A filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark's self-image

> We have cultures that throw gay people off the roofs, and cultures that celebrate them.

And you could take single individuals from either culture and drop them in the other culture, and most of them would happily act and think just like the new culture, and swear blind that they’d always thought that way.

It would be an interesting experiment to see how many individuals you could replace one-by-one before the culture changed. Or perhaps, like a Ship of Theseus, you could replace all the people, but have the culture endure.

And so if you went to Saudi Arabia you'd pretend to be down with executing people for apostasy?

Obviously it's an extreme example but many of the norms of a Western mindset would be no less offensive to billions of people in this world.

What bias of moderation exists is that you probably wouldn't migrate to Saudi Arabia unless you were already mostly ok with their values.

And if e.g. economic opportunity drove you there you'd probably keep your opinions to yourself, but it's unlikely your values would fundamentally change.

I will only add - I speak from experience here.

Hahaha. Take a look at western Europe. Vast majority of the immigrants from neither Africa or Middle east didn't adopt any of the core values of their host country even after decade+. More often than not, even second generation has very different values. What happens is isolated or connected silos of original values surviving a lot of generations.

Just ask Germans or French or Belgian folks, or go there. The idea was exactly what you write, and it failed miserably with no solution in sight.

Just to explain - we have friends among those communities. We like them a lot, but the difference is there even after couple of generations. Its not talked about much, but if you look for it, it shows up. Nobody will talk about this with strangers of course, thats just polite facade.

> and most of them would happily act and think just like the new culture, and swear blind that they’d always thought that way.

If that was true you wouldn't have minority communities isolated within larger ones, they would just naturally mix - but the ones that do are the outliers.

If you grew up in Saudi Arabia raised by a typical family then yeah sure, you probably would be fine with it. Culture of course shapes people and I think it's silly to pretend you could freely swap adults but that doesn't mean that people are fundamentally different.

They were arguably never placed in fact never placed in the culture. There are 24 hours in a day. In what culture does one spend most of those hours?

Imagine if those same people would have been adopted as newborns, by a rural family on a farm in Belgium, France or Germany.

This isn't inherent to Europe, nor to any particular background. I live in Korea. Most Western immigrants here spend most of their time not inside the culture. They both work and relax outside of the dominant culture. If they have children here, and raise them similarly, those children will also have different values. But if they put their child in environments where everyone else is from the dominant culture, for >8 hours per day ever since kindergarten, then that's the values they'll take on.

It all does come down to culture. For what it's worth, I'm originally from Europe, and very familiar with the phenomenon you're talking about.

Someone else here rightly mentioned the internet as changing this somewhat, which has some truth in it - it does affect the probability distribution. But by and large, it still holds.

> What bias of moderation exists is that you probably wouldn't migrate to Saudi Arabia unless you were already mostly ok with their values... you'd probably keep your opinions to yourself, but it's unlikely your values would fundamentally change.

Then, how do you explain, for example some people who migrates to France from a majority Muslim country and decides all French people are infidels and deserve death? Similarly, I know a lot of people who would curse America, yet still chooses to live in America. They were never mostly OK with the values on their current countries...

That's not what he asked you. You answered some other question.

Absolutely not. You can move me to any place on earth, I will not be okay with throwing gay people off the roofs for being gay.

The fact that you think like that is kind of insane to me.

The question that was asked was not to confirm what GP said, it was combative to try to position GP as a bad person. Basically the equivalent of saying “so you’re saying you would be okay killing Jews if you lived in Nazi Germany.”

GP answered to clarify their position and answered the only question that should have been asked, the equivalent of, “if during my childhood I was indoctrinated by the Hitler Youth program, yes I probably would have done this horrible thing and so would you.”

"Vast majority of the immigrants from neither Africa or Middle east didn't adopt any of the core values of their host country even after decade"

Depends. I think in their home countries, Muslim youth does not hang around drunk in the park, that is more of a european thing, erm. cultural value. So they clearly adopted.

Ok, so that was satirical. But they are the ones bothering me. I am not bothered by women wearing a Hijab and I don't see that hurting our values.

The Hijab is the least problem. The polls among European Muslims that show their attitudes towards secularism and various human rights that we take for granted (such as "abandoning your religion") are the problem. As are the consequences, such as parallel societies and the visible tip of the iceberg = actual terrorists and the whole infrastructure for recruiting them and sending them to jihadist hotspots.

The thing is that both ideas come from the same place. People try to create a save and livable place, but they have different opinions on how to get to that place. Some more right than others, but the fact is that both have their root in the same desires.

At the end of the day, most people just want to be able to live a life, work, have children, some friends, family and health. Most difference come from the way people think they best achieve those goals.

I think you may have misread his post. He was not speaking of being born and raised in an area but his thought experiment was swapping out people explicitly from different cultures, and seeing at what percent the 'host' cultures would change.

He believes people would simply change their values, but I think this is an incorrect assumption, as the example should make obvious.

You ellipsed out the answer - economic opportunity.