
Culturalism, Gladwell, and Airplane Crashes - jpatokal
http://askakorean.blogspot.hk/2013/07/culturalism-gladwell-and-airplane.html
======
crazygringo
Putting aside Gladwell for a moment...

By the end of the article, you realize that the whole point is about the
negatives of "culturalism". He says:

> _Like racism, culturalism distracts away from asking more meaningful
> questions, and obscures pertinent facts._

> _Like racism, culturalism puts a large group of people beyond rational
> understanding._

> _like racism, culturalism destroys individual agency._

> _Culturalism causes real harm. It obfuscates the truth._

But he hasn't backed this up at all, except for a single lengthy anecdote
about Gladwell's chapter. Speaking as someone who has lived in in several
different countries besides the US (including 8 years in one), cultural
attitudes are _extremely_ important everywhere you go and can explain _lots_
of important things.

Just look at Geert Hofstede's "Cultures and Organizations" if you want
empirical data for it.

Seeking cultural explanations for things is no different from seeking any
other kind of explanation. Even if it winds up not being true, it's perfectly
valid to wonder if cultural things are at work. Looking for cultural
explanations is _not_ a distraction, and it does _not_ put anyone "beyond
rational understanding" \-- to the contrary, it _tries_ to explain things
rationally.

I understand that the author is bothered by speculation about Korean culture,
but honestly, that's just silly. It's not emblematic of some kind of anti-
Korean attitudes in US media or anything, and the author's done nothing to
show that it is.

~~~
ghshephard
I completely agree with you - as someone who is deploying the same technology
system, with the same team, in eight different countries (USA, Brazil,
Luxembourg/Germany, UK, Portugal, Singapore, Australia, Malaysia) - I can tell
you that having a clear understanding of the culture prior to engaging with
the customer significantly enhances our chances of success in each endeavor.

One example - Germany has a reputation as being a rule oriented/structured
country, so taking an extra few days of preparation prior to deployments, was
very much appreciated there, and we went to the extra effort to do so (and
totally enjoyed having an appreciative audience for our wonderfully laid out
test plans).

We also discovered in Brazil, that if the customer showed up 5 or 6 minutes
late for a conf call, that we shouldn't stress or be concerned that there was
a problem - but that culturally, meetings/calls don't always start exactly on
the minute. We also learned to be careful to leave an extra 30 minute window
for meetings to end a little later than they were scheduled.

Contrawise, We were always careful to dial in within a 30-45 second window at
the start of a call when working with the UK. And those meetings (almost)
always ended precisely on time.

These are things that you need to be aware of if you want to work effectively
in different countries. Don't always expect that other people's expectations
of what's appropriate are the same as yours.

~~~
candybar
This is what I mean - these are things that completely vary from one person to
another and one company to another and somehow this is being attributed to
countries. Within any country, there are rule-oriented structured companies
and individuals and relatively unstructured companies and individuals. There
are companies and individuals who don't care if you're late to meetings and
there are companies and individuals who do. If someone is telling you, this is
how things work in this country, in regards to this kind of variation, you're
being lied to and it would be obvious to you someone tried to tell you the
same thing about your own country.

And no, you can't have a clear understanding of the culture by having someone
tell you a couple of things before meetings - most people have no idea how a
different subculture in their own country is like, let alone having a
reasonable picture of the national culture. A foreign culture with which you
have a brief contact? Clear understanding? Get out of here.

~~~
ghshephard
Our briefings on what to expect, and how a particular country might be
different from the "American Median" comes from our in-country teams. I.E.
People who were born there and have had to deal with American Companies.

You can certainly have variability around an average, but, it's also certainly
the case that average norms for various countries can be (dramatically)
different.

And, as one who has travelled quite a bit, I can tell you German Culture and
(for instance) Hong Kong Culture, around things like queues/rules, are so
different as to make your head spin. The meeting thing in Brazil is really
true. And, if you come out to Silicon Valley, 90+% of engineering companies
are fine with you wearing a T-Shirt. Strongly suspect that's not the ratio you
would see in London. Culture is real.

~~~
candybar
Except almost no one has any idea what the American median is, or the
Brazillian median is. These are large diverse countries with huge internal
variation to which you have not been exposed. New York is a lot more like
London than Silicon Valley, even though New York and Silicon Valley are part
of America and London is part of England. Even within New York. there's huge
variation that most people are unlikely to have full understanding of. A small
design studio in Dumbo, a large financial institution in financial district
and an advertising company in Midtown are going to have completely different
cultures and norms.

If someone tells you, in our country, people are like this, the chance is that
you're being mislead. Lots of people tell me that in their country of origin,
there are no gay people or something along those lines. People have a very
narrow view of what constitutes their own national culture, largely oriented
around their own peculiar and individual experience.

------
ghshephard
The entire premise, re: Great Golf Players, is off. The vast majority of golf
players make bad shots most of the time, and, are a function of individual
performance.

Landing a Plane is _not_ like a golf tournament. Every trained and qualified
pilot should be expected to safely land the plane. While not a trivial task,
and one requiring significant experience and training, it is not so
inordinately difficult that only a very few people alive can perform the task.

With Airplane pilots, Crashes are so exceedingly rare, and the backups, both
mechanical, human, and training so well designed to prevent them, that the
issues associated with a crash are typically systemic, and little to do with
an individual.

Also, the korean culturalism developed when the overly formal/seniority
centric cockpit of Korean Airlines was identified as a key contributor to a
poor safety record with some korean airlines.

I completely agree with the OP that it's absolutely premature to be making any
conclusions regarding impact of culture on the Asiana airlines crash, but, the
nature of the crash, in great weather, suggests that there will be some
systemic failure (Training, Over-reliance on Automation, poor maintenance,
overly complex modal-auto-throttle) that turns out to be the cause of it.

~~~
alanctgardner2
If you think that's the entire premise, you didn't read much of the article.
Keep scrolling, it's a well well reasoned discussion of why Malcolm Gladwell's
commentary on previous KA crashes was misinformed and possibly even distorted
to prove his point. Gladwell's book was the source of the "Korean culturalism
is incompatible with emergencies" myth you cite.

> With Airplane pilots, Crashes are so exceedingly rare, and the backups, both
> mechanical, human, and training so well designed to prevent them

Air travel is exceptionally safe, but it falls prey to the law of large
numbers: 99.9% success still means some people die every year when there are
thousands of planes in the air. This has everything to do with individual
decision making on the part of the pilots, which will necessarily be faulty
occasionally. It's basically just random chance that some planes every year
will crash because of pilot error.

> the issues associated with a crash are typically systemic, and little to do
> with an individual.

What sounds better in an NTSB report: "the pilot fucked up and flew into the
ocean, whoops" or "we recommend adjusting the height of the foo so the pilot
can better see it while barring"? Obviously everyone wants actionable outcomes
from post-crash investigations, even when they're just trying to explain away
a random accident. Y

~~~
gizzlon
_Air travel is exceptionally safe, but it falls prey to the law of large
numbers: 99.9% success still means some people die every year_

99.9% success would mean ~475 plane crashes during take-off and landing on
Heathrow alone _each day_ =)

~~~
gizzlon
Wait, that can't be correct, can it? :)

Was going off this:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_airports_by_a...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_busiest_airports_by_aircraft_movements)

Edit: Silly me, the stats are by year not by day as I was expecting. Guess it
means only ~1.3 crashes at Heathrow each day

------
dobbsbob
Korean/asiana airlines pilots were banned for 12 mos by the airport authority
where i worked over a decade ago pending pilot training and english review due
to numerous incidents of pilot error and communications problems. Those two
airlines managed to ram the jetway 3 times, and even rammed the maint hanger
causing millions in damage. One pilot tried to take off with the fuel truck
still attached, one pilot had poor english ordering fuel be halfed instead of
extra fuel and had to fly back because the pilot only noticed 1hr after
takeoff, and two (yes, two) Korean reg'd AC tried to land on the highway
instead of the runway.

Another Korean air flight misunderstood the tower and tried to land at the
same time as an another plane almost causing a crash, which was only noticed
by the other pilot who got out of there. I was there when they asked the pilot
about it who was completely clueless he had almost killed everybody on both
flights.

I dont know whats up with Korean pilot training but talk to anybody who has
worked in a tower and they will tell you horror stories. Theres also the 911
incident where they broadcasted a hijack code for some reason and were almost
shot down over the Yukon.

~~~
JamisonM
I lived in South Korea and I met some folks working at Berlitz there who
apparently won the contract to do English language upgrades for Korean Air. It
was soon after 9/11 and they said that after the first class they all looked
at each other in silence. Finally one of them said, "Now that is why people
thought they were hijacked." They said that 6 months later the difference was
absolutely amazing, they were all great students with very few exceptions and
all working under the threat of losing their jobs.

I worked with highly educated Koreans when I was there and what the OP says is
true about using English words and phrases for highly-technical things I found
little to no relationship between that use and a high level of English
language competency. If you look at the quoted transcript you see that the
item that is "off-script" is in Korean: "Captain: Glide scope 안 돼나? [Isn't
glide scope working?]" while all the routine OK checks are in English,
following training. For this reason I find elements of his arguments not much
more convincing than Gladwell's. (That and the tendency of Korean airliners to
drift into Soviet airspace he dismisses seems to support Gladwell's thesis
more than his.)

I generally think the "culturalism" thing is a dangerous excuse to engage in a
kind of casual racism, but I also think that dismissing culture as an element
of any task where humans have to communicate and cooperate is also incorrect.

~~~
duskwuff
> That and the tendency of Korean airliners to drift into Soviet airspace he
> dismisses seems to support Gladwell's thesis more than his.

The tendency of Korean airliners to drift into Soviet airspace had much more
to do with Korea's location on the globe than anything else.

~~~
briandon
South Korea was not the only country situated near the edge of the former
USSR. It was, however, the only country (according to the WP article on shoot-
downs) to have any commercial passenger jets shot down by the Soviets for
entering Soviet airspace.

------
danso
The title of the OP makes it sound like a ripoff of The Onion, but it's an
incredibly indepth criticism of Malcolm Gladwell's much-cited essay on
cultural causes airplane crashes...a case study of how a well-regarded author
can be very misleading with the facts.

edit: Here's a key rebuttal:

> "Gladwell also notes that Korean manner of speaking is indirect and
> suggestive, requiring the listener to be engaged and applying proper context
> to understand the true meaning... _And the transcript reveals a striking
> fact that Gladwell never mentions: 90 percent of the conversation among the
> three pilots is in English. In fact, the only part of the conversation that
> happens in Korea is idle banter, talking about how the company does not pay
> them enough or how Guam 's airport must be staffed by former U.S. soldiers
> who were stationed in Korea._"

If the premise of Malcolm's chapter is how culture/ethnicity can be related to
operational catastrophes, particularly in language, then the power of the
assertion is significantly undermined if language wasn't much of a factor in
the actual incident.

~~~
briandon
The linked article is indeed long but I'm not sure how much merit there is in
the poster's arguments.

He contends that 90% of the conversation between the pilots was conducted in
English and then, a bit later, quotes a multi-line dialogue between the
captain and first officer that was completely in Korean and which he had to
translate.

In making the case that the rigidly hierarchical nature of Korean society
wasn't a factor in a crash, he describes multiple, conflicting axes-of-respect
(age, experience, training) that would've existed and weighed on the crew
members' thoughts and actions.

At another point, he seems to be saying that an airline isn't accident-prone
if some (not all) of its crashed/destroyed planes were downed because the crew
flew them off course and into hostile territory. How many other passenger
planes were downed by the Soviets during the same period? Apparently none:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_inci...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airliner_shootdown_incidents#1970s)

I'm no fan of Gladwell and the "Igon Value" fiasco should have clued people
into the fact that they should be wary of science popularizers, but even a
stopped clock is right twice a day. Especially if it's just repeating aspects
of what other clocks have been saying.

~~~
danso
Well, I would argue that the OP is not contradicting himself, but tackling the
instances (since at least 10% of the dialogue is in Korean) in which the
dialogue _is Korean_. And he is directly challenging a passage from Gladwell
(I can't recall off-hand how many Korean dialogue examples Gladwell actually
sites, so it may be that the OP is cherry picking).

Anyway, the OP's intent is to show that in these Korean passages, Gladwell
apparently cherry-picks and edits the otherwise innocuous dialogue in a
misleading way:

\-----

There is the sound of a man shifting in his seat. A minute passes. 0121:13
CAPTAIN: Eh... really... sleepy. [unintelligible words]. FIRST OFFICER: Of
course. Then comes one of the most critical moments in the flight. The first
officer decides to speak up: FIRST OFFICER: Don't you think it rains more? In
this area, here? The first officer must have thought long and hard before
making that comment . . . [W]hen the first officer says: "Don't you think it
rains more? In this area, here?" we know what he means by that: Captain. You
have committed us to visual approach, with no backup plan, and the weather
outside is terrible. You think we will break out of the clouds in time to see
the runway. But what if we don't? It's pitch-black outside and pouring rain
and the glide scope is down. There is no nice way of saying this: this portion
of Gladwell's writing is ridiculous in several ways.

First, the way in which Gladwell quoted the transcript is severely misleading.
This is the full transcript, which goes from pp. 185 to 187 of the NTSB
report: CAPTAIN: 어... 정말로... 졸려서... (불분명) [eh... really... sleepy...
(unintelligible words)] FIRST OFFICER: 그럼요 [Of course] FIRST OFFICER: 괌이 안 좋네요
기장님 [Captain, Guam condition is no good]FIRST OFFICER: Two nine eighty-six
CAPTAIN: 야! 비가 많이 온다 [Uh, it rains a lot]CAPTAIN: (unintelligible words)
CAPTAIN: 가다가 이쯤에서 한 20 마일 요청해 [Request twenty miles deviation later on] FIRST
OFFICER: 네 [yes] CAPTAIN: ... 내려가면서 좌측으로 [... to the left as we are
descending] (UNCLEAR SPEAKER): (chuckling, unintelligible words) FIRST
OFFICER: 더 오는 것같죠? 이 안에. [Don't you think it rains more? In this area, here?]
(emphases mine)

Note the difference between the full transcript, and the way Gladwell
presented the transcript. Gladwell only quoted the first two lines and the
last line of this sequence, omitting many critical lines in the process. In
doing so, Gladwell wants to create an impression that the first officer
underwent some period of silent contemplation, and decided to warn the captain
of the poor weather conditions in an indirect, suggestive manner.

The full transcript reveals that this is clearly not the case. The first
officer spoke up directly, clearly, and unmistakably: "Captain, Guam condition
is no good." It is difficult to imagine how a person could be more direct
about the poor weather condition. Further, there was no silent contemplation
by the first officer. Nearly three minutes elapse during this sequence, during
the captain and the first officer chatted constantly. And it is the captain
who first brings up the fact that it is raining a great deal: "Uh, it rains a
lot." In this context, it is clear that the first officer is engaged in some
friendly banter about the rain, not some indirect, ominous warning about the
flight conditions.

~~~
philthesong
The translation of the script above doesn't accurately show the nuance between
the pilots.

------
candybar
Most comments seem to be missing the point.

Why did Gladwell make such egregious mistakes and resort to lazy, analysis?
Why did most readers lazily accept such explanations without asking relevant
questions? Why do journalists immediately jump to cultural explanations in
lots of cases without having a strong understanding of the facts, the details
and/or actual knowledge of the cultures that they are holding accountable?

Because culturalism makes us feel informed and superior. It allows us to form
a sophisticated-sounding opinion that confirms your own cultural superiority
without knowing anything. It allows us to quickly come to a wrong conclusion
in a lot of different contexts - it's difficult to get to know a specific
person, but it's easy to recall a cultural stereotype. We want to feel like we
know what's going on, even when we have no idea. Culturalism gives us that
feeling. It's knowledge saccharin.

This comes up a lot in technological contexts. for instance, with just
programming languages and platforms, we see these (or some politely worded
versions thereof) all the time: .NET developers are copy-pasting Microsoft
drones who can't solve difficult problems without wizards holding hands, Lisp
programmers are non-bathing egotists who can't work with others, Java
programmers are cargo-cultists who prefer verbose incantations full of acronym
soups and unnecessary hiearchies of meaningless classes to clear code,
Perl/Ruby/Javascript programmers can only write short scripts, not
maintainable, performant or critical applications.

The lesson here is clear - distinguish between actual knowledge of the world
and poor, phony substitutes that merely give us the feeling of knowing. It'll
make us better at what we do and incidentally also lead to a better society.

~~~
freshfunk
Incredibly insightful comment!

~~~
candybar
Thanks!

------
lnanek2
I don't know, gave up when the article claimed you can't learn from the plane
that wandered off into Russian territory and got shot. It's exactly the same
situation that needs to be addressed. Senior Korean pilots don't have to
legitimately pass training and aren't told by the people they work with when
they make mistakes. Wandering off course is the same as forgetting your auto-
throttle disables at a certain altitude in this regard. It's something easily
caught by a second pair of eyes who, in a more functional culture, could tell
the pilot. I don't think the article is even trying to see the argument.

I had a Korean CEO like this once at Noom. The guy constantly fucked up.
Forgot to pay employees, paid the wrong amount, forgot to pay gym memberships
for months which was supposed to be a benefit, promised to update addresses
for immigration paperwork and never got around to it, etc.. Even the CTO
admitted numbers were not the CEOs strong point and he was just there to make
friendly deals with other business people. If you called the guy out on
anything, or setup a meeting to try to address things together, he took you
away from his desk where things could be fixed to a meeting room to lecture
you for an hour on how you had to respect him.

~~~
bjourne
Come on! You can't seriously try and connect "Korean culture" with the
douchebag slacker CEO you are describing.

~~~
pessimizer
I'm not sure that's functionally any different than what Gladwell did here.

------
tokenadult
I have a good friend who is an American who has lived all over the world as an
airline industry consultant. He spoke Chinese well when I first met him in the
early 1980s (I hired him as a reporter for a trade magazine that published
English-language articles based on Chinese-language interviews with sources)
and he has since learned a lot of Japanese, at least. One of his lines of
airline consulting business over the years was cockpit resources management
(CRM) training for airline crews to ensure better communication among pilots
in commercial passenger airlines. His statement about his business experience
is that cockpit resource management training was most needed among the
airlines operating in Korea.

AFTER EDIT: Anyway, the fine submitted article here is an extended rant about
Malcolm Gladwell's essays that later get collected into Gladwell's books, but
it has too little to say about the latest airline accident with pilots trained
by an airline operating in Korea, the FIRST-EVER fatal crash involving the 777
aircraft. When news reports mention that a cockpit command told flight
attendants to tell passengers to stay in their seats rather than evacuate the
aircraft after it came to rest off the runway,

[http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_23637529/flight-
atten...](http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_23637529/flight-attendants-
told-pilots-plane-was-fire)

[http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/09/world/asia/asiana-
flight-a...](http://edition.cnn.com/2013/07/09/world/asia/asiana-flight-
attendant)

we know that that at least one pilot on that flight was using extremely poor
judgment even after the plane slammed into the ground. There was a human
factor in the most recent crash, and the investigation will have to find out
what that human factor was and reduce risk of recurrence of that human factor
in the next several hundred thousand passenger airline flights around the
world.

------
Gigablah
I've also noticed increased scrutiny in the media of the behaviour of the
passengers who carried their cabin luggage with them as they evacuated the
plane. Much emphasis was placed upon their race -- the majority of the
passengers were Chinese.

It feels really tasteless how rapidly the discourse shifted towards criticism
of the victims.

~~~
barry-cotter
I highly recommend living abroad to anybody who does not find the above
amusing[0]. People from different cultures really are different.

[0] No, your semester abroad during college does not count.

~~~
tokenadult
_I highly recommend living abroad_

I agree with the overall suggestion. Where have you lived abroad?

~~~
barry-cotter
Germany and China.

------
pessimizer
The flaw in cultural "explanations" is that they are not in any way
explanations, but simply associations. Explanations involve cause and effect.

Illustration: The causes of ascribed cultural trait X which has a 75%
prevalence in Fooistan may be identical to the causes of that same trait X in
Baristan, where it has a 5% prevalence, and the difference may be entirely due
to random circumstance and network effects. Explaining why a person in a
particular incident acted in accordance with trait X with "He's Fooistani and
they are often X" is not an explanation, just an observation, and offers no
insight into the 25% of Fooistanis who are not X. The equivalent statement in
the latter case is "He's Fooistani, and sometimes Fooistanis are not X" and
has equal explanatory power: none.

As a Baristani, though, it is a very comforting "explanation" if trait X is a
worrying trait, because being Fooistani is not something that they have to
fear.

------
waylandsmithers
Well, that does it for me as far as non-fiction goes. Is it so much to ask to
just be able to be a LITTLE bit lazy and believe something I read, without
having to stay on the lookout for a complete tear down from an expert in the
subject matter?

Maybe I'm just being naive, but I honestly feel betrayed by how badly one of
my (perhaps now former) favorite writers twisted or conveniently ignored facts
to make one of his essays more interesting.

~~~
ghshephard
Ah, welcome to the world of "Gladwell Deconstruction" \- It's a pretty well
known meme on HN - Calling out just how badly Gladwell distorts _everything_
he writes just to make an interesting story/theme.

He does it so well, though, that he's still one of my favorite writers.

And, much like Wikipedia has taught us to realize that anything written down
could be something totally bogus thrown up by a vandal, and therefore we
should challenge (and look for citations) for everything, everywhere -
Gladwell has taught us that just because something sounds good - doesn't
really mean it actually is accurate/truthy.

------
ivix
The entire article is undermined by this sentence:

" If you think that a Korean person in a professional setting would show any
disrespect to a person who is 14 years older just because he slightly outranks
the other, you know absolutely nothing about Korean culture."

Therefore confirming that cultural issues DO have an impact on people's
behaviour.

~~~
josephers
Of course they do, but that's not the entire article.

For much of the article, the author is saying that Gladwell's hypothesis is a
big stretch and it displays the Igon Value Problem.

------
sheri
Patrick Smith (a former pilot and now author) also criticized Gladwell
here:[http://www.salon.com/2008/12/05/askthepilot301/](http://www.salon.com/2008/12/05/askthepilot301/)

------
bengoodger
"Culturalism" aside, the additional CVR transcript the OP gripes about
Gladwell omitting does little to support his claim.

Gladwell's segment: FO: "Don't you think it rains more? [..]" Omitted: FO:
"Captain, Guam condition is no good."

Yeah the omitted section is much stronger. But it's wrong to argue that it's
direct enough, because it's still not as strong as the FO saying something
like:

"I think the conditions aren't good enough for VFR. I think we should change
our strategy."

Some of the pilot interviews after OZ214 have stated many airlines have a "no-
fault go-around" policy. If anyone in the cockpit has any discomfort with the
approach, the rule is that you go around, and make everyone comfortable, with
no fault to anyone. This is an environment in which a pilot could be more
confident making a direct statement like the one I suggest above.

I don't necessarily believe this is a cultural thing though, just a good idea
that airlines should implement.

~~~
josephers
I think Malcolm Gladwell was suggesting that the first officer wanted to tell
him something but couldn't because he couldn't be direct.

But looking at just the transcript, would you really come to that conclusion?
By leaving out most lines, the transcript seems to show a FO with an internal
struggle to speak out, but I don't think that was what happened at all.

------
mcguire
Philip Greenspun on Gladwell and "The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes":
[http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-
safety](http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety)

In a slightly more serious note, there is a fair chunk of research on this
topic[1], showing cultural differences in Cockpit Resource Management (CRM)
behavior[2].

On the third hand, making _any_ positive statements about the causes of _this_
crash is totally premature, very likely spewing horseshit, and a serious
disservice to the investigation and anyone involved, including the victims.

[1]
[http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/helmreichlab/p...](http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/group/helmreichlab/publications/publications.html)

[2]
[http://jcc.sagepub.com/content/31/3/283.short](http://jcc.sagepub.com/content/31/3/283.short)

------
natch
Claims to have coined the term "culturalism" decades after it has been in wide
use...

Says "Culturalism is the unwarranted impulse to explain people's behavior with
a "cultural difference", whether real or imagined," while running a blog
called "Ask a Korean."

Pretends culture has nothing to do with how accidents happen.

all credibility lost.

------
ojbyrne
Actually, as a Canadian and a golfer, there is a factor in why Canada has
fewer good golfers - you can't play year round in Canada.

~~~
ghshephard
Following your logic then, you should have more good hockey players because
you have longer winters.

~~~
gdilla
Annnd, we do. No doubt. But that's cultural too. We love hockey. It's in our
bones. You'd think siberia would have the best players by your logic.

~~~
ghshephard
If the logic is consistent, then Siberia should have, per capita, more good
hockey player than golf players, as compared to the a more moderate climate,
like South Africa.

~~~
rdouble
They do, don't they?

~~~
ghshephard
Presumably, yes. With a bit more meditation on this thread, I think my general
conclusion then is that while culture can shape behavior, it's possible that
things like weather can shape culture.

And, to bring it all home, this feels like the topic of a Gladwell Book (or at
least a chapter)

------
nbn234
Cultural explanations when the group of people make up a statistically small
portion of the incidents == bad.

Cultural explanations when the group of people make up a statistically
_significant_ portion of the incidents == good.

The question as I see it is : Do Koreans make up a statistically significant
portion of near misses and accidents?

From what I have read from various aviation professionals, the answer is yes.
What have you guys heard?

------
chaostheory
Golf is an extremely bad example to compare to flying an commercial airplane.
Why? Because it's a single player game and not a team sport. You don't need to
work with and communicate with others to win. When you're communicating and
working with other people, culture does matter.

