This, sort of. You can look up basic facts in a couple of minutes, but you can’t absorb background knowledge about a country/culture/people instantaneously. General knowledge takes a while, and you can’t think properly about something you don’t know anything about.
I think one difference is that when it comes to math tables, there is one discreet, sufficient datum within a single fact which you can find through the math tables. So just knowing the tableand how to use it does work for the purpose of finding that one sufficient datum.
Whereas when you don’t know where a country is on a map, it means that you don’t even know the most basic fact about that country, which means you’re very unlikely to be able to have an informative conversation with the other person.
It would be like having a conversation about geometry and having the other guy go “Wait, wait, I have to look up what a circle is.”
To Anaamika, just to be clear, I did say “It’s possible to be a non-yokel while not knowing much about geography”. The fact that “yokels & morons often have very limited geographical knowledge.” need not mean that people who have very limited geographic knowledge are necessarily yokels and morons.
I DID say Iran, and of course I’ve heard of Kuwait, I just thought Saudi Arabia (barely) blocked it off from Iraq.
*Where is the Iberian Peninsula?
Attached to the mainland!
*Which is further west, Los Angeles or San Francisco?
LA, when the Big One hits!
*Do you require a passport to visit New Mexico?
If visiting from Old Mexico, yes!
*What is Tasmania?
A land ruled by devils!
*Is it faster to New York than by train?
Tuesday!
I love trivia!
Purposefully memorizing things doesn’t really have much of a point, but I’d expect curious people to memorize a lot of facts in the course of taking in information. I’m not sure what not being able to find Iraq on a map says (I’m kind of surprised you would be able to find the Arabian peninsula but not Iraq), but sometimes ignorance of a fact can say a lot about what kind of information a person is exposed to.
How do you decide what is important baseline knowledge versus what can be researched? Calculators are ubiquitous, so division and multiplication can be done in seconds without knowing basic math. If geography is not important, then it seems reasonable that most history and literature would probably not pass the test.
Now, I see that your grasp of Iraq’s geography isn’t too bad at all, but your arguments seem to lead to an expectation that an education would consist of learning theories and processes with very little content. I don’t agree with that.
Why would anyone bother to exercise their limbs, when there are motorized wheelchairs available?
Cultures are more than the sum of their neighbors. Plenty of culture and general knowledge can be known about about a place without knowing whether that place on a map is that country. I can know about Shinto, Aruki-Henro, honne and tatemae, and a host of other Japanese cultural concepts without touching on its geographic relation to Korea or China. Even then, it’s not necessary to be able to point on a map and locate it. I can know that two countries have good or bad relations and why regardless of their geographic relation. Obviously if an issue is “there’s a wall between them” (i.e. East/West Germany) or “they keep sending infantry in and invading” or “there’s a contentious DMZ between them” then you can infer they’re next to each other. I don’t see a reason to really know which set of lines is next to which other set of lines, just know a country’s name, and only bother with what it borders when something very important happens with the border of two countries.
I admit it, I suck at memorization. The set of things I read and remember is completely random, I’ve read about concepts I’ve understood fully thousands of times and never really been able to remember it. Spatial relations is one of those things that my mind just doesn’t “get”, no matter how often I look at spatial relations I just can’t visualize it (unless I’m walking around, I can kind of navigate on foot, but I can’t remember when shapes are next to shapes). No matter how much I read about this or that or look at a map, my brain refuses to remember it. I know from Japanese class that I can remember spatial geometric relations (at least for a while) if I spend hours upon hours with flash cards, but aside from that, just looking up a map and news articles is not going to help me remember it.
Geography is one of those things like economics or history that you have to have a general knowledge of in order to understand the context of what’s going on in the world.
Not knowing the locations of countries demonstrates a general ignorance about the world, not the fact you’ve never sat down trying to memorise a map.
Maybe in 513 years http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhNM2K8cmU8
If you don’t know that, say, Israel has a border with Syria, and you don’t know how China’s support of Syria affects its relationship to other states that border Israel, and you get into a conversation with someone about these subjects, what are you going to do? Push some buttons on your phone to clarify which country is where? And the conversation is supposed to stop dead while you do this? And then fifteen seconds later, when you’ve forgotten if Syria is to Israel’s north or to its south, and you have to look that up again, are the people you’re talking to, all of whom have memorized basic geographic facts in the third grade, supposed to respect any contributions you may make to that conversation?
You may not care, but that’s why you memorize basic geography–so you can discuss politics and not be looking shit up on your IPhone constantly, or if you are, you’re looking up stuff that adults don’t generally know about, and you’re able to contribute to the discussion.
Well, I don’t talk to people, so I guess it’s kind of moot.
I don’t expect people to be able to memorize everything about the world map, or else we would have no need for maps.
Not being able to recognize the country that your country invaded and occupied for almost ten years is quite something, though. It’d be one thing to not know which is Belgium and which is the Netherlands, but a country yours has been pounding on since 2003 and sending people to kill and die in? I’m sorry, but that’s more than just a lack of interest in the subject of geography.
If you want to have any sort of understanding of Japanese culture and history–and I don’t claim to have any particularly deep understanding of Japanese culture and history myself–I think having a sense of its geographic relation with respect to China is going to be pretty important. On the one hand, it’s an island group off the coast, so it’s somewhat isolated. On the other hand, the 800-pound gorilla that is China is a few hundred miles away, and that has also had a profound impact on Japan’s history and culture.
To me, having at least some decent knowledge of geography, along with science (including astronomy) and history, is just part of having a basic mental map of the world so that you have some understanding of where you are–early 21st century (Gregorian calendar) in the U.S. state of Georgia, on the North American continent, Planet Earth (Sol III), the Milky Way Galaxy, and so forth.
I’ll wager that makes a lot of things moot.
True. My mother has a doctorate yet is hopelessly retarded when it comes to geography despite having a job that takes her all over the world. All she knows is a big airliner takes her there and it all looks the same from 30,000 feet. We got into a political discussion recently and she made a comment about Iraq having the capability to nuke the U.S. I told her that is not likely and she argued. After much confusion, it turned out she was talking about Iran. Her attempt at a save was that she was just talking about a large Arab state. I had to counter that one with the fact that Iran is not an Arab state but a Persian one. They are both largely Muslim but historically neighboring huge enemies.
We do not celebrate ignorance on this board. Not knowing geography is just one larger symptom of not understanding what the hell is going on in the world in general and it is a big tip off and certainly not for someone like the OP to defend. Knowing where stuff located is just the start and Beginners 101. If you can’t even manage that, you should abstain from voting in national elections. The full knowledge goes way deeper than that and takes much more time. I can’t say I am the biggest expert on every area of the world but I do know where my ignorance lies and try to correct for it or sit out of the discussion.
I’m sorry, I don’t know what to do about my stupidity. Should I hurt myslef? I’m really really sorry. I’ll make sure I don’t graduate college so I can’t burden jobs with me. But I don’t know what else to do, I’m really sorry everyone.
Totally agree. A failure to learn said general knowledge is a sign that the person is not worth talking to. Like someone who ends a sentence with a prepostion. Total waste of time, really.
I’m sorry, I have a fever and it’s making me more prone to panic attacks. I’ll do better to try and learn geography if that’s what it takes. I really do have a lot of trouble with it. I think I’ll go do something else now. Apologies.
I’m still not 100% convinced that geography is any more important than other things we don’t expect people to memorize, given how easy it is to look up, but I’ll try and do it better anyway.