The sinister attempts to ‘decolonise’ mathematics

Re:The sinister attempts to ‘decolonise’ mathematics by viraptor on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @06:42AM (#33607985)

While others covered the guide part, I just wanted to note some context about punctuality. In case people didn't know, this is actually very culture-dependent. For example in Australia, guides organising meetings with people from indigenous mobs sometimes refer to the meetings as running on "black man's time" . Essentially it means that the community comes first for them so when they have something else to do, it takes priority. The local person may turn up an hour late, or not at all, and it's not seen as lack of respect from their side.

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Re:The sinister attempts to ‘decolonise’ mathematics by ZeroGravitas on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @07:36AM (#33608364)

Any international business has training for these kind of cultural differences.

For example, when and if you refer to people by their first name or more formally with full titles for example. Whether working long into the night means you're dedicated or inefficient.

These are not right or wrong as such, they're just culture, but if you blunder into the situation assuming that everyone has the same culture, then someone bluntly telling you what's wrong with an idea can seem intentionally aggressive and rude, or someone trying to politely say no might seem vague, or worse, be taken as tacit agreement.

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Re:The sinister attempts to ‘decolonise’ mathematics by onos on Tuesday November 15, 2022 @07:23AM (#33608260)

Very interesting, cause that’s a reasonable explanation for that alternative norm.

Ultimately, if we’re gonna ask what norms are good we should have some cost function we are trying to optimize and ask for norms that encourage it to go up. Totally reasonable for different people to have different ideas of the good life and get different norms following that.

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