> I'm choosing to interpret this as a sarcastic jab at HN's US-centric tendencies
It wasn't a sarcastic jab.
> willful ignorance
Do you expect everybody in the world to know how the US government works?
> It would take two seconds to look this up.
I looked it up immediately after looking up Nancy Pelosi on Google. This is what I got (Wikipedia):
"The United States House of Representatives, usually referred to as the House, is the lower chamber of the United States Congress, with the Senate being the upper chamber."
Right. Now I have to look up "US congress", "US senate", "US upper and lower chamber"... Didn't want to bother with it.
So I typed in a simple explanation.
This is the honest truth. Believe it if you want to.
(I actually got a better understanding of what US House of Representatives is by reading other comments here.)
FWIW, there's also "simple.wikipedia.org", which has plain-English definitions for many of the most popular entries in regular Wikipedia. Here[1] is the entry for "House of Representatives".
> Didn't want to bother with it.
I suspect this is the root cause of the problem. I could see why you'd post such a question here if you had tried Googling, found no relevant results, and ran out of options for doing the work yourself. But that doesn't sound like what happened. Instead, it sounds like you had the ability to continue Googling, but decided to let others do your research for you. That's like saying your time is more valuable than other people's time. Do you see the problem there?
> Here[1] is the entry for "House of Representatives".
Thank you for taking the time. Much appreciated.
> Instead, it sounds like you had the ability to continue Googling, but decided to let others do your research for you.
No. I did not decide to let others do the research.
I simply stopped doing the research. Didn't want to find out more, because deep knowlege of the House of Representatives does not add much value to my life. And neither is it a topic I'm interested in (like, I have spent hours reading and learning about comets because that's something I'm interested in, even though it too doesn't provide much tangible value to my life).
> That's like saying your time is more valuable than other people's time.
Wrong. It's like saying I don't want to spend too much time on this.
I never asked anybody else to do anything on my behalf. Frankly I never expected this to upset people.
I don't know. I'm not an American and I know what the house of representatives is, I also know what the chinese national congress is and who is the president of France and who is Modi. I suggest it is a good thing to invest some time into reading international news, because so much of what influences our daily life is determined by international politics and the big players in it.
> Right. Now I have to look up "US congress", "US senate", "US upper and lower chamber"... Didn't want to bother with it.
I mean yeah, this does look a lot like what I would call "willful ignorance." Of course there's nothing wrong with needing to look up words, especially in one's non-native language, but anyone could feign needing to exhaustively depth-first search words in the dictionary to understand any concept regardless of how basic it is. Consider that for any explanation someone gives you in an HN comment you could also just as easily say "now I need to look up every word in that comment, and every word in the definition of each of those words, and every word in each of those definitions, etc.
> I mean yeah, this does look a lot like what I would call "willful ignorance."
The meaning I came up with in my original comment wasn't wrong, was it?
My goal was to find out who Nancy Pelosi is. Finding out what's House of Representatives wasn't the top priority.
I don't understand why you're upset with me not digging deeper into what the House of Representatives is.
> Consider that for any explanation someone gives you in an HN comment you could also just as easily say "now I need to look up every word in that comment, and every word in the definition of each of those words, and every word in each of those definitions, etc.
It's not the slippery slope fallacy, because I'm not saying anything about incremental steps inevitably leading towards anything. You complained that looking something up doesn't work because you then need to look up all the words you encounter in the definition. I pointed out that the same could be true for any explanation regardless of its source (and likely would be true, because words like "congress" would almost certainly feature in anyone's explanation).
Well, Congress is a term used by a number of countries, not just the US, for their legislative bodies. The main difference between a Congress and a Parliament as far as I recall is that Parliament has a combined legislative and executive role, where Congress is solely legislative.
Senate and the nuance of our bicameral legislature is going to be more bespoke, like me having to look up the House of Commons vs. House of Lords in the UK.
