LW systemic bias: US centrism

Re: units, I think we should act like TV Tropes with British vs American spelling: people use their native ones, they're encouraged to provide equivalents in the other common system but not punished for not doing so, and punished for complaining.

I think assuming familiarity with US culture is fair game, because it's everywhere. Then again, I also think assuming familiarity with thermodynamics, psychiatry, current world-impact affairs, or Belgian comics are fair game as long as there are enough keywords to look up.

Otherwise, IAWYC. It's even more frustrating because I exhibit it myself a lot (e.g. automatically assuming American attitudes to various minorities), and I've never even been to the US. And I'm reluctant to write "American" because what about the rest of the continent.

Possible cures include:

• Watching out for it (well duh)
• A handful of explicit norms - roughly, don't assume any country as default, and gently point out when other people do it; but keep your own national norms when they're not too stupid (e.g. no site-wide conversion to British spelling, SI units, or Lojban), though cultural translations are welcome
• Increased exposure to other countries' culture (if I can become US-centric that way, why not the reverse?)
• When talking about problems that concern a country, compare two countries (or more); this should cause you to notice you were only thinking of the US
• When you have expertise in something, check its domain of application, including country and culture; e.g. notice by "actors" you mean "Hollywood actors"

(Also, lose the "hey, this is about overcoming bias" line. Saying something is a bias and why is enough, we know biases are bad.)

According to Wikipedia:

Cultural bias occurs when people of a culture make assumptions about conventions, including conventions of language, notation, proof and evidence. They are then accused of mistaking these assumptions for laws of logic or nature.

It seems to me that cultural bias isn't so bad, as long as we don't make this mistake, and the examples you give do not seem to constitute evidence that this kind of mistake has been made.

Survey for LWers from outside the US: how off putting are instances of this bias?

Note that this measure will tend to underestimate how offputting it is since people who are put off will tend to participate less.

Results as of 7/20/2011:

• 68% Little
• 22% Moderately
• 10% Very

The C2 wiki has invented a beautiful name for this concept and gathered lots of examples: American Cultural Assumption. (Do Americans realize that words like "primaries", "cheerleaders" or "curveball" are incomprehensible to most of the world?) That said, as a Russian living in Switzerland, I'm not too worried about this sort of cultural bias. I generally don't even notice it until someone points it out. The only case in recent memory that really made me cringe was when Google decided to remind me about something called "Father's Day".

Aspects of the bias I have observed include: Presuming the US by default when it is assumed that no country name needs to be given.

Presuming the US when no country is named is statistical discrimination (not a bias).

Most Less Wrong users are from the US.

X is a Less Wrong user.

Probably, X is from the US.

What, if anything, is biased about this pattern of reasoning?

Another instance I recently noticed, and reacted moderately strongly against, was this post and its comments, where there is the implicit assumption that voting (for political candidates) is voluntary, and the discussion makes no consideration of compulsory voting.

The main reason I reacted against it was that the assumption was implicit, (mainly since nature of the discussion is not relevant to systems with compulsory voting).

I often feel quite self-conscious when I spell it "maths". That's about the height of it.

Your examples all come from the Discussion area. Are there examples in the Sequences or Promoted posts that you feel still suffer from this? Have you run in to issues with "main" posts where the authors reaction is anything other than "oh, thanks, let me fix that"?

I don't think policing the Discussion area is a worthwhile community goal.

I'll go ahead and just quote my original response to you:

People in the US use imperial measures as their native units. I doubt anyone on this site uses arshins and sazhens as their primary day-to-day measure of objects. Asking someone in the casual discussion area to translate out of their native units, for your convenience, when probably half of this site uses those units, is selfish.

If half the site were dominated by pre-revolution Russians I would (a) be very confused and (b) once I accepted that this wasn't a hoax, I'd use Google to learn the local vernacular rather than expecting them to cater to me.

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.

The bias of describing earnings annually is one that always struck me as american fun. It is widespread stereotype that americans are workaholic (when they obviously needn't).

Without considering the degree of truth of the stereotype, it relates strongly in my mind with the fact that they are always speakind of income as yearly, not monthly, like most people I know, nor Daily, like Ferriss recommends, very wisely, I think.

This quite often annoys me quite a bit. PLEASE fix it.

@Lucidfox: Why are you complaining? Amerika ist wundrebar.

It is a profound, if unsurprising, irony that in order to get the message of the video, one must be Americanized to a remarkable degree, yet also resent it.

Much like the OP.