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Surprising ignorance
"How can they not know that?" "I'm surprised you don't know about ___". I'm sure we've all had experiences like that. After a while I stopped getting surprised.
* [1998-2002] San Francisco bus stop. A couple of young women were talking about religion. One a Catholic from Austria, the other a presumed Muslim from Egypt. Between the two of them, they were unsure if Jesus came chronologically before or after Mohammed.
* [2002-2005] A distinguished professor at IU, whose friends said that as a younger adult, he'd thought chickens were cold-blooded. Also that he hadn't known about some astronomical thing, maybe the angle of the sun changing with the seasons, I don't remember.
* [2002-2010] Another professor, strong in cognitive science, and at least middle-aged, amazed by the concept of convergent evolution, and the existence of Tasmanian tigers. "They're not related to tigers? At all?" Didn't know about the deep marsupial/placental division in the mammals.
* [2002-2010] None of the other people in my Exalted game knew what a 'quisling' was. High schools for the 20-somethings don't cover WWII in any detail?
* [2002-2010] A grad student, over the age of 25, surprised to find the erotica section at Border's. And she's not from a particularly sheltered background.
* [1990s?] A while back, I commented on gale about Chick tracts and those corner preachers, who act as if they think tons of people haven't heard the Christ story and will be amazed and convert if they're simply told the "son of God crucified rose again died for our sins believe or Hell!" line. Other atheists on gale said they hadn't been raised with Christianity and didn't know that stuff, and even seemed proud of the fact. I was raised by two atheists, one Jewish, and I'd figured no American could avoid absorbing the basic Christ story via osmosis.
I know I've had my own gaps of knowledge, but I can't think of any right now. Though popular culture as a whole is a yawning void -- haven't seen Terminator, Aliens, lots of blockbusters, or even Real Genius, cult movie of Caltech. Oh wait, I remembered a couple, thanks to mentioning Christianity above.
* My sophomore year at Caltech, two of my new friends went home for Easter. I was surprised. "Going back for a candy and egg hunt?" "No, church. Our mother's Catholic and wants us at Mass." "...oh." Despite knowing about the Christ story, I hadn't actually processed that Easter was, you know, a big *Holy* day that people did churchy things for.
* [2005-ish] A few years in at Bloomington, I ran into a Catholic girl at the supermarket. She had a blue-gray what I thought was a bruise on her forehead. "Hurt yourself?" "Ash Wednesday." I'd never seen that before. Of course, I may genuinely not have hung around any practicing adult Catholics until coming here.
* A 17 year old I know, in a middle-class family and whose parents pay attention to the news, didn't know about Rudy Giuliani or the housing crisis, in December 2008. When should we expect people to pay attention to current events? Though I'm probably minimal compared to when I was a kid and we ate dinner watching the MacNeill-Lehrer News Hours. Still, I try to at least watch the headlines.
* [added Oct 2020]: Someone I know says "My partner at work didn’t know that there were two chambers of Congress; he thought that Congress and the Senate were different words for the same thing, and thought that the House was a separate entity but didn’t know what they did."
* [added Oct 2020]: "I was at a get together where everyone had a graduate education. I was the only one could name the three branches of government and what they did. The most missed one was the judicial"
* [added July 2023] Someone in Singapore, I think: "had lunch with some coworkers, had to explain an egg to one of them that no they are not all yellow inside. lifelong vegetarians. they were also confused by why my quail eggs were so small. since that is not the standard egg size. but yeah we were talking diet restrictions and one guy was like, yeah he can have whites but not the yolk and the other guy was 'yolk?' 'yknow the yellow part' 'arent they just all yellow inside?' etc"
* [added Aug 2023] from a tutor friend: 'I discovered last week that a straight-A HS senior and a straight-A sophomore (in DC, no less) didn't know the meaning of "candidacy," a word they acknowledged they'd seen many times before (but never looked up). They both thought it means "honesty" (the quality of being candid).'
And then of course there's all the people challenged horribly by adding fractions. Or, from the other direction, all the nerds challenged by color coordination. Though in our defense, everyone should have been through a class on fractions, whereas no one really told me about clothes and colors until Shiver offered a makeover. Well, my mother made some suggestions about colors good with my skin tone, but that was it.
Probably lots of sex ignorance horror stories as well, but not in my personal experience.
Livejournal version: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/131126.html
* [1998-2002] San Francisco bus stop. A couple of young women were talking about religion. One a Catholic from Austria, the other a presumed Muslim from Egypt. Between the two of them, they were unsure if Jesus came chronologically before or after Mohammed.
* [2002-2005] A distinguished professor at IU, whose friends said that as a younger adult, he'd thought chickens were cold-blooded. Also that he hadn't known about some astronomical thing, maybe the angle of the sun changing with the seasons, I don't remember.
* [2002-2010] Another professor, strong in cognitive science, and at least middle-aged, amazed by the concept of convergent evolution, and the existence of Tasmanian tigers. "They're not related to tigers? At all?" Didn't know about the deep marsupial/placental division in the mammals.
* [2002-2010] None of the other people in my Exalted game knew what a 'quisling' was. High schools for the 20-somethings don't cover WWII in any detail?
* [2002-2010] A grad student, over the age of 25, surprised to find the erotica section at Border's. And she's not from a particularly sheltered background.
* [1990s?] A while back, I commented on gale about Chick tracts and those corner preachers, who act as if they think tons of people haven't heard the Christ story and will be amazed and convert if they're simply told the "son of God crucified rose again died for our sins believe or Hell!" line. Other atheists on gale said they hadn't been raised with Christianity and didn't know that stuff, and even seemed proud of the fact. I was raised by two atheists, one Jewish, and I'd figured no American could avoid absorbing the basic Christ story via osmosis.
I know I've had my own gaps of knowledge, but I can't think of any right now. Though popular culture as a whole is a yawning void -- haven't seen Terminator, Aliens, lots of blockbusters, or even Real Genius, cult movie of Caltech. Oh wait, I remembered a couple, thanks to mentioning Christianity above.
* My sophomore year at Caltech, two of my new friends went home for Easter. I was surprised. "Going back for a candy and egg hunt?" "No, church. Our mother's Catholic and wants us at Mass." "...oh." Despite knowing about the Christ story, I hadn't actually processed that Easter was, you know, a big *Holy* day that people did churchy things for.
* [2005-ish] A few years in at Bloomington, I ran into a Catholic girl at the supermarket. She had a blue-gray what I thought was a bruise on her forehead. "Hurt yourself?" "Ash Wednesday." I'd never seen that before. Of course, I may genuinely not have hung around any practicing adult Catholics until coming here.
* A 17 year old I know, in a middle-class family and whose parents pay attention to the news, didn't know about Rudy Giuliani or the housing crisis, in December 2008. When should we expect people to pay attention to current events? Though I'm probably minimal compared to when I was a kid and we ate dinner watching the MacNeill-Lehrer News Hours. Still, I try to at least watch the headlines.
* [added Oct 2020]: Someone I know says "My partner at work didn’t know that there were two chambers of Congress; he thought that Congress and the Senate were different words for the same thing, and thought that the House was a separate entity but didn’t know what they did."
* [added Oct 2020]: "I was at a get together where everyone had a graduate education. I was the only one could name the three branches of government and what they did. The most missed one was the judicial"
* [added July 2023] Someone in Singapore, I think: "had lunch with some coworkers, had to explain an egg to one of them that no they are not all yellow inside. lifelong vegetarians. they were also confused by why my quail eggs were so small. since that is not the standard egg size. but yeah we were talking diet restrictions and one guy was like, yeah he can have whites but not the yolk and the other guy was 'yolk?' 'yknow the yellow part' 'arent they just all yellow inside?' etc"
* [added Aug 2023] from a tutor friend: 'I discovered last week that a straight-A HS senior and a straight-A sophomore (in DC, no less) didn't know the meaning of "candidacy," a word they acknowledged they'd seen many times before (but never looked up). They both thought it means "honesty" (the quality of being candid).'
And then of course there's all the people challenged horribly by adding fractions. Or, from the other direction, all the nerds challenged by color coordination. Though in our defense, everyone should have been through a class on fractions, whereas no one really told me about clothes and colors until Shiver offered a makeover. Well, my mother made some suggestions about colors good with my skin tone, but that was it.
Probably lots of sex ignorance horror stories as well, but not in my personal experience.
Livejournal version: https://mindstalk.livejournal.com/131126.html
no subject
A girl in my China study program who toured Tianamen square with our group and was completely ignorant of the events that had happened there. Maybe not that unexpected for a random American but she was of Chinese decent, with relatives in Taiwan, and majoring in Asian studies. Same girl later at the Forbidden City - "Wasn't Buddha born here?"
I think I did a LJ post about Jacoby's book _The Age of American Unreason_ (haven't read it yet). Apparently she decided to write it after the following on 9/11:
"Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:
“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.
The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”
“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.
At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.”
no subject
:O !
:O !! Though without tone, one can wonder if one man was joshing the other one.
Thanks.