Crash

I like cross cultural parodies, such as this T-shirt design. To get the reference, and thus the point, you need to be familiar with video games as well as modern art.

So is the joke half Magritte and half Super Mario? Well, yes. The picture belongs to the Nintendo game, and the French words are from the well known painting. But is what makes the T-shirt funny half Belgian and half plumber? Obviously that doesn't make sense. The joke simply refers to contradictions and surprises - clearly something that both Magritte and Shigeru Miyamoto enjoyed, but not unique to them.

There have been quite a few heated debates by columnists and bloggers trying to decide whether the new president elect of the United States is black, of mixed race, or neither. Treating a human as a tin of paint (or a T-shirt) is unlikely to yield much truth, though some interest in what makes Obama tick is hardly surprising. Is it always wrong to wonder how culture may effect people?

I was intrigued by what Malcolm Gladwell, the Tipping Point author, had to say about how a persons culture has a greater effect on their job than many other factors. He gives the example of how a cultures deference to authority has lead to increased air crashes, purely because of bad communication between pilots. If a co-pilot sees a problem, but does not feel it is right to confront the captain, what happens? What happens if he cannot find the right form of words, in a timely fashion, to indicate that fuel is low, or there is ice on the wing? Well, statistically, the answer is that he could cause a plane crash. Hence a culture’s attitude toward authority can influence things unexpectedly elsewhere.

So it isn't wrong to think about how culture can influence how people behave, as long as you realize individuals don't spend time fitting in with statistics - a point Mr Gladwell emphasizes. And the way people interpret statistics.. is cultural. The tendency to look at a story, then counterfactually make connections that don't really exist is a hard habit to break. For example, if Obama was involved in street crime, he would definitely, as far as the media was concerned, become black.

(Having said that, you may want to avoid Colombian airlines.)