[quote=“Mucha Man”]Unless you’ve been asleep the past month you have seen generosity, civic-mindedness, goodwill, consideration for one’s fellow man, etc, exemplified to the highest degree by ordinary people in Taiwan.
How ridiculously petty and insulated can you be to call the taiwanese selfish after the spontaneous and overwhelming help and donations offered to typhoon victims? Volunteer firefighting and rescue teams have risked their lives; students have gone down to help donation centres, animal rescue groups went out to help stray dogs and cats; ordinary people are sending what they can; giving what they can with no thought of a reward or thanks for themselves.[/quote]
:bravo:
I completely agree. I know many Taiwanese people who have given up a considerable amount of time and money to help the typhoon victims.
So many threads about how the Taiwanese are all “selfish”, “ignorant”, “uneducated” …and then the foreigners turn around and claim they are the victims of stereotyping by the Taiwanese.
Looking for a correlation between time spent in Taiwan and opinions posted in this thread, I broke out the spreadsheet.
User post count is used as a proxy for time in Taiwan.
Time for a look at the numbers.
At the time of this post:
== 22 unique members posted in the thread; cumulative post count of 65946.
== 13 are in the “Tunnel Vision” camp; average post count of 1130.
== 5 are in the “Just Humans” camp; average post count of 6562.
== 4 had no discernible opinion; average post count of 4501.
== 1 waffled; will stay anonymous.
Findings:
** Those with lower post count, hence less time in Taiwan, are more likely to comment on the OP in agreement.
** Those with higher post count, either don’t care or have adapted and disagree with the OP.
I don’t see any relation between low post count and less time in Taiwan…[/quote]
You don’t have to see it. The spreadsheet sees it for you. That’s the beauty of it!
If we take date joined and turn that into # of days since joining, we can find correlation to post count. Going out on another limb, we can assume date joined and arrival date in Taiwan are closely tied, but we don’t have access to Customs records.
Removing Buttercup and sandman from the data, as their average post counts per day are amazingly high when compared to the other 22 respondents, we find the following:
65% correlation using linear best fit.
72% correlation using exponential best fit.
82% correlation using 2nd order polynomial best fit.
I would imagine statistically less than your average furriner. I don’t really have any data for you, though - merely anecdotal evidence. There was this one time, at the Post Office …
You only got the relation between joining Forumosa and number of posts, you don’t no nothing about the time a person spent in Taiwan. Someone might have joined Forumosa yesterday after living here for 30 years.
For example, I had a lift in a company I was working at a while back, which had a sensitive weight detection to set of a buzzer if too much weight was in the lift. Lunchtimes had the lift full before it got to the 8th fl, and this day a guy gets in and the buzzer sounds, and he just stands there!! For about 20 or 30 seconds.
But, then he starts looking at people to his left as if to say "shouldn't YOU be the one to get out" and then chills for a while and looks to the right and same thing, look in his eye to say, "YOU should leave and stop holding the elevator up". Eventually after what seems an uncorfortable lifetime of constant buzzing, he gets out.
The point being, no one said a word throughout, which is very typical in Taiwan in this and many other situations. In the west the guy stood a real chance of getting a swift boot in his ass, or at the least a severe bitching on what a inconsiderate dick he was being.
If your complaining about this aspect of the culture, you should also be complaining about the politeness which empowers it, and in fact the whole enchilada or apple or orange.
:roflmao:
:roflmao:
Taiwanese “rude” (from Eurocentric perspective), are you kidding me?
Have none of y’all been to Singapore?
They’re kiansu* and proud…
In a week here, I’ve seen at least five Taiwanese give up a bus/train seat to an oldster.
In two years in Singapore, I saw a local do this maybe twice.
Carrefour on Sunday afternoon here is nothing compared to the thrash pit of Singaporeans at the same time. Talk about people riding your @$$ in a queue…
You pay ang mor tax there; maybe here too? Heck, “ang mor” was the first phrase I picked out of their flow of language I heard it so much.
Either way, I feel like I’m in a highly refined society after Singapore…
*This is Hokkien-turned-Singlish. Means “afraid to lose”. More like “paranoid of missing out on anything that can be lorded over another human, including one queue spot ahead of them or a free coffee coupon.”
I bet 100元 that you were the only one that even looked at him directly.
[quote=“gt2313a”]In a week here, I’ve seen at least five Taiwanese give up a bus/train seat to an oldster.
…
Either way, I feel like I’m in a highly refined society after Singapore…[/quote]
Give it time, grasshopper. Ghost Month may just have people on their best behavior, thinking of their lost elders.
In a nutshell:
Some are narrowminded Western norm elitists.
Others are enlightened Eastern norm apologists.
Intermixed with some firsthand experiences on both sides of the spectrum and concurrent denial that either side may have a cogent argument.
But seriously, folks, generalisations and stereotypes usually need a fair number of actual cases to be raised at all. There ARE some folks in Taiwan who seem to be blissfully unaware of their surroundings, especially to the more ‘sensitive’ Westerners who tend to hang out here (not the drunk sots in the Brass Monkey, they’re just as ignorant of their surroundings… and who wouldn’t be after fifteen pints of Carlsberg?). Me, I blame the education system, just because i saw that somewhere else on forumosa.
You don’t have to see it. The spreadsheet sees it for you. That’s the beauty of it! 
