles lately, and it's been a thoroughly positive experience. Somewhat better on average than with Germans, even. Similarly competent. Much better than the Turks and Russians - a lot more open to just saying "I don't know, this looks like a mess" rather than "Ah yes, I see, clearly you must do X, Y and Z", only for the entire alphabet to turn out to have been irrelevant to the issue; i.e., they're not faking competence, but are seemingly more honest. And I don't know whether it's due to the organization or a cultural characteristic, but the Latvians I worked with were all extremely unapproachable. Edit: Unapproachable at work. Other Latvians were great fun when drunk at a company party.

I don't know

I do not wish to bitterly complain about people from other countries. But, in my experience, many Koreans have a tendency to say "yes" when they truly mean to say "no" or "I don't know". And when planning schedules or tasks it really matters being accurate. So repeatedly saying "yes" and then not delivering is enormously worse than truthfully saying "no" from the beginning.

For what it's worth they've improved in the past few years. It's gone from completely unjustifiable and by American cultural norms insulting lies to mostly true communication with a rare few horrible gotchas that would ruin Americans.

And this is at different companies. So I'm not talking about one small group.

That makes sense- Poland being poorer than Germany is almost entirely due to economic mismanagement for most of the 20th century(as demonstrated by meteoric polish growth rates), you’d expect them to be very good workers on average. On the other hand no one in their right mind expects Turkey or India to reach Western Europe levels of wealth anytime soon.

Poles are often very stubborn, in my experience, but often good people. The women are all much more politically left than the men, even moreso (in terms of the size of the gender gap) than in the US, I’d say. Almost all the most militant feminists I’ve ever met have been Slavic.

Are they socialist left, or just feminist left?

The artist/humanities/hipster types are socialist, the PMCs just feminist left.

Would you gauge them radfemmish or modern western lib feminist? In my experience it’s much more the former.

The far end of libfem, maybe.

You probably should modulate the above by the social strata 2rafa hangs out with. Look at the way she talks about the Indian masses, and maybe it will become clear why elites from poorer countries might be a bit too eager to show that they're one of the good ones.

I worked with Poles and Ukrainians and had a similar experience. They meshed very well with the American engineering team.

My sample size is a little small, but the Ukrainians, especially the Women...do they all talk a lot?

The Ukrainians I’ve dealt with have all been extremely talkative, albeit often gruff, to the extent of their English language knowledge.

In my experience (pretty small sample) Ukrainians are pretty tight lipped compared with Americans until they know you very well. They're a lot more frank in their speach than Americans though (both before and after they know you well).

The ones I worked with were all men. They were friendly but mostly introverted.

The Ukrainian men I worked with didn't talk excessively.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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