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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   4790 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 26, 2024

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Are Brits on average more intelligent than Americans, at least verbally (restricting both sets to college-educated people, say)? As an American I know I might be conditioned by silly tropes of British sophistication but I feel like there's something here.

  • Based on what Youtube serves up to me occasionally, British talk shows seem more clever
  • Prime Minister's Questions, despite being nonsense, seem to require more quick-wittedness than any comparable American political event I can think of
  • Social customs seem to require saying lots of things in subtler, more roundabout ways, which is simply more mentally taxing for both the speaker and listener

Not that any of these are amazing displays of intelligence. There just seems to be a greater demand on one's verbal faculties in everyday life.

A big difference between Americans and Europeans is how we view Brits. If your image of Brits is upper class posh people you are American.

If you associate Brits with obese football hooligans causing a scene at a McDonalds at 3 am you are European.

I couldn't put it better. There is a ton of videos and memes mocking the dullness, meaninglessness, and poor quality of life of British lower classes.

On the other hand, Brits seem to me to have many of the smartest white people, with exemplars like Paul Dirac, Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson, Roger Penrose or Timothy Gowers, so the differences are indeed significant.

The British lower classes were thoroughly pwned, as the kids would say. They don't even aspire to rise in the social classes. It is looked down upon to try. I wonder if this is a very long lasting heritage from what the Normans did to the Anglo-Saxons after conquering England. The latter were deeply subjugated, starved, massacred; put in their place. You can see the legacy in the way the language is organized. The words that describe things that are served to a nobler person, or are found in the house, or take place within the house, are French in origin. The words that describe the outside locations, the fields and the work and the serving, etc, are Anglo-Saxon in origin.

England lost a lot of people to emigration in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Maybe the ambitious ones mostly left.

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