{"id":67106,"date":"2012-04-09T22:37:21","date_gmt":"2012-04-10T06:37:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/gnxp\/?p=16234"},"modified":"2012-04-09T22:37:21","modified_gmt":"2012-04-10T06:37:21","slug":"understanding-across-cultures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2012\/04\/09\/understanding-across-cultures\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding across cultures"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the non-science aspects of this weblog which I&#8217;ve been addressing over the past 10 years is attempting to get a grip upon cultural variation. There are two major dimensions in terms of the problem. One is positive, <strong>in that people don&#8217;t really have a good sense of cultural variation.<\/strong> This is simply a function of stupidity, or ignorance. In the latter case the primary problem is that the media and public intellectuals aren&#8217;t very good at concisely transmitting information (I don&#8217;t expect normally curious people to pick up ethnographic or historical monographs). For example, &#8220;elite&#8221; publications like <em>Slate<\/em> routinely flub facts which could be confirmed via <em>The World Book Encyclopedia<\/em>, such as whether <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/articles\/news_and_politics\/explainer\/2001\/10\/is_iran_an_arab_country.html\">Iran is an Arab country<\/a>. Sometimes the confusions are more obscure, but nonetheless misleading. In 2004 I <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gnxp.com\/MT2\/archives\/002702.html\">slammed<\/a> an Iranian American writing for <em>Slate<\/em> (this publication deserves to be picked on because of its quasi-<em>New Yorker<\/em> superiority; it&#8217;s a &#8220;smart&#8221; webzine which doesn&#8217;t live up to its own billing too often in substance if not style) for asserting that Iran&#8217;s Islamic history has been predominantly a Shia one. Going back to that 2004 post, I realized now that it was written by <a ...<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/GeneExpressionBlog\/~4\/lRfAMtf2pgo\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the non-science aspects of this weblog which I&#8217;ve been addressing over the past 10 years is attempting to get a grip upon cultural variation. There are two major dimensions in terms of the problem. One is positive, in that people don&amp;#8217&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,14,13,68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthroplogy","category-islam","category-religion","category-turkey"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67106"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":67357,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67106\/revisions\/67357"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}