The speaker explores how cultural norms function like algorithms, shaping behavior across different societies. In Malaysia and Vietnam, they observed practices like avoiding unlucky floor numbers and orderly motorbike traffic without road rage, contrasting with Western efficiency-driven expectations. They argue that recognizing these internalized scripts requires humility to question which learned behaviors we should keep.
Chapters
We're gonna have a conversation this month about working against the algorithm. We're very aware of the algorithms that affect us in technology, but there are algorithms, cultural concepts that we follow in our lives as well, and we need to become more aware of them. For example, we're traveling in Southeast Asia at the moment, and when we were here in Malaysia the first time, we stayed in a very tall apartment building and we stayed in room floor 43A, not 44, because the number 4 in Chinese culture sounds very much like the word for death. And whereas number 13 is unlucky for us, anything ending in a 4 is unlucky for the Chinese culture. So we stayed on 43A. And there's lots of observations you'll make like that when you're traveling, when you're outside of your cultural experience, like leaving shoes at the door and not walking into a home with outside shoes on. But then I thought back to when I was at home and I went to visit a family member in hospital, and I was running late and I wanted to get in quickly before they would tell me visiting hours were over. So I was trying to rush through, and the security guard, the Black security guard, paused me and made me greet him politely. So I greeted him, he greeted me, he asked what I was there for. I told him to visit a family member, and he allowed me to sign in and then to walk in. And that little check was something important to note because I come from a culture that values efficiency and moving through things quickly, whereas many Black cultures, many cultures in Asia value relationship and respect and communication rather than just efficiency. Back to our travels, we're in Vietnam and we're looking at the the roads filled with motorbikes, and it's just wild. I cannot express it enough, but there are just so many motorbikes, and people can deliver goods off their motorbikes. You can have an entire family of 4 on a single bike. The roads are very good, but there aren't very many traffic lights. But we didn't see, and this was like really startling when we were traveling around in a Grab taxi, which is than Uber. When we're traveling around, we're seeing all these bikes coming through. When we're trying to cross the road ourselves, we never saw any road rage. And we discussed that for like weeks. How come we're not seeing road rage on these, you know, entirely insane roads? And then I remembered this idea that I'd heard that for white privilege, one of the things that white people value is convenience. And when we are inconvenienced, we get angry because we assume that the world should be convenient for us. But if you don't grow up with that entitlement, that expectation of convenience, then when you're on the road, you're not going to have road rage because somebody's trying to cross and they're slow, or there's an entire family, you know, carefully moving through the traffic. You're going to have respect for your fellow man and woman. So that's something I've been grappling with. And this idea that in certain parts of the world, this assumption that one culture is more sophisticated than another, that they look down on another culture that does things differently from them without really realizing the values and depth that that culture has that we might be missing out on. How we expect behavior to work, how we expect society to work is an algorithm. It's what we've been raised on in our education, in our family, in the news reports, That is what we expect the world to be like. And it's really challenging when you're in a different culture to look back and think, have I just assumed that everything in my culture is right because it's mine? Or do I have the humility to reexamine parts of my life that could be learned behavior, learned algorithms that actually we could do with removing from our algorithm? It's easy to point to an algorithm, to a learned behavior when you see it in technology, when you see it in your social media or your news feed or your Netflix feed. We can point to that, we can judge that, but it's much more challenging to find that in ourselves. And that's the challenge we're going to be exploring this month. I certainly haven't finished learning it yet, and that's why our overseas travels continue. I look forward to exploring this conversation with you further.
