
Show HN: Test Your Culture – What's your (English-speaking) cultural knowledge? - crazygringo
https://testyourculture.com/?hn
======
schoen
I was a little unsure about the criterion of "can uniquely identify". I left a
bunch of things blank if I felt that I had little or no idea "who someone is"
even if I had certainly heard the name before.

For example, I left actors and singers blank if I didn't know any works
involving them or what genres they work in (or whether they're still alive),
and I left sports figures blank if I didn't know what country or team they
played for or whether they're still active, even if in each case I had heard
that there was such a person. Is that the intended approach? Is what
consistent with what other people did?

Similarly, I left movies blank if I had no idea what the movie was about or
what kind of movie it was, or what story it was based on, even if I'd heard
that there was such a movie.

~~~
crazygringo
Thanks! Yes, deciding how to define whether you know something or not wasn't
easy. Eventually I settled on "uniquely identify" and I'm happy you understood
it correctly -- it's not enough just to have heard of somebody or something,
but you need to be able to name one (any) unique fact about them.

~~~
taco_emoji
Does it count if I can uniquely identify the person/thing after having seen
the Wikipedia overlay? For example, I saw a name that sounded vaguely
familiar, but once I saw their picture, I recognized who they were and what TV
show I knew them from. But I couldn't necessarily have drawn that connection
from just the name.

Put another way: are you testing that I know of the entity itself, or that I
know the entity _and_ its/their name?

EDIT: another example: For a given novel title, I could probably have recalled
who the author was (which would seem to be "a unique fact about [it]") but not
anything about the plot. However, you listed the author right under the title,
so... did I "know" that novel?

~~~
schoen
I think it might be helpful to find some way to clarify what kind of knowledge
is expected so that people's results are a little more comparable.

------
crazygringo
Hey HN! 7 years ago you helped launch my site Test Your Vocab... and now I was
inspired to do something similar, only for cultural knowledge. Would love
any/all feedback.

Edit: sorry about the 5 min database outage! I'm keeping an eye on server
memory and will upgrade my instance if it happens again, but it's all back to
normal now, and reloading the page for whatever step you got stuck on should
work.

Edit 2: resized to a much larger droplet, apologies again, should be no more
out-of-memory. Again, reloading the page will let you continue in the quiz
where you left off.

~~~
bliblah
Thanks showing this! I scored 78%, which I guess is pretty good considering I
spent a lot of time reading on reddit lol

I found it kinda interesting that i got quite a few Indian and Asian American
musicians/actors. I'm guessing Bollywood is very popular in the UK and in
certain sections of the US.

I would also like to know how you selected the criteria of what is popular.

This definitely took me back to the days when Facebook quizes were novel and
were all the rage.

------
nkg
I am disapointed that much of the Culture is actually Pop culture, as so few
items are relating to people or event before the '80s. As a 33 yo person, I
recall the general knowledge quizzes I went through as a teenager (french
school). Most of it was about literature and science, and it would end with
just a few questions about contemporary stuff.

------
sonofgod
Internal error Sorry, but something went wrong with our code. Retrying may or
may not fix it. (19284)

(Retrying does not fix it.)

(url:
[https://testyourculture.com/step_three?u=zmtPIg](https://testyourculture.com/step_three?u=zmtPIg))

~~~
crazygringo
Thanks! The database was running out of memory, but I upgraded to a much
larger droplet and I'm monitoring it, so it's back up now.

~~~
golergka
Still down for me

------
ravenstine
> Good job! You know 2,950 out of the top 10,000 items. > This means you know
> more than 36% of Americans aged 18+:

Not too bad, seeing as there's never been a time of my life that I ever cared
about pop culture.

I just reran the test having ticked none of the boxes and still entering the
same data at the end, and it gave me a 0% score, so at least the test is
"real". I was skeptical that the tick boxes were just a red herring.

~~~
ummonk
I strongly suspect that a lot of quiztakers aren't going by "could you
identify" but just "did you know of".

------
fabricexpert
It's not English-speaking, it's American

~~~
learc83
The quiz is adaptive, so perhaps you got more American specific questions than
I did?

For me there were plenty of British specific questions. I also saw a fair
amount of Bollywood questions, and there were plenty of non-American athletes
as well. Considering the relative dominance of American and British cultural
exports on the English speaking world, the mix seemed about right.

------
travelbuffoon
Hmm, when "English-speaking" actually just refers to the United States.

~~~
crazygringo
You'll actually see a fair amount of footballers, British royalty, and
Bollywood stars... it's according to popularity on en.wikipedia.org, so it
not's just the US.

------
kuroguro
15th percentile :| (from north EU)

Weird, I'm somewhat sure I know more than most of my peers. It would be cool
if they showed average stats by region / country.

~~~
crazygringo
Thanks! I definitely will show that in the future, posting here to HN is the
first step in collecting that data. :)

I did the same thing a long time ago for English vocabulary scores per
country:

[http://testyourvocab.com/blog/2011-09-10-Results-by-
country](http://testyourvocab.com/blog/2011-09-10-Results-by-country)

------
izietto
> You know 1,980 out of the top 10,000 items. This means you know more than
> 13% of Americans aged 18

I'm pretty happy about that, given that:

1\. I'm italian

2\. I don't have a good memory at all

3\. Many items were out of my area of interests (wrestlers, superhero
movies...)

------
detcader
Site is down but crossword puzzles also do this... I used to do the LA Times
one as it seemed proximal to the NY Times, but free to play.

------
bumbledraven
> Good job! You know 2,100 out of the top 10,000 items.

> This means you know more than 13% of Americans aged 18+:

I was born and raised in the USA, but I grew up without a television, 5 miles
up a dirt road in a house built by my parents with hand tools. Kerosene lamps,
outhouse, generator, etc.

------
shrikant
Mine crashed just before showing the results, but reloading worked.

> Amazing knowledge! You know 7,200 out of the top 10,000 items. > This means
> you know more than 98% of Americans aged 18+

I guess it helped that I'm Indian and could get some of the Bollywood stuff
off the bat!

------
natch
\- I detest sports and don't follow sports people

\- Very not interested in celebrities

\- When I see movies, I enjoy the movie, but don't ever bother to learn the
names of the actors/actresses

\- Not that into music, especially rap

\- Not into TV, never owned one

Got a very low score :D

It would be interesting to see this kind of test with, shall we say, less
superficial topics. Maybe more politics, current events, history, geography,
technology, law, business, etc. So about general knowledge instead of about
what is being called culture here.

------
joenot443
Mine worked fine - I received a score of 58%. Somewhat surprising, I felt as
if I was doing very well! Cool tool OP, hope you get the errors sorted out.

------
Joe8Bit
Got a consistent 'Something went wrong, please reload' between step 3 and 4.
Reloading didn't help.

------
vkdelta
Site is dead

Internal error Sorry, but something went wrong with our code. Retrying may or
may not fix it. (19284)

------
celestialjeu
48% I'm happy with that cause I'm pretty bad at actor names and such. There
were a few that when I hovered over the tooltip I was like 'Oooooh yeah, I
know that person' but I only clicked the checkbox if I knew without double
checking.

------
protomyth
Interesting although I would bet cash that the anonymous part is total bull
given the request for zip code. I'm not sure how I should feel about the 89%.
I don't have cable, so I only watch some podcasts and TV when I visit the
relatives.

~~~
crazygringo
I know it can feel that way but I promise you it's not. :)

I'd like to do a blog post showing which cultural interests have the most
geographic variation in the US together with maps (and which areas of the US
are "most culturally distinctive"), and asking for zip codes is just an easier
UX than asking for cities or counties. And all survey questions are optional
to answer.

(To sibling commenter: zip code only appears if you select United States as
nationality.)

------
jfk13
All I got was

    
    
        WHOOPS :/
        Internal error
        Sorry, but something went wrong with our code. Retrying may or may not fix it. (19284)
    

(and retrying did not fix it).

------
chaos_emergent
Is anyone suspicious of this as an information collecting site?

------
eeZah7Ux
I understood "culture" to be, as defined on the Webster, "enlightenment and
excellence of taste acquired by intellectual and aesthetic training".

------
macintux
37%, I'm almost as culturally illiterate as I expected.

------
duiker101
Looks interesting but I am getting a lot errors, on step 2 I retried and it
worked but can't really get to step 3.

------
y-c-o-m-b
Site was a bit slow to load (anywhere from 4-15 seconds between pages), but
this is pretty cool. Good work.

------
raverbashing
54th percentile

Sounds like average? Though I don't have much time to be "in tune" with modern
pop culture

------
natch
This was fun. You should do it for other topics like HN buzzwords and
acronyms.

------
ucosty
Apparently not at all knowledgable, I got 7% on my first run and 6% on my
second.

------
glax
89th percentile. Too much TV in my childhood i guess.

~~~
i_d_rather_read
I got 2% on the test and 25k on testyourvocab.

English is my second language and I don't have a TV.

