"People sometimes mistake their own shortcomings for those of society and want to fix it because they don't know how to fix themselves."
"It is possible for individuals, and even for whole cultures, to care about the wrong things, which is to say that it's possible for them to have beliefs and desires that reliably lead to needless human suffering."
I'm outraged. I was born in Greece to Greek parents and feel extremely unlucky about this, sort of being born in a completely third world country.
The level that the Greeks (not all of them, but to an extraordinary extend) fail to comprehend reality is astonishing. The modus operandi here is "do whatever other people do around you". And what is that? Slowing drag your feet through education, which is laughable and teaches almost nothing of practical value, go out as much as you can, drink coffee for hours on end talking about crap every day, study "whatever you like" failing to understand that some (most!) university departments are terribly anachronistic and will lead to unemployment with certainty, etc, etc. It's a failure from top to bottom: parents and especially teachers are freeloader lazy people and this is exactly what they teach to the young, by every aspect of social interaction.
I lost too many years of my life, trying to find out what's wrong with me, and eventually found out about Paul Graham, and startups, and ambition, dammit!
I read a comment somewhere about the US/western Europe just nuking the place and felt so in tune with it.
In fact, the people here are just unlucky, like me. They don't even comprehend what it means to work. They say stuff like "Greeks work more than Germans!" and they go to work 1 or 2 hours late and talk for hours about last night's football match.
Empirical data towards a proof of what I'm saying: I was saying those stuff to a sibling of mine, and they were hating me, as most people do here. But then, they moved to a Western European country, and after several years of trying to adjust, they now tell me that they themselves regard the Greeks to be lazy whining freeloaders.
I apologize for the rant. My question is this:
Why the German government, and Western European countries more advanced and with better "culture" in general, doesn't try to help Greeks become more like them, starting from education? Is it because of politics, or is it that this might be happening already, but to see actual results you have to wait a very long time?
"It is possible for individuals, and even for whole cultures, to care about the wrong things, which is to say that it's possible for them to have beliefs and desires that reliably lead to needless human suffering."
I'm outraged. I was born in Greece to Greek parents and feel extremely unlucky about this, sort of being born in a completely third world country.
The level that the Greeks (not all of them, but to an extraordinary extend) fail to comprehend reality is astonishing. The modus operandi here is "do whatever other people do around you". And what is that? Slowing drag your feet through education, which is laughable and teaches almost nothing of practical value, go out as much as you can, drink coffee for hours on end talking about crap every day, study "whatever you like" failing to understand that some (most!) university departments are terribly anachronistic and will lead to unemployment with certainty, etc, etc. It's a failure from top to bottom: parents and especially teachers are freeloader lazy people and this is exactly what they teach to the young, by every aspect of social interaction.
I lost too many years of my life, trying to find out what's wrong with me, and eventually found out about Paul Graham, and startups, and ambition, dammit!
I read a comment somewhere about the US/western Europe just nuking the place and felt so in tune with it.
In fact, the people here are just unlucky, like me. They don't even comprehend what it means to work. They say stuff like "Greeks work more than Germans!" and they go to work 1 or 2 hours late and talk for hours about last night's football match.
Empirical data towards a proof of what I'm saying: I was saying those stuff to a sibling of mine, and they were hating me, as most people do here. But then, they moved to a Western European country, and after several years of trying to adjust, they now tell me that they themselves regard the Greeks to be lazy whining freeloaders.
I apologize for the rant. My question is this:
Why the German government, and Western European countries more advanced and with better "culture" in general, doesn't try to help Greeks become more like them, starting from education? Is it because of politics, or is it that this might be happening already, but to see actual results you have to wait a very long time?