
Second Life: Europeans Outnumber Americans 3 to 1 - pg
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/05/05/second-life-europeans-outnumber-americans-3-to-1/
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willarson
In an interesting coincidence, Europeans outnumber Americans approximately 2.4
: 1 (730 mil to 300 mil), so maybe there exists a simple explanation for this
phenomenon...

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mojuba
You probably took that number from Wikipedia, where Russia (100m) and Turkey
(80m) and many other unrelated countries count as Europe too. The exact number
for today's EU is 486m.

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mojuba
Paul, you have theories about everything, how about this one? :)

There was an interesting article about why jazz is more popular in Eurpoe and
Japan than in the U.S. Accoring to the author, it was something to do with
abstract thinking: if music is a language, then jazz is the most abstract part
of it - no feelings, no relation to real-world notions, just pure musical
math. (I'd say also baroque music is as abstract as jazz.)

SecondLife in a way is about abstract thinking, too.

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pg
It seems to me the most likely explanation is that Europeans care more about
liking highbrow things. Most people who like jazz are also rather proud that
they like it.

I suspect you'd also find more Europeans than Americans are fans of Beuys, or
Lacan, or _Finnegan's Wake_ , or other such things that might have been
created as controls in experiments to measure pretentiousness.

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Goladus
I'm not sure if that explains Japan, though.

I think cultural values play a part, but I think it has more to do with the
way early musical education typically works in those countries.

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mojuba
In my other reply to you I tried to explain that it's not only about musical
education, but abstract thinking in general.

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nurall
pg beat me to it!!

What does this mean? My thoughts:

1\. European users are relatively more jobless (this post
<http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=18996> further validates the claim)

2\. European users have fewer options for gratification on the Internet

3\. The long tail of second life members as a whole, in particular is skewed
in favor of the European long tail. Its either longer or fatter.

